Volume 15, Issue 3

Recent work has called for increased investigation into methods used to explore second language (L2) speech perception (Flege 2021). The present study attends to this call, examining a common practice for developing listening prompts in the context of at-home administrations. Vowel perception studies have historically used fixed consonantal frames to determine how well participants can discriminate between target L2 vowels, and the present study compares the effects of employing a fixed consonant-vowel-consonant frame (h-vowel-d) with open (phonologically diverse) consonantal environments using real and nonce words. Thirty-eight Mandarin ( n  = 31) and English ( n  = 8) first language speakers participated in a listening experiment and a post-experiment question. Data were framed within Best and Tyler’s (2007) Perceptual Assimilation Model-L2. Internal consistency and proportion correct were calculated and a generalised linear mixed model design was used to investigate how well performance with h-vowel-d prompts predicts performance with the more diverse prompt types. Results suggest an inflation of scores for the fixed frame prompt and support the use of diverse words for listening prompt designs. Findings have implications for vowel perception researchers as well as computer (and mobile) assisted language learning developers wishing to inform their designs with relevant empirical evidence.

The “writing-to-learn” dimension of the second language (L2) writing has generated theoretical and empirical intrigue in the past decade. Task repetition is one variable of interest; however, little attention has been given to its role in individuals’ writing processes. This study explores the influence of task repetition on L2 Chinese learners’ attention to form by analyzing their writing processes. Four advanced learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL) were asked to complete one writing task twice in 10 days under think-aloud conditions. Language-related episodes (LREs), the representation of writers’ attention to form, in participant-produced think-aloud protocols were analyzed along three dimensions: language-related problems, problem-solving strategies, and depth of processing. Results indicated that task repetition in individual writing contributed to learners’ Chinese acquisition, as learners 1) attended closely to the typological characteristics and new/complex forms of Chinese; 2) strove for precise language expression; and 3) were granted time to access external resources and expand their linguistic repertoire. Implications related to task repetition in L2 writing, L2 Chinese instruction, and associated research are discussed.

Ongoing debates in the field of sociolinguistics are centred around the implications of the commodification of the languages and cultures of ethnic minorities. Previous research has adopted synchronic approaches to describing how ideologies of tourist consumption shape language choices in the linguistic landscape. However, such snapshot analyses have proved to be inadequate in revealing changes in the linguistic landscape over time, especially the nuanced perceptions of minority communities who are subjects to ethnic tourism. This paper examines the use of Dongba script in the linguistic landscape of the Naxi minority in Lijiang under the conditions of commodification in tourism. A diachronic comparison of photographic data collected in 2016 and 2021 revealed the increasing visibility and prominence of Dongba script on public signs; interviews with ordinary inhabitants, tourism industry practitioners and Dongba priests within the Naxi community further demonstrated the evolving attitudes towards linguistic commodification, from hesitation and objection to integration and creative accommodation. The study provides new insights into how a diachronic perspective can help reveal the dynamic between packaging languages as commodities and retaining signs of identity, religion and culture.

Drawing on methodological insights from psycholinguistic research protocols, the present study employed a structural equation modelling approach to examine whether explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge of English language learners would be influenced by their onset age of language learning and hours of exposure to language instruction; and if so, in what way? The present study further examined how the hypothesized causal effects might be mediated by explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge. The results showed that while early onset appeared to exert a facilitative effect on the participants’ implicit grammatical attainment, the role of exposure to instructed input was more relevant to their explicit grammatical attainment. Importantly, early onset facilitated the participants’ implicit grammatical attainment more than their explicit grammatical attainment, most likely because early learners’ analytical learning mechanism was still immature. Notably, while superior implicit grammatical attainment was conducive to the participants’ explicit grammatical attainment, their better explicit grammatical attainment did not necessarily facilitate their implicit attainment. The insights of this study shed light on the necessity of implementing early foreign language education when the curriculum goal concerns developing learners’ intuition regarding the FL, and provides empirical evidence of the need to adjust current instructional hours and foci in school.

