Interaction research that has investigated the relationship between language production and second language (L2) development has largely focused on learners' immediate responses to interactional feedback. However, other speech production processes might help account for the beneficial relationship between interaction and L2 development. The…

Investigated whether planning opportunity results in increased focus on form at the level of strategic attention to form during planning time, as well as at the level of production outcomes during task performance. Results provide support for the claim that planning before doing a second language task can promote an increased focus on form.…

Challenges the critical period hypothesis by examining phonological performance among highly motivated subjects who use German daily as graduate student instructors and who have been immersed in the language through in-country residence, augmented by years of instruction in both language- and content-based courses. (Author/VWL)

Reports on an experiment in which 2 groups of 20 Japanese learners of English as a Second Language performed 2 monologic production tasks with and without time for planning. It was found that providing learners with time to plan their utterances results in interlanguage productions that are more complex. (64 references) (Author/VWL)

Argues that mental translation during second-language (L2) reading may facilitate the generation and conservation of meaning by allowing the reader to represent portions of L2 text that exceed cognitive limits in a familiar, memory-efficient form. The study presents hypotheses and questions for future research. (68 references) (Author/CK)

Using a miniature linguistic system with five morphological rules and a 98-word lexicon, this experiment determined that explicit-deductive learning was more effective than implicit-inductive learning for the acquisition of categorical rules by 61 college student subjects. (87 references) (MDM)

Linguistic analyses suggest that the nongeneric use of the English definite article "the" falls into four major categories: cultural, situation, structural, and textual. Aims to determine whether these uses present different levels of difficulty for English-as-a-Second-Language students and whether they are acquired at the same time. (Author/VWL)

Analysis of college Spanish students' processing of information under different conditions suggested that learners, and particularly early-stage learners, have great difficulty in attending to both form and content. (22 references) (Author/CB)

Reports on a study that investigated the effect of different amounts of planning time on the speech performance of second-language speakers. Subjects were four groups of learners of German performing two tasks each. The study employed various general and specific constructs for measuring fluency, complexity, and accuracy of speech; the…

Examines the processing of Spanish future tense morphology incidentally while reading in a second language. Participants had no previous knowledge of future tense morphology so that, as they read the passage used in the study, they encountered the target form for the first time, which is an accented "a" on the end of an infinitive--for example,…

Discusses the ACTFL/ETS Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) in relation to current models of communicative skills and argues that the OPI fails to measure important aspects of communicative ability. Two Situation Tests, one written and one oral, are described as alternative measures of communicative ability. Examples are given in Appendices.…

Examined whether intermediate learners of a second language acquire and retain unknown vocabulary as a result of reading. Also assessed the effect of the text variable of exposure frequency. (Author/VWL)

Reviews the literature on the role of background knowledge in second-language listening comprehension, presents findings of pertinent first- and second-language research, and reports on a study showing the importance of schemata in second-language listening comprehension and the role of linguistic knowledge. (34 references) (Author/CB)

Reports on a study of the classroom acquisition of German word order by adult learners. Results of the study support the claim that classroom and naturalistic second language acquisition of complex grammatical features such as word order follow similar routes. (50 references) (Author/OD)

Compared two methods for correcting transfer errors in the foreign language classroom. Eight commonly encountered English-to-French transfer errors were identified and randomly assigned to one or two teaching conditions for one class section; each error was assigned to the opposite condition for the other section. (29 references) (VWL)