This study investigates the potential benefits for incidental vocabulary acquisition of implementing a particular sequence of input--output--input activities. More specifically, learners of English as a foreign language (EFL; n = 32) were asked to watch a TED Talk video, orally sum up its content in English, and then watch the video once more. A…

While most empirical studies have investigated the improvement of learners' L2 spoken proficiency via speaking-related interventions, the present study examined the same topic through a different modality: listening. Ninety-five first-year tertiary-level students of English as a second language (ESL) in Hong Kong participated in this three-month…

The practice of integrating listening and speaking in the classroom emanates from a belief that the attainment of proficiency in oral production is associated with listening since learners are plunged into the rich exposure of language input by means of listening tasks. Engaging in meaningful communication puts great demands on grammatical…

Captioned video is widely used to enhance second language (L2) learners' exposure to oral input beyond the classroom setting, and captioning has been found to provide an instantaneous, useful visual aid for parsing and understanding L2 oral discourse. Nevertheless, a meta-analysis has shown that captioning exerts a selective effect on L2 learners…

Developmental psychology plays a central role in shaping evidence-based best practices for prelingually deaf children. The Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis (Conway et al., 2009) asserts that a lack of auditory stimulation in deaf children leads to impoverished implicit sequence learning abilities, measured via an artificial grammar learning (AGL)…

With the advent of communicative methodologies, the promise to develop both fluency and accuracy was made as a goal for teaching and learning English as an international language. However, it did not happen (Richards, 2008). In an attempt to equalize students' both semantic and syntactic competence, this study investigates the impact of Swain's…

As an increasingly popular format of input, the affordances of audio-visual materials have been widely studied. Past research has provided evidence that audio-visual input combined with different captioning strategies could benefit learners in terms of vocabulary learning, listening comprehension, and the development of grammatical knowledge.…

The present study investigates the prosody/pragmatics interface in TBLT by extending the traditional morphological focus-on-form to a focus on intonational forms, with Spanish declaratives and imperatives. Twenty-eight intermediate L2 Spanish learners were assigned to one of two conditions that differed in the type of focus-on-form present during…

In this study, two alternative theoretical models were compared, in order to analyze which of them best explains primary school children's text comprehension skills. The first one was based on the distinction between two types of answers requested by the comprehension test: local or global. The second model involved texts' input modality: written…

This study explores the impact of using TED Talks on improving oral presentation skills of Business English students and vocabulary uptake/retention. It also assesses the impact of improving such hard cognitive skills on increasing Business majors' speaking anxiety level. Sequential explanatory mixed method was used, which includes both…

The ability to detect non-adjacent dependencies (i.e. between "a" and "b" in "aXb") in spoken input may support the acquisition of morpho-syntactic dependencies (e.g. "The princess 'is' kiss'ing' the frog"). Functional morphemes in morpho-syntactic dependencies are often marked by perceptual cues that render…

This study examined two common accounts of heritage speakers' nonnative attainment in their heritage/first language (L1), one attributing it to the influence of the second language (L2) and another to insufficient L1 input. Three groups of children who were heritage speakers of Arabic and who varied in their age of L2 exposure and type and amount…

Recent findings in the field of pragmatics have revealed that pragmatic accuracy (knowledge) and pragmatic speed (processing ability) function as two distinct and non-parallel components of pragmatic competence. Anderson's adaptive control of thought--rational (ACT-R) model, which emphasises the development of skill through repeated practice,…

This book is relevant for language testers, listening researchers, and oral proficiency teachers, in that it explores four broad themes related to the assessment of L2 listening ability: the use of authentic, real-world spoken texts; the effects of different speech varieties of listening inputs; the use of audio-visual texts; and assessing…

This study compares the effect of using corpus-based materials and activities for the instruction of pragmatic routines under two conditions: implementing direct corpus searches by learners during classroom instruction and working with teacher-developed corpus-based materials. The outcome is compared to a repeated-test control group. Pragmatic…