This article reports a meta-analysis of 42 experiments in 33 published studies involving processing instruction (PI) and production-based instruction (PB) used in the PI studies. The comparative effectiveness of PI and PB showed that although PI was more effective than PB for developing receptive knowledge, PB was just as effective as PI for…

Development of target language pragmatic competence in language learners requires not only provision of cultural features of target language community in language classes but also language learner's willingness to learn and use those cultural features. To investigate the relationship between language learners' attitudes toward cultural instruction…

The chapters in this volume, all written by experts in the field, present an array of new research on second language acquisition (SLA) that touches on several current theoretical debates in the field and present a rich range of new empirical data and a number of innovative findings. The studies address questions relating to ultimate attainment,…

The major goal of this research is to investigate learners' metaphorical comprehension in L1 and its effect on the metaphorical comprehension in L2 by Iraqi EFL learners at secondary school. In which, they encounter difficulties understanding English texts and lectures, primarily when metaphor is included, which leads to the misunderstanding of…

This study investigated the effects of three fluency-enhancing activities on interpreting learners' performance. Four groups of students took part in the experiment. They were assigned to one of the four task conditions: pre-task planning, task repetition, formulae acquisition, and a control group. A temporal approach was adopted to measure…

The present study investigated the relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and word reading in both Chinese (L1) and English (L2), with children's cognitive/linguistic skills considered as mediators and/or moderators. One hundred ninety-nine Chinese kindergarteners in Hong Kong with diverse SES backgrounds participated in this study. SES…

This article presents a generative analysis of the acquisition of formulaic language as an alternative to current usage-based proposals. One influential view of the role of formulaic expressions in second language (L2) development is that they are a bootstrapping mechanism into the L2 grammar; an initial repertoire of constructions allows for…

To help EFL learners realize the use of nominals and clauses in practicing productive skills of academic writing in English writing tests, experiments have been exploited using the tasks similar to those of internet-based test of English as a foreign language to determine the nominal and clause level information during sentence and paragraph…

In China, English as a foreign language (EFL) learning mainly occurs in the classroom, and the resultant lack of practice using English in authentic settings makes it quite difficult for many Chinese learners to learn English words. They may often feel that English words are "difficult to learn and easy to forget." As such, how to…

This book focuses on appropriate English for Academic Purposes instructional concepts and methods in the Japanese context. It investigates a variety of pedagogical techniques, addressing the fundamental academic English skills -- listening, speaking, reading and writing -- as well as assessment and materials development. All the research included…

The paper tackles a central question in the field of Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL): How can language learning tasks be conceptualized and made explicit in a way that supports the pedagogical goals of current Foreign Language Teaching and Learning and at the same time provides an explicit characterization of the Natural…

This study extends the evidence for implicit second language (L2) learning, which comes largely from (semi-)artificial language research, to German. Upper-intermediate L2 German learners were flooded with spoken exemplars of a difficult morphological structure, namely strong, vowel-changing verbs. Toward the end of exposure, the mandatory vowel…

The present study investigates whether two types of word combinations (free combinations and collocations) differ in terms of processing by testing Howarth's Continuum Model based on word combination typologies from a phraseological tradition. A visual semantic judgment task was administered to advanced Swedish learners of English (n = 27) and…

This study examined whether 30 learners of Japanese in the United States who engaged in a semester-long video-based eTandem course made gains in global language comprehensibility, that is, ease of understanding (Derwing & Munro, 2009), and what linguistic correlates contributed to these gains. Speech excerpts from Week 2 and 8 of tandem…

In two experiments, this article investigates the predictive processing of gender agreement in adult second language (L2) acquisition. We test (1) whether instruction on lexical gender can lead to target predictive agreement processing and (2) how variability in lexical gender representations moderates L2 gender agreement processing. In a…