From November 2015 to October 2020, Canada had welcomed 44,620 Syrian refugees to more than 350 communities across the country. In 2019, it further surpassed the United States and Australia in the number of refugees settled. Lacking the necessary language skills for living and working in a new country is one of the most critical barriers refugees…

This study examined the crosslinguistic sharing of morphological awareness (MA) in biliteracy development. The analysis included 34 correlational studies with 41 independent samples (N = 4,104). Correlational coefficients were meta-analyzed, yielding four main findings: (a) the correlation between first language (L1) and second language (L2) MA…

Language proficiency is multi-componential in nature and, according to many SLA researchers and L2 practitioners, is best captured by the concepts of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Two of the three studies reported in this paper adopted the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2003) as the means to address the question of whether increasing…

The paper gives an overview of learner corpora and their application to second language learning and teaching. It is proposed that there are four core components in learner corpus research, namely, corpus linguistics expertise, a good background in linguistic theory, knowledge of SLA theory, and a good understanding of foreign language teaching…

Drawing on the findings of longitudinal studies in uninstructed contexts over the last two decades, this synthesis explores variations in developmental patterns across second language (L2) pragmatic features. Two synthesis questions were addressed: (a) What are the variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features?, and (b) What are…

Slobin's (1996) "thinking for speaking" hypothesis has been recently adopted by second language researchers as a valuable lens from which to examine the complexities of possible conceptual restructuring during interlanguage development. This paper reviews a sample of studies analyzing the linguistic and conceptual patterns observed in…

This paper brings together the research and developments of instructed pragmatics over the past three decades by reporting the synthesis findings of instructional intervention studies in interlanguage pragmatics. Two questions have guided this investigation: (1) is instruction effective in learning pragmatics?; and (2) what methods are most…

Translation and language teaching techniques which take language learners' first language (L1) as point of reference for teaching the second language (L2) have been long discouraged on the ground that these teaching techniques would end in the fossilization of L2 structure forms in the learner's Interlanguage system. However, in recent years, the…

As Tarone (1998) stated, an understanding of interlanguage variation in relation to contextual changes has been a key issue in both second language acquisition (SLA) and language assessment (LA) research. Research on interlanguage variation has shown that systematic variation is often evidenced when different phonological and syntactic forms are…

First language (L1) transfer has been a key issue in the field of applied linguistics, second language acquisition (SLA), and language pedagogy for almost a century. Its importance, however, has been re-evaluated several times within the last few decades. The aim of this paper is to examine current research that has investigated the role of L1…

This review article evaluates the intersection of the content of two recent anthologies in second language (L2) phonology. One of the books lays out both the methodological context and theoretical underpinnings of the field, whereas the other volume reports 11 empirical studies on the L2 acquisition of several aspects of pronunciation by adult…

Underlying the mainstream of current SLA research is the Ansatz that some level of attention to the formal aspects of language is necessary for acquisition to take place. It is self-evident and commonsensical that focusing on specific linguistic aspects helps the learner to acquire and internalise them. Numerous recent studies investigated the…

Misuse of English conjunction related to incoherent writing, according to the literature, comes from learners' first language interference, improper mechanical exercises, and misleading lists of connectors in textbooks demonstrated as if mutually interchangeable without contextual constraints. Form-focused instruction with explicit semantic,…