This study reports on the findings of a questionnaire administered to 93 students studying Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) at British universities, focusing on their views of the role of grammar in their learning of Japanese. Learners' views are important because mismatches with their teachers' views can affect their learning negatively.…

Research in literature reports the importance of L2 vocabulary and syntactic knowledge on the learners' reading comprehension. In this regard, the current study investigated the role of vocabulary knowledge that is disunited into depth and breadth dimensions and syntactic knowledge in the reading comprehension scores of an advanced cohort of…

The present study investigates the interaction between vocabulary breadth and depth on the one hand and assessments of L2 learners' descriptive writing on the other. The predictive role of these two dimensions of vocabulary knowledge in relation to the vocabulary component of the assessment was also examined. The extent to which vocabulary…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between Chinese MA students' depth of vocabulary knowledge, their use of L2 vocabulary learning strategy (VLS), and the types of L2 contact they encountered while studying abroad. 165 Chinese MA students from a British university participated in the study by filling out the questionnaire…

Generic noun phrases, or generics, refer to abstract categories ("Dogs" bark) rather than particular individuals ("Those dogs" bark). Study 1 investigated how parents use gestures in association with generic versus particular reference during naturalistic interactions with their 2- and 3-year-old children. Parents provided…

Finding the match between individuals and educational treatments is the aim of both educators and the aptitude-treatment interaction research paradigm. Using the latent growth curve analysis, the present study investigates the interaction between the type of explicit instructional approaches (deductive vs. explicit-inductive) and the level of…

This study examines the lexical representation and recall of abstract words by beginning L2 learners of Spanish in the light of the predictions of the dual coding theory (Paivio 1971; Paivio and Desrochers 1980). Ninety-seven learners (forty-four males and fifty-three females) were randomly placed in the picture or non-picture group and taught…