To date, a growing body of second language (L2) research has investigated linguistic alignment as a pedagogical intervention, focusing on L2 learners’ alignment behaviors in task-based interactions (e.g., Jung, YeonJoo, YouJin Kim & John Murphy. 2017. The role of task repetition in learning word-stress patterns through auditory priming tasks.  Studies in Second Language Acquisition  39(2). 319–346; Kim, YouJin, YeonJoo Jung & Stephen Skalicky. 2019. Linguistic alignment, learner characteristics, and the production of stranded prepositions in relative clauses: Comparing FTF and SCMC contexts.  Studies in Second Language Acquisition  41(5). 937–969). Linguistic alignment refers to a tendency where one speaker’s utterances align with particular language features of those of the other speaker in dialogue. The current study investigated how L2 speakers’ alignment behaviors differ in natural dialogues between L2-L1 and L2-L2 dyads in terms of language style (i.e., stylistic alignment) and the role of non-linguistic factors in the occurrence of stylistic alignment. The study analyzed a corpus of 360 texts using a computational tool. Results showed that stylistic alignment occurred to a greater extent in the L2-L2 dyad than in the L2-L1 dyad with respect to the word range, word frequency, word imageability, and proportion of bigrams proportion produced by the interlocutors. Furthermore, findings demonstrated the degree of stylistic alignment on each of the four selected lexical features was affected by numerous factors including age, group membership, nonnative speaker status, familiarity between interlocutors, and linguistic distance between L1 and L2. The effect of each factor on stylistic alignment in conversation is discussed in detail.

Despite the ubiquity of boredom and its aversive effects in educational contexts, it has received scant attention from second/foreign language (L2) researchers until very recently. This article reports on one of the first empirical attempts to explore boredom in L2 learning and its sources in Chinese tertiary-level EFL contexts through eliciting responses of 1,502 university students to open-ended questions and conducting 16 individual semi-structured interviews. The qualitative data analysis revealed that participants perceived wide-ranging learner-internal and learner-external factors as sources of their foreign language learning boredom: (1) task characteristics, (2) teaching and learning activities, (3) student factors, (4) course content, (5) classroom factors, (6) teacher factors, and (7) feeling unoccupied in the class. Moreover, open-ended responses showed greater prominence of the first three categories of factors than others, lending support to the central role of control-value appraisals in inducing boredom, and suggesting situation-sensitive nature of boredom. Additionally, the study revealed that multiple factors, both learner-internal and learner-external, can interact and jointly shape control-value appraisals, which suggests the congruence between the person-in-context perspective on SLA and the control-value theory, and the potential to integrate the two approaches to extend L2 emotion research.

It is one of the concerns of EAP to bridge the disparity of discursive practice between novice and expert writers, but the comparison is largely made across a broad knowledge field and little is known about the likely divergence within a disciplinary divide. In this study, we explore the epistemic positioning in research writing by PhD students and expert writers across applied and pure science disciplines. By focusing on hedges and boosters as its main devices, we examine their forms and functions in the academic texts. Results show that PhD students in applied disciplines use significantly fewer epistemic devices than experts but no significant difference was found in pure sciences. Apart from the differences in linguistic choices, student writers show a preference for authorial positioning at the outset of academic texts while professionals tend to comment on research findings and establish a persuasive interpretation of their value. Additionally, novice writers are inclined to hedge on numerical information ( about ) but expert writers hedge on claims ( likely ). We discuss the results from the perspectives of disciplinary epistemology and writer identity. Pedagogical implications are raised on the teaching of epistemic positioning and the enculturation of disciplinary stance in academic writing classrooms.

