The congruency effect--that is, faster and more accurate processing of congruent multiword units, has been demonstrated in multiple studies. It is still unclear, however, what its underlying mechanism is, and how congruency may interact with other factors. Using an acceptability judgement task, this study examined the congruency effect in…

Noise, although ubiquitous, is seldom considered as a factor that may impede learning. In South Africa, most learners are multilingual and learn in English, which is their second language. Most noise studies have been conducted in the Global North, where the school context differs from the Global South. In this article, using questions selected…

Avoidance as a strategy for error-free production in a second language is shown to be unavailable to the student when the second language is linguistically similar to the native language. In avoidance, the student "steers around" those aspects of the grammar of the target language with which he/she is unfamiliar. By restricting linguistic…

Argues for the studying of the language learning process itself, rather than doing contrastive or error analyses for determining the source of error in second language acquisiton. Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies can help determine the language learning stages. A multidimensional model of language learning is proposed. (PJM)

Current research on adult second language learning suggests that study is necessary to separate interference variables from intralinguistic variables and to determine the relative difficulty of structures in each group. This research on the acquisition of the English relative clause was specifically designed to test the transfer hypothesis…

A knowledge of areas of difficulty as well as their underlying causes is necessary before instructional materials, teaching techniques, and evaluation methods in foreign language instruction can be organized. This research describes three methods of analyzing the problems in foreign language learning and suggests their complementary role in…

The phonological switching processes of 16 bilingual (Spanish-English) adults were observed to provide phonological evidence for the coordinate/compound theory of bilingualism. Each subject was categorized as a coordinate or compound based on responses to a questionnaire. Subjects were recorded reading a mixed list of Spanish and English words.…

This investigation examined the acquisition of five complex English syntactic structures by Egyptian and Israeli adult learners at different levels of proficiency. Carol Chomsky's methodology, as adapted by d'Anglejan and Tucker, served to assess comprehension of these structures. The responses of the Egyptians and Israelis, which were similar to…

Little has been done to test or describe reading strategies of second language learners. The study reported in this paper was an attempt to begin to investigate the nature of perceptual strategies which second language learners employ when reading certain English structures, and to ask the question of whether second language learners, when…

The main concern of this report is the nature of the reliance by children on prior native language (L1) knowledge in naturalistic, untutored second language (L2) acquisition. It is suggested that L1 reliance is systematic, in that specific conditions have to be met within the child's L2 development before he or she will, or can, draw on previous…

A general model for second language learning is proposed in this paper. First, this model aims to describe different components (input, intake, integration, output) of the learning process in terms of the information (explicit/implicit, linguistic/sociolinguistic) to which the learner is exposed. Secondly, the model serves to identify the stages,…