This study investigated whether individual differences in learners' age of arrival (AOA) and length of residence (LOR) in a country where a second language (L2) is spoken determine the relationship between L2 perception and production. In the first experiment, 40 Korean learners of English and 10 native English speakers participated in vowel…

This study explored the effect on vocabulary retention of vocalizations involving three cognitive processing depths ("repetition," "manipulation," and "generation"). Eight participants in an English for academic purposes (EAP) context encountered five unknown words when working alone and five different words when working in pairs. In each…

This paper looks at the acquisition of articles and related nominal functional properties (the status of classifier, the singular-plural distinction) in English and French by native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese. Two experimental studies are reported. In the generative SLA literature, there is disagreement as to which properties of the grammar…

Presents the results of a study investigating the acquisition of English tense and aspect by Persian speakers. A cross-sectional study of 45 second language learners at three levels of proficiency was conducted using a grammaticality judgment task. Findings showed that the acquisition of tense and aspect followed the universal entailment of…

Examines peer collaboration in a group of Japanese undergraduate students who were engaged in an academic presentation task during their yearlong studies in a content-based English-as-a-Second-Language program in a Canadian university. Students' preparatory activities outside of the classroom included negotiating task definition and teacher…

Reports on an experiment conducted with native and non-native speakers of English involving a picture-drawing task, where one member of each pair instructed the other in the drawing of simple objects. Results suggest that success or failure of meaning negotiations in providing comprehensible input depends on the point of discourse at which they…

The intuitions and reasoned judgments of second-language learners of English were compared on a number of semantic and syntactic phenomena in the language. Because scores on the semantic tasks were higher than on syntactic tasks, it is assumed that classroom instruction should follow the same route. (24 references) (Author/LB)

Investigates effect of task type on resultant candidate discourse and input of the interlocutor. The experimental design ensured an information gap in one of the interview tasks for prospective immigrants to Australia. Findings indicate that candidate discourse differs in quantity and quality between situations when an information gap exists and…

Describes principles underlying ILLICO, a generic natural-language software tool for building larger applications for performing specific linguistic tasks such as analysis, synthesis, and guided composition. Shows to what extent this approach is relevant to the development of computer-assisted language-learning systems. (Author/VWL)

This investigation encompassed a full-scale experiment for both Japanese and Korean university students and looked at the following: the role of grammaticality-judgment tasks (GJT) in second-language acquisition; the learners' behaviors when they were asked to do GJT; and the reasons why the learners made the wrong grammatical judgments.…

Examines a wide range of writing tasks of 11- and 15-year-old students from four regions of England to establish the relative importance of nonstandard dialect as a factor in deviation from standard English norms in writing. (Author/JL)

Reports the preliminary results of an ongoing study of the benefits of building repetition into a communicative task in an English for Specific Purposes course. Compares the performances of two learners at markedly different levels of English proficiency and finds that both benefited from the opportunity to recycle communicative content as they…

Explores the developmental patterns observed when Japanese adult learners acquire the locality condition on English reflexives. Experimental tasks were designed specifically to deal with the methodological problems of earlier research and then administered to Japanese learners of English at five proficiency levels as well as English and Japanese…

Examined why adults learning second languages make frequent errors in lexical form. More and less fluent bilinguals in English and Spanish performed a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. Less fluent participants experienced more interference for…

This study compares 27 sixth grade students who have been learning Spanish since kindergarten with 5 who have had Spanish for only 1 year using a battery of Spanish oral and written tests. The students who started early out performed the new students in listening, speaking, and writing Spanish. Those who started early also displayed a positive…