In keeping with discipline-specific genre expectations for writing in scientific and technological fields, students enrolled in English writing classes for future engineers are often required to produce collaborative reports on team projects. For freshman engineering students, such collaborative report writing, which constitutes a cornerstone in their academic literacy, is an entirely new genre. Drawing on Engeström’s (Engeström, Yrjö. 1987. Learning by expanding: An activity theoretical approach to developmental research . Orienta-Konsultit Oy) activity system and Storch’s (Storch, Neomy. 2002. Patterns of interaction in ESL pair work. Language and Learning 52(1). 119–158) interaction model, this paper explores two engineering freshmen’s experiences of working collaboratively in separate groups in the same writing class. Our focal students were both native-English-speaking women at a U.S. midwestern university. Over the course of one semester, they provided their class notes and project report drafts, and they and the course teaching assistant participated in interviews. Our findings demonstrate that while both students had similar levels of commitment to the collaborative project, their writing experiences differed depending on their respective group members and their own attitudes and experiences. Our case study has implications for engineering freshman writing education as we illustrate how the ESP class we examined can help students prepare for academic and professional communication. We also discuss ways to help apprentice future engineers overcome discipline-specific communication difficulties as they enter a new discourse community.

Returnee scholars are regarded as key agents to advance internationalisation in many non-Anglophone countries where internationalisation through the medium of English has raised concerns about the preservation of national language, culture, and identity. This study investigated how eight Chinese returnee scholars used their linguistic repertoires in their professional practice and daily lives and how their language practices interacted with multiple identities. Gathering data from a questionnaire, semi-structured interview, and regular class observations, this study reveals that in research, all participants predominantly used English and many expressed concerns about their Chinese academic writing skills. In teaching and daily lives, most participants embraced bilingualism and were open to translingual practices. The participants’ language practices appeared to be linked to their self-conception as competent English users and English-mediated ideal professional identities. However, their bilingual practices did not correspond to a bicultural identity, indicating a disconnect between language use and cultural belonging. Drawing on the findings, suggestions are offered for institution- and state-level authorities to better facilitate the integration of returnee scholars into their home academic communities and to promote academic multilingualism.

Preparation for university entrance tests now forms a significant part of international English language pedagogy, with considerable numbers of learners aiming to study abroad requiring supportive instruction. This important learning stage underpins subsequent experiences and requires further investigation, if later challenges faced by international university students are to be understood. This paper’s Japan-based research included observing an entire intensive IELTS preparation course ( N  = 12 students) over a five-week period. Additionally, two instructors and seven learners were interviewed, and forty homework essays collected. Pedagogical approaches, participant perspectives and the test preparation process itself are described in depth. Thematic analysis of qualitative data indicated three key findings. First, a think-plan-write essay model may improve students’ performance under timed test conditions, if supported by classroom exercises on lexis, grammar and structure. Second, introducing unfamiliar academic writing structures using model answers and increasing test knowledge (particularly using simplified rubrics) helped clarify expectations of western-style writing. Third, test preparation should be broader than increasing score gains alone; introducing academic writing is a justified and viable objective of preparation courses.

The present study investigated the direct and indirect contributions of morphological awareness to vocabulary knowledge among a group of Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) students in a university in China. Using multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling analysis, the study found that morphological awareness made significant contributions to vocabulary knowledge after lexical inferencing was controlled for. To be more specific, the prediction of morphological awareness on vocabulary depth was stronger than its prediction on vocabulary breadth. The direct effects of morphological awareness were stronger than its indirect effects on vocabulary. More importantly, the study revealed that the relationships between morphological awareness (morpheme recognition and morpheme discrimination) and vocabulary knowledge were mediated by discourse clues rather than grammar clues.

