Examines native language transfer in second-language comprehension and production in relation to the different demands that the four language modalities make on the second-language learner and focuses on the different roles played by context and potential knowledge in comprehension and production. (53 references) (Author/CB)

This study investigated three techniques designed to increase the chances that second language (L2) readers look up and learn unfamiliar words during and after reading an L2 text. Participants in the study, 137 college students in Belgium (L1 = Dutch, L2 = German), were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, forming combinations of two…

How is knowledge represented and organized in the mind? What role does it play in discourse comprehension and interpretation? What are the exact mechanisms whereby knowledge-based processes are utilised in comprehension? These are questions that have puzzled psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists for years. Despite major developments in the…

This study examined two issues: (a) whether there are gains in accurate and speedy comprehension of second language (L2) pragmatic meaning over time and (b) whether the gains are associated with cognitive processing ability and the amount of language contact in an L2 environment. Forty-four college students in a US institution completed three…

Second language listening has historically proved to be a difficult skill. Strategy instruction studies have sought to bring about improvements in subjects' listening but with mixed results. This lack of success might be due to the nature of listening strategy theory and its influence on conceptualizations of listening strategy instruction. The…

It is widely believed that listeners understand some dialects more easily than others, although there is very little research that has rigorously measured the effects. This study investigated whether listeners experience more difficulty with regional, ethnic, and international dialects of English than with Standard American English. The results…

This study examines how topic familiarity and working memory capacity affect beginning Spanish learners' reading comprehension and their processing of future tense morphology. Participants included 94 adult learners from an accelerated, beginning Spanish course. In addition to completing a computerized version of a reading span test as a measure…

We tested Chinese-English bi-scriptal fourth-graders on reading aloud and comprehension in Chinese and English and their understanding of some structural principles underlying Chinese orthography. These principles concern phonological and semantic representation in written Chinese. Regressions showed that knowledge about phonological…

Assesses the influence of religious-specific background knowledge on adult ESL listening comprehension. Sixteen Moslems, 20 Christians, and 28 religion-neutral students listened to two passages, one on prayer rituals of Islam and one on those of Christianity. Students better recalled and understood the passage related to their respective religious…

The present study revisited the issue of simultaneous attention to form and meaning from a methodological perspective that addressed several potential methodological issues of previous research in this strand of inquiry. Seventy-two second-semester-level participants were randomly assigned to one of five experimental groups, including a control,…

This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on…

A study investigated the effect of foreign accent and speaking rate on native English speaker comprehension. Three native Chinese speakers and one native speaker of American English read passages at different speaking rates. Comprehension scores showed that an increase in speaking rate and heavily accented English decreased listener comprehension.…

Analyzes major assumptions underlying schema theory. Considers an alternative perspective, a construction-integration model of text comprehension, and discusses how this perspective, when applied to second language (L2) reading comprehension offers a different and more comprehensive account of the role of knowledge and knowledge-based processes…

This quasi-experimental study attempts to incorporate grammatical elements into meaning-focused reading classes by attracting learner attention to form with minimal interruption to meaning comprehension. Two hundred fifty-nine Korean English as a foreign language students underwent four different treatments--involving textual enhancement and topic…