The Review (Dearing & King, 2007) will doubtless be judged less on its detailed content and standpoint and more on the impact it has on politicians' and ministers' priorities for teaching languages. For the Review is concerned with language "teaching" much more than with "learning". This is evident, for example, in the discussion of the consensus…

This paper reports on the effects of classroom exercises that encourage noticing and conscious attention to form, which were part of a university EFL oral presentation course in Japan. The students on the course were given a set of exercises that encouraged them to notice and to reflect on L2 forms of their own choosing throughout one academic…

Second language tasks are often described as classroom activities that promote greater student participation, yet many studies only discuss participation in aggregates, such as total turns at talk or total words per turn. The aim here is to demonstrate that a qualitative inquiry into tasks can equally reveal important participatory and…

Current attention in L2 acquisition research focuses on the integration of message-focused and form-focused instruction. One way to accomplish this is through the incidental focus on form during meaning-focused activities. Some studies have investigated incidental focus on form in different contexts and shown that it exists in L2 classes and…

Research on input processing in the acquisition of a non-primary language has rested largely on the assumption that learners use a meaning-based approach as the "default" when processing input (VanPatten, 1996). The study reported here poses a challenge to this assumption: findings show that participants who were absolute beginners used a…

Over the past decades, there have been a number of studies investigating the vocabulary strategies used by learners of Indo-European languages, especially English. However, studies of the strategies used by learners of non-Indo-European languages are rare. This classroom-based case study investigates the vocabulary learning strategies used by nine…

This article considers the current debate in Australia into the learning of literacy and foreign languages. It examines not only the literacy levels attained by Australian students in their national language (English) in comparison to these in other countries, as well as between Australian states, but also theories involved in school learning and…

This study investigates whether or not abstract-level linguistic features, not successfully acquired abroad, will be acquired once the advanced language learner returns from a study abroad program and is exposed to linguistic instruction. The goal of the study was to measure the development of the Spanish subjunctive in adverbial clauses collected…

This study examined the methodological training of preservice secondary foreign language teachers through the lens of the college methodology course syllabus from 32 participating postsecondary institutions, survey data from the related methods instructors, and questionnaires from 10 of the instructors. The findings indicate that preservice…

The popularization of portable media players such as the "iPod," and the delivery of audio and video content through content management software such as "iTunes" mean that there is a wealth of language learning resources freely available to users who may download them and use them anywhere at any time. These resources vary greatly in quality and…

This paper presents an empirical study of how different "wh"-words behave in English speakers' L2 Chinese "wh"-questions. Our results indicate that L2 Chinese "wh"-questions are specified by the Chinese "wh" -particle ne and that there is neither variability nor L1 transfer in this aspect of L2 grammars as no "wh"-movement is found in English…

This study investigated the relationship between phonological memory and second language (L2) fluency gains in native English-speaking adults learning Spanish in two learning contexts: at their home university or abroad in an immersion context. Phonological memory (operationalized as serial nonword recognition) and Spanish oral fluency…

Firth and Wagner (1997) questioned the dichotomies nonnative versus native speaker, learner versus user, and interlanguage versus target language, which reflect a bias toward innateness, cognition, and form in language acquisition. Research on lingua franca English (LFE) not only affirms this questioning, but reveals what multilingual communities…

This article explores recent changes in the landscape of second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language pedagogical (FLP) research. Firth and Wagner's (1997) proposal for the reconceptualization of SLA has been supported by SLA and FLP researchers who share the sentiment concerning the need for increased attention to social and contextual…

This article investigates the L2 acquisition of clausal syntax in postpuberty learners of German and Swedish regarding V2, VP headedness, and verb particle constructions. The learner data are tested against L2 theories according to which lower structural projections (VP) are acquired before higher functional projections (IP, CP), VP syntax is…