The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

The ratio of women to men is 4 to 1 in beginning university Spanish courses, and this gap widens the higher the level of instruction (Chavez 2001). Prior experiments on reading in Spanish show that the interaction of readers' gender and passage content plays a significant role with learners at the intermediate levels, but not at advanced levels of…

The purpose of this study is to explore the connection between two goal theories and to investigate how goals and the goal setting process can have an effect on academic achievement and linguistic and intercultural competence development in the Spanish second language (L2) classroom. Specifically, this study employs achievement goal theory and…

This study investigates whether dynamic visual enhancement affects the recall of second language (L2) vocabulary and whether working memory interacts with visual enhancement and vocabulary recall. Participants in four groups completed a pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test that measured the effects of the type of dynamic…

The present study compared the performance of two groups of second language learners processing three linguistic structures in Spanish. The linguistic targets were passives, object pronouns in O[subscript pro]VS sentences, and gender-cued null subjects in subordinate clauses. The primary differences between the two groups were language experience…

This article presents a descriptive analysis of the evolution of the world language Advanced Placement (AP) exam candidates' ethno-racial background, their heritage learner status, and language dominance, with particular emphasis on the two Spanish exams. The data come from aggregated national totals prepared by the College Board that include…

This pilot study looks at the effect of learning second language vocabulary with gesture. Specifically, this current study asks whether researcher-instructed or student-constructed gestures are more effective. Depth of processing theories (Craik and Lockhart 1972) as well as more recent educational frameworks like ICAP ("Interactive,"…

In seeking to both confirm previous conclusions and expand the literature of the field with a different group of participants, McNulty (2012) was (partially) replicated. Three instructional interventions were designed to ascertain which activity type was responsible for learner gains. One treatment group (R) included referential-only practice…

Teacher accountability continues to be at the forefront of educational policy in the United States, with the current focus on the Outcomes of K-12 teaching and teacher education (Cochran-Smith 2000). edTPA, a high-stakes assessment used in many states to make licensure or certification decisions, purports to measure those content-specific…

In this study, the researcher investigated Spanish teachers' sense of efficacy as it relates to their students' achievement on the AATSP National Spanish Examinations. Results suggest that there is a link between Spanish teacher efficacy and students' scores on the exams. That is, the higher one's belief about his or her…

This study explored native English speakers' interpretations of second-language Spanish sentences featuring an animate subject and an ambitransitive verb (e.g., "Escuchan bien los ninos" "The children listen well"). First- (N=37), third- (N=39), and fifth-semester (N=23) participants heard eight subject-verb (SV) and eight verb-subject (VS)…

This study examines the effects of processing instruction (PI) alone versus PI and output (O) on the acquisition of three conjunctional and infinitival phrases in Spanish. Seventy intermediate and advanced-intermediate high school participants received: 1) PI on three consecutive days (PI + PI + PI); 2) PI for two days and meaning-based output…

Varying methodological conditions changed the emphasis of Spanish instruction for 212 English-speaking university students. Evaluation of the cognitive style preferences of first semester students via the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, Learning Styles Inventory, and a specially-designed questionnaire produced a single cognitive preference score.…

Comparison of the listening comprehension of second language learners completing three different prelistening activities after one and two exposures to a passage shows that scores for subjects completing the question preview activity were higher than for subjects completing the filler activity and that additional exposure improves comprehension.…