The mastery of speaking skills in English has become a major requisite in engineering industry. Engineers are expected to possess speaking skills for executing their routine activities and career prospects. The article focuses on the experimental study conducted to improve English spoken proficiency of Indian engineering students using task-based…

This paper sketches a comprehensive framework for modeling and interpreting language contact phenomena, with speakers' bilingual strategies in specific scenarios of language contact as its point of departure. Bilingual strategies are conditioned by social factors, processing constraints of speakers' bilingual competence, and perceived…

This article examined the integration of semantic and morphosyntactic information by Korean learners of English as a second language (L2). In Experiment 1, L2 learners listened to English active or passive sentences that were either plausible or implausible and translated them into Korean. A significant number of Korean translations maintained the…

This article reports a study that sought to determine whether non-native sentence comprehension can show sensitivity to two different types of Spanish case marking. Sensitivity to case violations was generally more robust with indirect objects in ditransitive constructions than with differential object marking of animate direct objects, even among…

Language testing and second language acquisition research are both concerned with proficiency in the second language; given this shared interest, the rapprochement between these two domains may prove revealing and productive not only in terms of teaching practices, but also in taking a wide view of language, ranging across cognition, society and…

This study reports on the results of classroom research investigating the effects of corpus use in the process of revising compositions in English as a foreign language. Our primary aim was to investigate the relationship between the information extracted from corpus data and how that information actually helped in revising different types of…

In this study we examined how the introduction of a parallel finger-tapping task influences second language (L2) speech encoding mechanisms and monitoring processes, and how the level of proficiency impacts the efficiency and accuracy of L2 performance under single and dual task conditions. The results indicate that imposing dual task demands had…

Although there is good evidence for implicit learning of associations between forms, little work has investigated implicit learning of form-meaning connections, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Two experiments were carried out using a novel reaction time methodology to investigate implicit learning of grammatical form-meaning…

This article discusses perceptions of and performance in listening by a group of heritage and non-heritage learners of Portuguese. Our data include a survey containing background information and perceptions about listening, two listening tasks and a post-task self-report on how learners arrived at their answers. Quantitative and qualitative…

A Virtual Resource Center (VRC) has been brought into use since 2008 as an integral part of a task-based language teaching and learning program for Business English courses at Nantes University, France. The objective of the center is to enable students to work autonomously and individually on their language problems so as to improve their language…

Many studies on bilingual language processing have shown that lexical access is not selective with respect to language. These studies typically used nouns as word stimuli. The aim of the present study was to extend the previous findings on noun processing to verb processing. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performed a lexical…

Until now, research on bilingual auditory word recognition has been scarce, and although most studies agree that lexical access is language-nonselective, there is less consensus with respect to the influence of potentially constraining factors. The present study investigated the influence of three possible constraints. We tested whether language…

Babcok et al. (2012) claim that Paradis (1994, 2004, 2009) argues that the reliance of late L2 learners on L1 neurocognitive mechanisms increases over time across both lexical and grammatical functions, namely for lexical items as well as rule-governed grammatical procedures, when in fact one can find repeated statements to the contrary in the…

The current study employed a neuro-imaging technique, Event-Related Potentials (ERP), to investigate real-time processing of sentences containing filler-gap dependencies by late-learning speakers of English as a second language (L2) with a Chinese native language background. An individual differences approach was also taken to examine the role of…

In this article, we examine whether the effectiveness of processing instruction (PI) is limited to forms targeted in the instructional treatment (primary effects) or whether it also extends to other forms (transfer-of-training effects). L2 Spanish learners (N = 123) received either PI or traditional instruction (TI) targeting third-person…