The increasing view of Spanish as a pluricentric language has raised awareness of its linguistic diversity also in the grammatical domain. The concept of Pan-Hispanism—the recognition that varieties different from Castilian Spanish can be acceptable as Standard Spanish—has been publicly implemented by the prescriptivist institutions. The goal of this article is to analyze the influence of Pan-Hispanism and awareness of syntactic variation in teachers of Spanish as a second language. To do so, we surveyed 264 native and non-native teachers of Spanish across the world through an online questionnaire where they had to (a) implicitly judge sequences which reflected grammatical phenomena of different diatopic varieties of Spanish, and (b) explicitly indicate which variety they used in their classes. The results show that, despite the advances and institutional efforts towards pluricentrism, awareness of Pan-Hispanism in grammar is still very low among teachers of Spanish, since most tend to reject grammatical uses that are alien to their own variety. The prevalence of the prestige of Castilian Spanish is linked to a still dominant Eurocentrism in the teaching of Spanish as a second language, thus showing the need for adopting a more tolerant and inclusive view of Spanish linguistic diversity.

Understanding the intricate relationships among strategic competence, tasks and performance is an issue of perennial interest in the assessment of foreign/second languages especially in integrated speaking assessment, a field that is under-researched. Against this background, we investigated such complex relationships in the context of integrated speaking assessment of English as foreign language (EFL) learners, hoping to provide additional empirical evidence to address the problem. In the investigation, strategic competence was defined as metacognitive strategy use and was measured via an inventory administered on 120 Chinese university EFL students; task characteristics were conceptualised as task complexity and were measured on a self-rating scale by the students and five EFL teachers; and the students’ speaking performance was indicated by their scores on four integrated speaking assessment tasks. Data analysis through a hierarchy linear modelling approach led to two primary findings: Monitoring, one form of strategic competence, moderated the effect of task complexity on performance; strategic competence had no substantial effects on performance which had an inverse relationship with task complexity. These findings will add validity evidence for the foreign language speaking assessment literature and provide implications for speaking instruction and test development.

This study examined the extent to which working memory (WM) capacity and distance-based complexity influenced how second language (L2) learners used morphosyntactic information incrementally during online processing of L2 English long-distance subject-verb number agreement dependencies. The moving-window self-paced reading experiment involved 40 agreement-lacking first language (L1) Thai learners of English and 40 native English speakers. Distance-based complexity was manipulated based on whether the agreement controller and the agreeing verb were intervened by a short-distance subject-extracted relative clause or a long-distance object-extracted relative clause in line with the Dependency Locality Theory. The findings indicated that both native speakers and L2 learners experienced less processing difficulty in short-distance conditions, showing heightened sensitivity to agreement violations. Their sensitivity was, however, modulated as a function of distance-based complexity and WM capacity. The L2 learners’ lack of sensitivity in the long-distance conditions was associated with their limited pool of cognitive resources. Consistent with the L1–L2 structural competition account, these findings suggest in relation to morphology learning in SLA that L2 learners may labor under parallel activation during crosslinguistic competition, whereby cognitive resources are insufficient to resolve long-distance agreement dependencies, thus resulting in reduced sensitivity to L2 morphosyntactic violations.

This study adopted a synthetic approach to review empirical studies on oral corrective feedback (OCF) for lexical errors. It examined OCF types, lexical target types, interlocutors’ attention to lexical errors, and OCF effectiveness in promoting vocabulary development. After the application of inclusion and exclusion criteria on studies retrieved from a search of six databases, 31 primary studies were available for coding and analysis. Findings revealed that interlocutors showed a greater preference for recast than prompt and explicit correction. However, recast resulted in the lowest rate of lexical repairs, whereas prompt was found the most effective. Lexical errors received OCF at a higher rate than grammatical errors and phonological errors, indicating that interlocutors paid greater attention to vocabulary problems. OCF was most often provided for the inappropriate choice of lexical items, or inaccurate use of word derivation, involving a wide range of word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs). Only a few studies looked into OCF targeting a single lexical feature. Findings suggest it may be more effective for teachers to employ prompts to elicit repairs of lexical errors from learners. There is a need for future researchers to conduct empirical OCF studies on a single lexical target.