When viewed through a generic, one-size-fits-all perspective, use of input enhancement does not appear effective. Through analysis of individual grammatical features and different learner proficiency levels, a significant impact may be revealed. To study the impact of input enhancement on diverse grammatical features, 16 short reading texts and…

The paper seeks to demonstrate how academic Content Obligatory Language can be potentially organized in teacher talk applying semantic gravity waving from Legitimation Code Theory. The questions asked are: Which concepts do I teach from my discipline in this session? How do I teach these to ensure effective comprehension? Research was conducted…

Metalinguistic knowledge is regarded as an important factor in the development of writing. However, little attention has been paid to the metalinguistic knowledge of L2 writers in non-anglophone contexts. This study investigates L1-Turkish-speaking, first-year university students' metalinguistic knowledge of the lexical phrases they use in their…

Since its inception, pragmatic competence has been studied vastly; the majority of these studies, however, have examined pragmatic production, and pragmatic comprehension is chiefly under-researched. This lack of adequate research also stands true for the underlying pragmatic comprehension processes and strategies. Therefore, the present…

Timed grammaticality judgment tests (TGJT) and oral elicited imitation tests (OEIT) are considered reliable and valid measures of implicit linguistic knowledge, but studies consistently observe better performances on the TGJT than the OEIT due to the different types of processing they require: comprehension for the TGJT and production for the…

In a visual world paradigm study, we manipulated gender congruence between a subject pronoun and two antecedents to investigate whether second language (L2) learners with a null subject first language (L1) acquire and process overt subject pronouns in a nonnull subject L2 in a nativelike way. We also investigated whether L2 speakers revise an…

The growing number of multilingual speakers poses an interesting question as to the way in which three or more languages are represented in the memory of a language user. The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart in "J Mem Lang" 33: 149-174, 1994) or the Sense Model (Finkbeiner et al. in "J Mem Lang" 51(1), 1-22, 2004)…

This study examined the sensitivity of Chinese-English bilinguals to derivational word structure in English. In the first experiment, English monolinguals showed masked priming effects for prime-target pairs related both transparently (e.g., "hunter-HUNT") and opaquely (e.g., "corner-CORN") but not for those related purely in…

The article focuses on defining how background knowledge impacts on second-language acquisition by giving a brief overview of schema theory, the interaction of the basic modes of information processing. A challenge of dealing with culturally specific texts in second language acquisition is also touched upon. Different research-supported views on…

This study investigated the pragmatic comprehension and production of the speech act of refusals in English by a group of Spanish-English bilinguals (SEB) in comparison with native English speakers (NES), taking into account variables such as length of residency in the L2 environment, type of refusals and level of politeness. Other variables…

These concluding reflections seek to put the articles of this special issue in a broader context. The article begins by looking at the ideas of cognitive linguistics and linguistic relativity that are invoked. It then considers the questions that arise about the relationship between two or more languages in the same mind, the differences between…

The development of effective second and foreign (L2) language learning materials needs to be grounded in two types of theories: (a) a theory of language and language use and (b) a theory of language learning. Both are equally important, insofar as an effective learning environment requires an understanding of the knowledge, skills, and abilities…

Speakers of a second language (L2), regardless of profciency level, communicate for specifc purposes. For example, an L2 speaker of English may wish to build rapport with a co-worker by chatting about the weather. The speaker will draw on various resources to accomplish her communicative purposes. For instance, the speaker may say "falling…

The use of collocation has always been considered as a good yardstick by which the idiomaticity of second language (L2) use is reliably judged. Hence, this study aims at investigating the relationship between optimizing the lexical approach and improving the collocational accuracy and the ability to operate on the idiom principle in the writing of…

We provided texts generated by speech-to text-recognition (STR) technology for non-native English speaking students during lectures in English in order to test whether STR-texts were useful for enhancing students' comprehension of lectures. To this end, we carried out an experiment in which 60 participants were randomly assigned to a control group…