Volume 50, Issue 3

This article examines how learners of English as a foreign language process reduced relative clauses (RRCs) from the perspective of usage-based language learning, which posits that language knowledge forms a hierarchy from item-based knowledge consisting only of entrenched frequent exemplars to more advanced schematized knowledge. Twenty-eight Japanese undergraduates provided phrase-by-phrase reading times for frequent and infrequent RRC exemplars. Immediately after the experiment, the participants also made stimulated-recall comments on their thought processes employed during sentence processing. Both the reading-time data and the stimulated-recall data show that the learners who comprehended infrequent exemplars as well as frequent exemplars had computed syntactic relationships at the key regions of the sentences in real time, and that those who could not comprehend infrequent exemplars had not. These results suggest that the former type of learners successfully activated the RRC schema while the latter learners failed to do so.

The current study presents the results of an experiment investigating the effects of processing instruction (PI) and dictogloss (DG) on the acquisition of the English passive voice. Sixty speakers of Turkish studying English at university level were assigned to three groups: one receiving PI, the other receiving DG and the third serving as a control group. Assessment measurements consisted of an interpretation task, a sentence-level production task and a reconstruction task in a pretest-posttest design. The results indicated that PI offered an advantage over DG in terms of developing correct interpretation of passive structures in English. In addition, PI was found to be as good as DG in terms of developing sentence-level production and simple text reconstruction.

This study examines the effect of two vocabulary instruction treatments on word retention by 56 EFL learners. In particular, it focuses on the differential effects of a message-oriented treatment (reading text and answering comprehension questions) and a vocabulary-oriented treatment (reading text and performing two vocabulary tasks) on learners' recall and recognition of the meaning of 14 target words. Learners in the two groups were required to first read a text, in which they encountered the 14 target words for the first time, before carrying out their respective task. Both groups were required to process and actually use the target words when carrying out their task. Finally, both groups were allotted the same amount of time to complete their task. The results of immediate and delayed vocabulary post-tests indicate that the vocabulary-oriented treatment yielded greater vocabulary learning gains than the message-oriented treatment.