Research shows that bilingual learners move naturally between their languages to learn; however, this practice is not welcomed in many second/foreign language classrooms given the belief that first language (L1) use negatively affects second language (L2) development, despite much empirical evidence to the contrary. Moreover, translanguaging…

Teachers often repeat language learning tasks and materials with students year after year. Although some tasks do not render satisfactory outcomes, students' performances can serve as valuable historical autoethnographic data that teachers can reflect on to improve their teaching materials and language learning tasks. In this article, using…

Second language (L2) writing researchers have enthusiastically adopted task complexity frameworks in their examination of the effects of complex task features on L2 written performance. However, such research often overlooks the effect(s) of such features on general L2 development as well as L2 writing development. Drawing from Manch?n and…

Collaborative writing (CW) involves two or more students writing a single text together. Previous studies mainly focused on students' cognitive engagement in CW and investigated their attention to various language-related problems during task interaction. However, little CW research to date has considered that engagement in language-related…

Researchers, parents, and policymakers from previous generations have recently expressed concern about the inevitable exposure of youngsters to digital media and its potentially detrimental effects on their development. Private speech is the overt audible self-talk people produce when engaged with challenging problem-solving tasks and is believed…

This study investigates feature acquisition and feature reassembly associated with Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD). The article compares the acquisition of CLLD in second language (L2) Italian to L2 Romanian to examine effects of first language (L1) transfer, construction frequency and the type of interface involved (external vs. internal…

This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in…

Mastering the phonological aspects of a second language (L2) poses significant challenges for adult learners, often affecting their intelligibility in acquiring that language (Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998). McAllister (1997) has highlighted L2 learners' struggles in perceiving and producing novel segmental features, which is corroborated by…

The relationship between working memory (WM) and second-language (L2) reading has been extensively examined, with mixed results. Our meta-analysis models the potential impact of under-researched variables considered to moderate this relationship. Results from 74 studies (228 correlations) showed a significant, small relationship between WM and L2…

Since Gisela Granena's influential work, LLAMA D v2, a sound recognition subtest of LLAMA aptitude tests, has been used as a measure of implicit learning aptitude in second language acquisition research. The validity of this test, however, is little known and the results of studies with this instrument have been somewhat inconsistent. In this…

We tested whether second language (L2) learners rely more on explicit memory during structural priming at lower than at higher proficiency levels (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2017). We compared within-L2 priming with lexical overlap in 100 low and 100 high proficiency French L2 speakers under low versus high working memory load conditions induced…

In this paper, we report a longitudinal study of the effects of procedural task repetition on learners' task performance (i.e., syntactic complexity in relation to lexical complexity). We investigated how task repetition results in differences at the group and individual level across each task interval (T = 7). Intermediate-level Saudi learners of…

As language programs are endangered in K-16 contexts due to low enrollments, and for budgetary reasons, it is more important than ever to find enduring ways to help promote the study of languages and to make studying languages enjoyable for everyone. For sustainable language education, we need to focus on and promote the true purpose of…

The acquisition of Italian stop consonants by Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners has hardly been investigated. This study was designed to fill this gap. To investigate Chinese learners' acquisition patterns of Italian voiced and voiceless stops, a perception experiment and a production experiment were conducted. Twenty Mandarin Chinese-speaking…

In this dissertation, I will present social-cognitive frameworks that support the use of mental imagery for possible self enhancement; and articulate and evaluate a pedagogical intervention designed for the foreign language class. This intervention will allow students to explore and develop prominent and vivid mental representations (self-schemas)…