Tests of nonword repetition (NWR) have often been used to examine children's phonological knowledge and word learning abilities. However, theories of NWR primarily explain performance either in terms of phonological working memory or long-term knowledge, with little consideration of how these processes interact. One theoretical account that…

People differ in the size of their social network, and thus in the properties of the linguistic input they receive. This article examines whether differences in social network size influence individuals' linguistic skills in their native language, focusing on global comprehension of evaluative language. Study 1 exploits the natural variation in…

An important aspect of Family Language Policy in bilingual families is parental language choice. Little is known about the continuity in parental language choice and the factors affecting it. This longitudinal study explores maternal language choice over time. Thirty-one bilingual mothers provided reports of what language(s) they spoke with their…

The present study investigates the prosody/pragmatics interface in TBLT by extending the traditional morphological focus-on-form to a focus on intonational forms, with Spanish declaratives and imperatives. Twenty-eight intermediate L2 Spanish learners were assigned to one of two conditions that differed in the type of focus-on-form present during…

The two main components of Processing Instruction (PI) are Explicit Information (EI) and Structured Input (SI). Most researchers have concluded that the SI is more responsible for learner gains than the EI (Benati, 2004a, 2004b; VanPatten & Oikennon, 1996; Wong, 2004). However, some researchers have found that EI does significantly impact…

In this study, two alternative theoretical models were compared, in order to analyze which of them best explains primary school children's text comprehension skills. The first one was based on the distinction between two types of answers requested by the comprehension test: local or global. The second model involved texts' input modality: written…

This study used a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design at one-week intervals to determine the extent to which written, audio, and audiovisual L2 input contributed to incidental vocabulary learning. Seventy-six university students learning EFL in China were randomly assigned to four groups. Each group was presented with the input from the same…

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb…

Video viewing can be a valuable resource to expose students to large quantities of input so they can improve their vocabulary and content comprehension. Most studies so far have used short clips and have not explored in much detail the effects of individual differences (IDs) such as aptitude, listening skills and vocabulary size. This paper aims…

Television is considered an important source of comprehensible input for second language learners of English and there is some evidence that L2 words can be learned incidentally by watching television. Few studies have looked at the role of TV viewing for learning formulaic sequences, despite the ubiquity of formulaic sequences in spoken English,…

This paper, through the use of Joycean narrative inquiry, offers a qualitative narrative analysis of two types of language input the South Korean community was exposed to when the doors opened to a large number of western teachers in 1993 (i.e., General American and Received Pronunciation). Specifically, this paper provides examples of lexical…

This study explores the impact of using TED Talks on improving oral presentation skills of Business English students and vocabulary uptake/retention. It also assesses the impact of improving such hard cognitive skills on increasing Business majors' speaking anxiety level. Sequential explanatory mixed method was used, which includes both…

With the steady increase in the English Language Learner (ELL) population in the U.S., this case study was aimed at capturing elementary teachers' perceptions of how well their teacher preparation program was prepared to teach ELLs. This work utilized the case study design, and included five North American elementary teachers as the subjects of…

The current study explored the home and school factors that are important for Singaporean pre-schoolers' (N = 1440) early English development from K1 to P1. Language input quantity and quality factors at home (e.g., number of English books,) and at school (e.g., instructional support in class) were used to predict children's English vocabulary and…

Social deficits have been implicated in the language delays and deficits of children with autism (ASD); thus, the extent to which these children use language input in social contexts similarly to typically developing (TD) children is unknown. The current study investigated how caregiver input influenced the development of "wh"-question…