This article investigates the effect of explicit individual corrective feedback (ICF) on L2 pronunciation at the micro-level in order to determine whether ICF needs to complement listening only interventions. To this purpose, the authors carried out a study which investigated the immediate effect of feedback on comprehensibility of controlled…

This study investigates outcomes of deliberate learning on vocabulary acquisition in a second language (L2). Acquisition of 48 pseudowords was measured using the lexical decision task with visually presented stimuli. The experiments drew on form priming, masked repetition priming, and automatic semantic priming procedures. Data analyses revealed a…

Researches of English language teaching (ELT) have focused on using mother tongue (L1) for years. The proliferation of task-based language teaching (TBLT) has been also occurred. Considerable findings have been made in the existing literature of the two fields; however, no mentions have been made in the combination of these two ELT aspects, i.e.,…

Leung and Lewkowicz remind us that the debate over the past two decades that is most relevant to ELT (English languge teaching) pedagogy and curriculum concerns test-task authenticity. This paper first reviews how the authenticity debate in the literature of second language acquisition, pedagogy and testing has evolved. Drawing on a body of…

This study analyses intermediate and advanced learner-learner and learner-native speaker (NS) interaction looking for collaborative dialogue. It investigates how the presence of a NS interlocutor affects the frequency and nature of lexical language-related episodes (LREs) spontaneously generated during task-based interaction. Twenty-four learners…

Considerable research has demonstrated that English-speaking children extend nouns on the basis of shape. Here we asked whether the development of this bias is influenced by the structure of a child's primary language. We tested English- and Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 1 ; 10 and 3 ; 4 in a novel noun generalization task. Results…

In this article we report on the results of a pilot study on the use of task-based multilingual and multicultural professional scenarios for higher education teachers and learners at BA and MA level. The scenarios reflect new learning outcomes and assessment criteria for the presently under-conceptualised domain of communication in multilingual…

The need for foreign language education in the US has increased in recent years, and teaching methods based on traditional textbooks are unlikely to meet the real-world needs of current learners. As a response, interest in Language for Specific Purposes programs has grown and so has Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) methodology. This article…

This research investigated if and how the instructional design affected the learning outcome in a blog-mediated project, namely students' communicative writing in the social media. Thirty-four college-level English learners from two universities in Taiwan participated in the telecollaboration. The current research continues to highlight the social…

The acquisition of linguistic structures that require "perspective-taking" at the level of "message generation" is challenging. We investigate use of "progressive aspect" in L2 event encoding, using a sentence priming paradigm. We focus on Dutch, in which use of progressive aspect is optional. The progressive consists…

In response to the growing interest in evaluating young learners' foreign language (FL) performance, this study aims to deepen our understanding of young learners' developmental differences in interaction during task-based paired-language assessments. To examine age effects separately from the effect of general language proficiency, we analysed…

This investigation extended the use of the priming methodology to 5- and 6-year-olds at the beginning stages of learning English as a second language (L2). In Study 1, 14 L2 children described transitive scenes without an experimenter's input. They produced no passives and minimal actives; most of their utterances were incomplete. In Study 2, 56…

This study examined how language learners' preconceptions about a task influence their approaches to second language reading and the sociocultural basis for such preconceptions. Participants were 30 students learning English at a Korean university. The researchers told half of the participants that they would do a recall task after reading an…

The current study explored the occurrence of stress pattern alignment during peer interaction in a second language (L2) classroom. Interactive alignment is a sociocognitive phenomenon in which interlocutors reuse each other's expressions, structures, and pronunciation patterns during conversation. Students (N = 41) enrolled in a…

This investigation examined two techniques that may help learners focus on second language (L2) constructions when recasts are provided during meaning-based communicative activities: altering the cognitive complexity of tasks and manipulating the input frequency distributions of target constructions. We first independently assessed the validity of…