This study investigated the effects of direct and indirect WCF on students' revision accuracy as well as on new pieces of writing over time. Intermediate level pre-faculty university students were divided randomly into four groups: direct, underlining only, underlining metalinguistic, and a control group. They produced two texts from two different…

Despite the large amount of research that has taken place with mobile devices for language learning over the years, there are still limited conclusions that can be reached as to what contributes to sustained task engagement. A common problem that has long been seen in the CALL literature is that many tasks and activities that are reported are…

Evidence of learning following incidental exposure has been found for aspects of nonnative syntax in adults (Rebuschat & Williams, 2006, 2012; Williams & Kuribara, 2008). However, little research has tested delayed effects of learning under an incidental condition or moved beyond word order. This study investigated learning of third…

The contribution of phonological memory to syntactic abilities has been demonstrated in various populations, but its relationship to metasyntactic abilities, defined as the ability to control syntactic aspects of language, remains largely unexplored. This study therefore aims to examine the contribution of phonological memory in the completion of…

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…

Students in South East Asia often struggle with English /l/ and /r/. This study therefore set out to examine how Taiwanese pupils' perception of these sounds is influenced by cross-language effects. Most Taiwanese students have Mandarin as L1 and Taiwanese as L2 or vice versa, and English as L3. A same-different discrimination experiment was…

Communicative adequacy is a key construct in second language research, as the primary goal of most language learners is to communicate successfully in real-world situations. Nevertheless, little is known about what linguistic features contribute to communicatively adequate speech. This study fills this gap by investigating the extent to which…

The present study investigates whether the implementation of a dictogloss task within a proactive Focus on Form approach (e.g., Long 1991; Long and Robinson 1998) has significant effects on the acquisition of Spanish present subjunctive. A total of sixty-six learners in a fifth-semester Spanish course participated in the study and were assigned to…

This study contributes to the literature on second language (L2) learners' revision behavior by describing what, when, and how often L2 learners revise their texts when responding to timed writing tasks on the computer and by examining the effects of task type, L2 proficiency, and keyboarding skills on what and when L2 learners revise. Each of 54…

Only a few characteristics of picture-based narrative prompts have been studied to determine what features affect task performance. Thus, it is not easy to identify equivalent narrative prompts or identify features that are impactful. Tavakoli and Foster (2008) and Tavakoli (2009) examined the impact of prompt on the language produced by English…

The present study investigated the impact of pronunciation training on the learning and retention of second language (L2) grammatical structures. By drawing on the phonological saliency of stress placement in German separable- and inseparable-prefix verbs, the study explored whether enhancing explicit instruction through pronunciation training can…

Oral language exams at university often consist of an individual or group conversation with the examiner about topics dealt with during the semester. A question-and-answer format is applied and vocabulary and structures tested. As a consequence, the oral exam does not reflect action-oriented approaches that often form part of classroom activities…

The present study examined the use of prosody in semantic and syntactic disambiguation by means of comparison between Japanese and Chinese speakers' production of English sentences. In Chinese and Japanese, lexical prosody is more prominent than sentence prosody, and the sentential meaning contrast is usually realized through particles or a change…

Knowledge of derivational morphology is considered an important aspect of vocabulary knowledge both in L1 (mother tongue) and L2 (second or foreign language) English language learning. However, it is still not clear whether different derivational affixes vary in their (learning) difficulty. The present study examines whether Bauer and Nation's…

Substantial biliteracy research on two alphabetic languages has indicated that, once it is fostered in the first language (L1) literacy experience, morphological awareness can transfer and facilitate second language (L2) reading. It is still unclear, however, whether L1 metalinguistic awareness transfers in the same manner across typologically…