Volume 56, Issue 2 -

The study explores whether Russian immigrants in Israel with no knowledge of Hebrew (L2) can experience attrition of Russian (L1). Immigrants with no knowledge of Hebrew (−Hebrew), bilingual immigrants who know Russian and Hebrew (+Hebrew), and monolingual controls were compared on lexical retrieval, correctness judgment of collocations, future tense formation, confidence in providing answers to two tasks and the time it took to complete them. Both immigrant groups showed signs of L1 attrition of collocations and of future tense formation, and the –Hebrew group performed significantly worse than +Hebrew group on future tense formation. The three groups did not differ in time-on-task. The –Hebrew group was less confident than the other groups in one task. Low and significant correlations were found between some sociolinguistic factors and test results. We conclude that first language attrition can occur both when immigrants acquire a second language and when they remain monolingual.

The present study investigates whether the tense-aspect development of Cantonese-English bilingual children conforms to the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai 1994. Discourse motivations for some cognitive acquisition principles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16(2). 133–156.), which has been shown to predict the development of monolingual children of many different languages well, and whether the two languages influence each other during development. Analysis of longitudinal production data from three Cantonese-English bilinguals (Yip and Matthews 2000. Syntactic transfer in a Cantonese-English bilingual child. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3(3). 193–208.) shows that the development of bilingual children resemble that of monolingual children and generally follow the Aspect Hypothesis, but to a lesser degree. Interactions were also observed in that the acquisition of the Cantonese progressive marker gan was accelerated by the -ing in the bilingual children, and transfer from Cantonese to English allowed them to use the English past tense marking with verbs of different lexical aspect early in their development, deviating from the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis.

The L2 motivation self system posits that motivation emerges from the dynamic interactions among a learner’s ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self, and situated learning experience. Only a few studies to date have investigated the individual and combined impact of trait-based and task-induced motivation (i. e., situational motivation related to the immediate learning environment) on L2 performance. Therefore, the current study explored whether Korean L2 speakers’ trait-based and task-induced regulatory focus impacted their oral task performance. Vietnamese university students ( N =62) studying Korean as a foreign language completed a questionnaire to assess their L2 instrumentality as being oriented toward prevention or promotion. They were randomly assigned to promotion or prevention task-induced conditions, and then carried out an oral task. The results indicated that whereas the participants’ general motivational tendencies did not impact their task performance, the task-induced prevention condition facilitated faster speech rate (i. e., fluency) and lower error rate (i. e., accuracy) than the promotion condition. Implications for further studies are discussed.

Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) suggest that the motivational-cognitive construct of involvement may explain and predict different levels of effectiveness for vocabulary-learning tasks. Drawing on their original work and on later research on the involvement load hypothesis (ILH), this study set out to compare the effectiveness of carefully-designed tasks for incidental vocabulary acquisition in children. Thirty-eight EFL elementary-level 10-year-olds from a public school in Warsaw, Poland, participated in the experiment. Divided into three groups, the participants performed three different sequences of tasks, each sequence inducing similar levels of involvement load. In order to measure receptive lexical learning and retention of meaning and spelling, the children were tested with an orthography test, an L2-L1 translation test, and a multiple-choice test immediately after the treatment, and one week later. In support of the ILH, the MANOVA results showed no significant differences between the treatments (irrespective of them being input- or output-based) in any of the test measurements, either in the immediate or in the delayed posttest. We discuss the results in light of the ILH, and outline some limitations and possible implications for pedagogy.

This study aimed to determine as to whether or not the text type and strategy usage affect the EFL learners’ lexical inferencing performance. The participants were comprised of 87 first-year English majors at a technical university. Data were collected from (1) a lexical inferencing test with excerpts of narrative and expository texts, for which both multiple-choice and definition tasks were designed, respectively, and then (2) the responses from the learners’ self-reported strategy usage. The quantitative analyses demonstrated that the text types significantly affected the EFL learners’ lexical inferencing performance, in which the EFL learners performed better for the narrative excerpt than for the expository texts. However, significant coefficients between the strategy use and the lexical inferencing performance were not found in this study. The results further implied that the text structure and the lexical inferencing strategies should be explicitly taught to the EFL learners.