TASK-BASED LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING. Rod Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 387. $24.95 paper.

This book is part of the Oxford University Press series in Applied Linguistics. In the preface, Ellis explains that his goal was to produce a book that “attempts to examine ‘task’ from a variety of perspectives,” noting he was striving in particular for “a rounded, balanced account of how tasks have figured in both SLA and language pedagogy” (p. ix). As Ellis also notes, the book is not a “how to” guide for the teacher or researcher but rather a text that informs about current research and practice on task-based second language research and teaching.

Second language (L2) researchers have long acknowledged the role of language anxiety in communication processes, such that learners with greater language anxiety tend to be less willing to engage in communication. However, little research has explored links between L2 speakers’ perceptions of conversation and dynamic measures of anxiety. Therefore, this study measured 60 L2 English speakers’ galvanic skin response (a physiological index of anxiety) during conversation. After the conversation, speakers evaluated themselves and their partner in terms of speech fluency and comprehensibility, engagement, and anxiety, and responded to trait-anxiety and social network questionnaires. Correlational analyses explored relationships between speakers’ trait-anxiety, social network characteristics, self- and peer-perceptions and five levels of physiological response during conversation. Findings revealed that high arousal during interaction was related to speakers’ negative self-perceptions of speech fluency and negative perceptions of their partner’s engagement. Implications are discussed regarding state-anxiety as triggered by partner- or task-specific experiences.

Boduch-Grabka and Lev-Ari (2021) showed that so-called “native” British-English speakers judged statements produced by Polish-accented English speakers as less likely to be true than statements produced by “native” speakers and that prior exposure to Polish-accented English speech modulates this effect. Given the real-world consequences of this study, as well as our commitment to assessing and mitigating linguistic biases, we conducted a close replication, extending the work by collecting additional information about participants’ explicit biases towards Polish migrants in the UK. We did not reproduce the original pattern of results, observing no effect of speaker accent or exposure on comprehension or veracity. In addition, the measure of explicit bias did not predict differential veracity ratings for Polish- and British-accented speech. Although the current pattern of results differs from that of the original study, our finding that neither comprehension nor veracity were impacted by accent or exposure condition is not inconsistent with the Boduch-Grabka and Lev-Ari (2021) processing difficulty account of the accent-based veracity judgment effect. We explore possible explanations for the lack of replication and future directions for this work.

The development of L2 utterance fluency has been extensively researched, whereas that of cognitive fluency has rarely been examined. This study investigated the longitudinal development of L2 utterance and cognitive fluency and their relationship. Thirty-one Chinese learners of English completed speaking tasks and a set of tasks for cognitive fluency before and after 5 months’ study abroad. The results showed that participants made a significant improvement in mean syllable duration, end-clause pause frequency, and the speed of syntactic encoding and articulation but not in mid-clause pause frequency or lexical retrieval speed. Mixed-effects modeling confirmed a significant relationship between syntactic encoding speed and mean syllable duration and mid-clause pausing. Furthermore, the significant relationships were maintained over time. The findings highlight (a) the differences between mid-clause and end-clause pausing in terms of their developmental patterns and relationship with cognitive fluency and (b) a significant role of syntactic encoding speed in L2 utterance fluency.

This study closely replicates Wong, Zhao, & MacWhinney (2018), who found that cognitive linguistics–inspired instruction (i.e., schematic diagram feedback) demonstrated a superiority effect over traditional instruction (i.e., rule and exemplar feedback or corrective feedback) on the translation test but not the cloze test. While the original study adopted the null hypothesis testing approach, the current study adopted Bayesian mixed effects logistic models to investigate how different variables might affect the learnability of prepositions among 81 Chinese-speaking learners of English. The research design, materials, and procedure are nearly identical to those of the original study except for an added delayed posttest. Our findings are generally consistent with the results reported in the original study, indicating that the cognitive linguistics–informed instruction demonstrates superiority effect. Furthermore, these positive learning outcomes persist over time, as evidenced by the results of the delayed posttest.

This study investigated the constructs underlying second language (L2) word association (WA) with regard to three dimensions of lexical competence—size, organization, and accessibility—and the lexical performance of speech. One-hundred and thirteen Japanese learners of English completed a computer-delivered oral WA task along with three vocabulary tasks: a form-recall gap-filling task (size), a primed lexical decision task (organization and accessibility), and an oral cartoon narrative (lexical richness). Regression analyses explored how well these lexical competence and performance scores predicted two WA outcome variables: response profiles and response times. Form-recall vocabulary knowledge, (collocational) priming, and lexical richness explained a large amount of variance in WA response type profiles (Nagelkerke’s pseudo R2 = .901). Form-recall vocabulary knowledge and lexical decision time explained 28.5% of the variance of WA response times. A three-stage model of L2 WA task performance is proposed to account for the constructs underlying WA performance.

This textbook, the second volume in the Language, culture, and teaching series, is a summary of the current issues of multicultural education in schools. As the demography of schools is rapidly changing, Nieto offers skills and tools necessary to face the challenges that these changes bring to current and future teachers regardless of their ethnic background. The book investigates the connection of language and culture, their sociocultural and sociopolitical framework, and the consequences of diversity to school reforms. The introductory chapter gives the reader a general overview of problems related to language, literacy, and culture as they have been seen through historic shifts and arrives at the realization that in education these ideas are inseparable. We need to learn how they influence individual students' learning to teach them successfully.

This study investigated the relationship between second language (L2) speakers’ success in learning a new morphosyntactic pattern and characteristics of one-on-one learning activities, including opportunities to comprehend and produce the target pattern, receive feedback from an interlocutor, and attend to the meaning of the pattern through self- and interlocutor-initiated eye-gaze behaviors. L2 English students (N = 48) were exposed to the transitive construction in Esperanto (e.g., filino mordas pomon [SVO] or pomon mordas filino [OVS] “girl bites apple”) through comprehension and production activities with an interlocutor, receiving feedback in the form of recasts for their Esperanto errors. The L2 speakers’ interpretation and production of Esperanto transitives were then tested using known and novel lexical items. The results indicated that OVS test performance was predicted by the duration of self-initiated eye gaze to images illustrating the OVS pattern during the comprehension learning activity and by accurate production of OVS sentences during the production learning activity. The findings suggest important roles for eye-gaze behavior and production opportunities in L2 pattern learning.

Prosody is crucial for language comprehension because it highlights underlying structures. This study explores whether prosody facilitates memory recall to the same extent in L1 and L2, and whether memory recall is poorer in L2 or whether language-specific differences can mitigate L2 processing difficulties. Nineteen Greek learners of English, and a monolingual English baseline, repeated three-digit chunks with and without prosodic cues in L1 and L2. Prosody was a major facilitator of memory recall only in L1 despite the high proficiency of learners. This indicates that L2 mastery of prosody perception is hard to attain, mirroring production studies. However, when prosodic boundary cues were absent, memory recall in L2 was comparable to L1. This demonstrates that language-specific differences can attenuate more general processing difficulties in L2. This study is the first to demonstrate differences in prosodic processing in L1 and L2 resulting in poorer memory recall in L2.