The study investigated the effect of task complexity (TC) on second language (L2) learners' affective responses and writing performance and how these were modulated by cognitive and affective individual difference (ID) factors. A total of 412 Chinese 8th-grade English-as-a-foreign-language learners completed a working memory (WM) test, a scale…

This article examines how second language (L2) interactional competence is manifested in students' use of "and"-prefaced turns when doing meaning-focused oral tasks in pairs and small groups. Drawing on video recordings from English-as-a-foreign-language upper-secondary classes recorded in Czechia and Finland, 86 sequences involving…

Robinson's (2001) Cognition Hypothesis claims that more complex tasks promote interaction and language development. This study examined the effect of task complexity in the learning of request-making expressions. Task complexity was operationalized as [+/- reasoning] following Robinson's framework. The study employed a pretest-posttest research…

This study examined the effectiveness of Zipfian frequency at facilitating the acquisition of English prenominal past participles. Chinese middle school students (N = 103) were randomly assigned to a sequenced Zipfian frequency (SZF) group, a random Zipfian frequency (RZF) group, a balanced frequency (BF) group, and a control group. A mixed…

This study introduces an approach to providing corrective feedback to L2 learners termed analogy-based corrective feedback that is motivated by analogical learning theories and syntactic alignment in dialogue. Learners are presented with a structurally similar synonymous version of their output where the erroneous form is corrected, and they must…

The article reports on a study investigating the comparative effects of immediate and delayed corrective feedback in learning the English past passive construction, a linguistic structure of which the learners had little prior knowledge. A total of 120 learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) from 4 intact classes at a Chinese middle school…

In the present study, we examine the effects of prompts and recasts on the acquisition of two new and different grammar structures in a task-based learning environment. Sixty-four 14-year-old 9th grade students (low intermediate) learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to three conditions: two experimental groups (one…

This article reports a comparative study of first language (L1) Chinese and second language (L2) English lessons in Hong Kong secondary schools. Aiming to explore how to take advantage of L1 academic proficiency for the benefit of L2 development, the study asked how Chinese and English lessons compare in terms of the content knowledge covered and…