This article reports on the development and validation of the Informal Second Language Engagement questionnaire (ISLE) for capturing various aspects of learner engagement with informal second language practices. Whereas other questionnaires have primarily focused on learner behavior (the frequency, quantity, and diversity of informal activities in…

This study investigates the influence of grammatical role and discourse-level cues on the interpretation of different pronominal forms in native speakers of French, native speakers of Turkish, and Turkish learners of French. In written questionnaires, we found that native speakers of French were influenced by discourse-level cues when interpreting…

This study explored the usefulness of dual-task methodology, self-ratings, and expert judgments in assessing task-generated cognitive demands as a way to provide validity evidence for manipulations of task complexity. The participants were 96 students and 61 English as a second language (ESL) teachers. The students, 48 English native speakers and…

This study investigated the effects of a group of task factors on advanced English as a second language learners' actual and perceived listening performance. We examined whether the speed, linguistic complexity, and explicitness of the listening text along with characteristics of the text necessary for task completion influenced comprehension. We…

The position of antecedent strategy (Carminati, 2002) claims that speakers of null-subject languages prefer to resolve intrasentential anaphora by linking pro to an antecedent in the specifier of the inflection phrase and the overt pronoun to an antecedent lower in the clause. The present study has two aims: (a) to determine whether adult early…

This article provides a comprehensive synthesis of research on language attrition to date, with a view to establishing a theoretically sound basis for future research in the domain of second language (L2) attrition. We identify the variables that must be tracked in populations who experience language loss, and we develop a general model for the…

This study examines the nature of the involvement load (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) in second language (L2) lexical input processing through reading by considering the effects of the reader-based factors of L2 reading proficiency and background knowledge. The lexical input processing aspects investigated were lexical inferencing (search), attentional…

Efforts to gather data of various sorts--demographics, language-learning history, contact with native speakers, use of the language in the field--as they relate to participants in SLA research studies are inherent to understanding more about language acquisition and use. Scholars frequently develop questionnaires of their own, which are rarely…

Argues that crossing the boundaries between sociolinguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) is essential to both fields of study. Specifically, data collected in an investigation of the SLA of copula choice by 77 English-speaking learners of Spanish are examined in terms of similarities to data collected in studies of language change.…

Presents findings of a survey of English as a second language students' attitudes toward and preferences for the correction of spoken errors by native speaker friends. The subjects reported positive attitudes toward error correction and claimed to prefer even more correction than their friends did. They saw correcting errors as facilitating--even…

Questionnaire data from 484 Israeli tenth graders studying Arabic showed that Gardner's socioeducational model for second language learning was generalizable to the context of the present study (i.e., a different social context from that in which the model was developed). (23 references) (Author)

This study investigates whether proficient second language (L2) speakers of Spanish and English use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, such as "Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California."…

This study examines whether aural processing of input in a situation of implicit instruction can build a knowledge base that is available for both comprehension and production tasks. Fifty-five Dutch students learned a miniature linguistic system based on Spanish. Three training conditions were compared in which noun-adjective gender agreement was…

A study of acquisition of new word formation devices in Hebrew as an indication of near-native competence is based on data collected from written questionnaires. The three tasks to be completed included: (1) production, requiring suggestions for new nouns; (2) evaluation, choosing the most appropriate innovation; and (3) interpretation,…

Focuses on the application of the Null Subject Parameter. Data reveals that some second-language learners exhibit knowledge that English is morphologically nonuniform yet still accept English null subject sentences. Findings disprove the Morphological Uniformity Hypothesis, indicating that any reformulation of the Null Subject Parameter must…