Most second language (L2) learners are aware of the importance of vocabulary, and this awareness usually directs their attention to learning new words. By contrast, learners do not often recognise unfamiliar idioms if all the compositional parts look familiar to them such as "turn the corner" or "carry the day." College-level…

This study investigated whether video-based materials can facilitate second language learners' text comprehension at the levels of macrostructure and microstructure. Three classes inclusive of 98 Chinese-speaking university students joined this study. The three classes were randomly assigned to three treatment groups: on-screen text (T Group),…

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 article reports on the findings of an empirical study that relates translation studies and research on language acquisition/attrition by looking at the interpretation of overt pronominal subjects, previously found to be problematic in both domains. The focus is on the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Italian by two…

This study focuses on beginning second language learners' attention to irregular verb morphology, an area of grammar that many adults find difficult to acquire (e.g., DeKeyser, 2005; Larsen-Freeman, 2010). We measured beginning learners' eye movements during sentence processing to investigate whether or not they actually attend to…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

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…

With the ever increasing number of studies on formulaic language, we are beginning to learn more about the processing of formulaic language (e.g. Ellis et al. 2008; Siyanova et al. 2011), its use in speech (e.g. Aijmer 1996; Wood 2012) and writing (e.g. Hyland 2008a, 2008b) and its application in natural language processing (e.g. Tschichold 2000).…

The present study aims to investigate how trilinguals process their two non-dominant languages and how those languages influence one another, as well as the relative importance of the dominant language on their processing. With this in mind, 24 French (L1)- English (L2)- and Spanish (L3)-unbalanced trilinguals, deemed equivalent in their L2 and L3…

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…

Infants have remarkable abilities to learn several languages. However, phonological acquisition in bilingual infants appears to vary depending on the phonetic similarities or differences of their two native languages. Many studies suggest that learning contrasts with different realizations in the two languages (e.g., the /p/, /t/, /k/ stops have…

The current study examined how two groups of native speakers--monolingual Canadians and multilingual Singaporeans--differentially perceive foreign accentedness in spontaneous second language (L2) speech. The Singaporean raters, who had exposure to various models of English and also spoke multiple L2s on a daily basis, demonstrated more lenient…

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…