To respond to recent calls for examining oral fluency from a broader social and communicative perspective, the current study aimed at investigating the effects of task communicative function on second language (L2) and first language (L1) speakers' fluency. Designing tasks that represent three different communicative functions (congratulations,…

Drawing on positioning theory and Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of mind, this study analyzes the discursive processes through which expert and novice positions are negotiated in heritage-second language (HL-L2) learner interaction. It examines how positioning practices shape collaboration between HL and L2 learners, determining what types of…

Although most children learn to communicate in their first language (L1), there is normal and expected variation in their rate of acquisition across all components of the language system. Until recently, most second language acquisition and second language (L2) researchers have assumed that individual differences (IDs) in L1 acquisition are small…

In classrooms, teachers play a fundamental role in managing students' participation. As part of their classroom interactional competence to maximize interactional space for students' learning, teachers use multimodal resources to orchestrate turn-taking, allocate the next speaker, and manage repair sequences. However, little is known about how…

This study compares the effects of distributed versus massed corrective feedback (CF) on Spanish differential object marking (DOM). Forty-eight Spanish learners completed three communicative tasks with a researcher on three consecutive days, one task per day. Partial recasts were used to reformulate DOM errors. The distributed group (n = 16)…

Study abroad (SA) is touted for providing language learners with regular exposure to a second language (L2) in naturalistic settings. However, few studies have examined how interaction occurs in situ. This study analyzed 13 hours of naturalistic dyadic conversations self-recorded by 15 US-based undergraduate sojourners studying abroad for one…

In this article, we present our vision of a transformed second language acquisition and teaching (SLA/T) disciplinary community that approaches second language (L2) education through four pillars. The first pillar is praxeology (i.e., the study of human action) to highlight the sociocontextually emergent nature of L2 competence. It locates the…

Although current approaches to second language (L2) pronunciation underscore that instruction should concentrate on pronunciation features that help learners be more intelligible (and not necessarily more native like), there is little empirical evidence as to what those features are, especially in languages other than English. To address this gap,…

As emotions research in the field of second language acquisition continues to evolve, it is equally important to explore the impact of social--emotional variables that are specifically relevant to heritage language (HL) contexts. Anchoring on foundations in critical heritage language education (HLE), this study examines the discomforts of the HL…

This study examined the relationship between lexical coverage (i.e., the percentage of known word tokens in a text) and second language (L2) reading comprehension. Several studies have suggested that adequate comprehension occurs between 95% and 98% coverage, but no study has investigated beginning-level learners reading under the conditions of…

While an elicited imitation test (EIT) has been widely used as a measure of oral proficiency in second language acquisition (SLA) research, it is still unclear the extent to which memory capacity impacts EIT performance. In light of this gap, the present study sought to clarify the nature of elicited imitation by examining the relative…

The simple view of reading (SVR) model proposes that reading comprehension is the product of cognitive domain skills, word decoding, and oral language (linguistic) comprehension, and that decoding and language comprehension make separate, independent contributions to reading comprehension. The SVR has been supported in both first (L1) and second…

This study investigated to what extent and how novice second-language (L2) Spanish learners use the cognitive linguistics-informed concept of boundedness to support their development of aspect--namely, the Spanish preterite and imperfect. The concept was presented within the framework of concept-based instruction (CBI) as part of a regular,…

As second language (L2) research adapts to the dynamics of multimodal instruction, researchers are exploring the role of captioning and textual enhancement (TE) on learner development. The present experiment assesses the differential effects of textually enhanced captions on learners' elicited imitation of L2 Spanish grammar. Twenty-eight…

This study examined linguistic development among both intermediate and advanced college-level second language (L2) learners during short-term study abroad summer programs in Spain. Participants completed a measure of overall proficiency, as well as assessments of receptive grammatical (morphosyntactic) and lexical (semantic) abilities at the…