Volume 49, Issue 4

This cross-sectional study examined the effect of general proficiency and study-abroad experience in production of speech acts among learners of L2 English. Participants were 25 native speakers of English and 64 Japanese college students of English divided into three groups. Group 1 (n = 22) had lower proficiency and no study-abroad experience. Group 2 (n = 20) and Group 3 (n = 22) had higher proficiency than Group 1 but differed in their study-abroad experience. Group 2 had no study-abroad experience, but Group 3 had a minimum of one-year study-abroad experience in an English-speaking country. They completed a pragmatic speaking test (PST) measuring their ability to produce two speech acts: requests and opinions. Speech acts were examined for appropriateness, grammaticality, planning time, and speech rate. Results revealed a significant effect of proficiency on appropriateness, grammaticality and speech rate, but study-abroad experience had no effect on these variables. There was no significant group difference on planning time.

According to information-processing accounts of skill acquisition, learner performance becomes more automatic over time and with practice, requiring less attention, time, and cognitive effort (DeKeyser, Skill acquisition theory, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007a). This study set out to provide converging evidence for the development of automatization of verbal morphology in comprehension and production. Eighty-five university-level L2 learners of Italian were assigned to one of three proficiency levels and completed a picture identification task and a picture description task. Reaction times (RT), error rates, and coefficients of variation (CV) were analyzed. Results overall revealed that there was evidence of increasing automatization of verbal morphology with increasing proficiency. However, differences were found between comprehension and production, and depending on the measure used. Findings are discussed in the context of SLA automaticity and implications for classroom learning. The study contributes to the continuing efforts to define and measure automaticity, and lends support to the suggestion that converging evidence is needed for automaticity and automatization to be useful constructs in SLA.

This paper investigates the extent to which productive use of formulaic sequences by intermediate students of two typologically different languages, i.e., English and Spanish, is associated with their oral proficiency in these languages. Previous research (e.g., Boers et al., Language Teaching Research 10: 245–261, 2006) has shown that appropriate use of formulaic sequences helps learners of English come across as fluent and idiomatic speakers. The evidence from the present study, which was conducted with the participation of Dutch-speaking students of English and Spanish, confirms that finding, as oral proficiency assessments based on re-tell tasks correlated positively with the number of formulaic sequences the students used in these tasks. The correlations were strongest in the English language samples, however. It seems that the greater incidence of morphological-inflectional errors in our participants' spoken Spanish dampens the contribution that using formulaic sequences tends to make to their oral proficiency (as perceived by our assessors). The findings are discussed with reference to typological differences between L1 and L2.