Volume 56, Issue 4 -

The Noticing Hypothesis holds that input does not become intake during language learning unless it is noticed. The hypothesis has been tested and evaluated in many empirical studies for more than two decades, either supported or criticized. This study shares the findings on the comparative effectiveness of noticing treatments gathered and evaluated from various empirical studies that were carried out in different countries. The results of the studies reflect the potentials of noticing treatments in second language/foreign language -L2- instruction/learning and touch upon the validity of the Noticing Hypothesis. The results of the reviewed studies also showed that noticing through output oriented tasks generates higher level of perception of L2 knowledge.

This article compares the use of collocations in texts written by native speakers and advanced learners of Spanish. The collocations studied were first identified in the sample texts on the grounds of phraseological criteria and subsequently assigned frequency information corresponding to their occurrence in a reference corpus of Spanish. The distribution of collocations with different frequency of co-occurrence and mutual information scores in the texts of the two samples was then compared, as was their proportion in the collocation repertoire of native speakers and learners. The study revealed significant differences both in terms of frequency and mutual information.

This paper examines the use of clause-initial adverbials in English novice writing. Previous research has identified frequent use of such adverbials as characteristic of Dutch EFL writing. Our contrastive corpus analysis of novice writing by Dutch and Francophone learners as well as native speakers allows us to determine whether this use of initial adverbials is (a) a V2 transfer effect, (b) a general interlanguage feature, independent of learners’ L1, or (c) a characteristic of novice writing in general, holding true for both native and non-native writers. We will show that both learner groups are ‘equally different’ from the native-speaker novice writers in their frequent use of initial adverbials, but appear to have distinct underlying reasons for this linguistic behaviour: Francophone writers place adverbials in initial position more often for stylistic purposes, while Dutch writers have a stronger tendency to use initial adverbials for local discourse linking.