This study investigated the relationship among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in the speech of second language learners of Spanish of varying proficiency in instructed contexts. It conceptually replicated studies by Munro and Derwing (1995a) and Derwing and Munro (1997), who found partial independence among the three speech…

Answering calls to map college-level proficiency development (Modern Language Association, 2007) and longitudinally chart language learning (Barkaoui, 2014; Ortega & Byrnes, 2008), we mapped the oral proficiency growth of 1,922 lower-division college students of Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish (in the second, third, or fourth semester of…

This 8-year longitudinal case study of Fabiola, a Spanish-English bilingual, investigated her argumentative writing development, focusing on her use of evidence to support and develop arguments over time from high school through university. Data sources included 36 writing samples. Texts across grade levels and course types were analyzed to…

Tasks and interactional feedback have received much attention in instructed second language acquisition research in recent years. However, little research exists that has investigated feedback and task factors together during naturally occurring teacher-student interaction in classroom settings. To bridge this gap, the current study explored the…

This study examines the relationship between learners' production of modified output and their working memory (WM) capacity. The task-based interactions of 42 college-level, native English-speaking learners of Spanish as a foreign language were examined. A relationship was found between learners' WM test scores and their tendency to modify output.…

Examined second language learners' ability to use their second language knowledge in production, exploring form/meaning relationships. Groups of native English speakers watched video segments four times while recording their own online rendition in Spanish, viewing either repeated or different segments each time. Results indicated that task…

A study was conducted among college students of Spanish to determine whether certain linguistic and ethnic attitudes can predict proficiency in Spanish as a second language. Attitudinal data did not predict second language proficiency, but evidence suggested that a positive orientation toward the Chicano community was not necessary for the…

A study was conducted to determine if informal learners of ESL had the same acquisition order of morphemes as formal learners have and to find out what would happen to the established order if only certain of the grammatical morphemes were explained and drilled. Instruction did not change acquisition order. (Author/KM)

Examined the differential role of comprehension and production practice in second language learning. Discusses the results of a study of 82 first-year students of Spanish as a second language that indicated that relative effectiveness of production versus comprehension practice depended on the morphosyntactic complexity of the structure in…

Analyzes the incorporation patterns of well-educated, but low proficiency, Chinese immigrants (n=4) to Spain and of high-proficiency Chinese university students (n=4) with extensive formal training in Spanish. Findings reveal that whereas the university students showed awareness of error and successfully incorporated native speakers' corrections,…

Examined the influence of the social use and the history of acquisition of Euskera on comprehension and recall of two versions (Euskera-Castilian) of a scientific text read by bilingual high school and college students. Results suggested that both extensive social use and an active history of acquisition of a language improve the level of…

Testing of a second-language phonological acquisition model with four beginning learners of Spanish supported the claim that transfer processes decrease over time while developmental processes increase and then decrease. Analysis also revealed a hierarchical organization of processes in second-language acquisition and an interaction of the native…

Examined the efficacy of the keyword method versus rote rehearsal in learning foreign language vocabulary. Findings revealed that in experienced foreign language learners, rote learners' performance excelled that of keyword learners, whereas in experienced learners, rote and keyword learners recalled the same proportion of words, although the…

Tested the interlanguage structural conformity hypothesis by examining how frequently young adult, native Spanish speakers in Mexico modified English two- and three-member onsets. Results indicate that three-member onsets were modified significantly more frequently than were two-member onsets and that epenthesis occurred more frequently after…

This cross sectional study used verbal protocol analysis to compare the temporal distribution of formulation processes of Spanish English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writers composing first and second language (L1, L2) argumentative texts. Studied three groups at different levels of second language proficiency. Results showed the same total…