Volume 57, Issue 3 -

The present study explores the effects of structured input and structured output when delivered in isolation or in combination on the acquisition of the English causative. Research investigating the effects of processing instruction and meaning output-based instruction has provided some interesting and sometimes conflicting results. Additionally, there are a number of issues (e. g., measuring a combination of structured input and structured output, measuring discourse-level effects) that have not been fully and clearly addressed. To provide answers to the questions formulated in this study, two classroom experiments were carried out. In the first study, fifty-four Chinese university students (age 18–20) participated. The participants were randomly assigned to four groups: structured input only group ( n =13); structured output only group ( n =15); combined structured input and structured output group ( n =16); control group ( n =10). In the second study, thirty school-age Greek learners (age 10–12) participated. The participants were randomly assigned to three groups: structured input only group ( n =10); structured output only group ( n =10); combined structured input and structured output group ( n =10). Only subjects who participated in all phases of each experiment and scored lower than 60 % in the pre-tests were included in the final data collection. Instruction lasted for three hours. The control group received no instruction on the causative structure. Interpretation and production tasks were used in a pre-test and post-test design. The design included a delayed post-test battery (3 weeks after instruction) for both experiments. In the first study, the assessment tasks included an interpretation and production task at sentence-level, and an interpretation task at discourse-level. In the second study, an additional discourse-level production task was adopted along with the interpretation discourse-level task. The results indicated that learners who received structured input both in isolation and in combination benefitted more than learners receiving structured output only. These two groups were able to retain instructional gains three weeks later in all assessment measures.

Morphological instruction has been proved to be facilitative of second language learners’ vocabulary learning. However, studies on the effect of teaching affixes on Chinese EFL learners’ vocabulary learning were relatively less explored. Therefore, this study was aimed at investigating the effect of teaching six affixes on Chinese EFL learners’ vocabulary learning, the teachability of affixes, and the learners’ perception toward the instruction. The participants were 40 seventh-graders from two intact classes in a junior high school in southern Taiwan. One class of 20 students served as the control group, and the other class of 20 students was assigned as the experimental group to receive the six-session training of affixes. Instruments were a morpheme identification task, a vocabulary translation test, students’ learning journals, and a questionnaire of perception toward the instruction. The results indicated the positive effect of instruction on the experimental group’s receptive learning of the affixes. In addition, the data also showed the students’ positive perception toward morphological instruction. This study concluded with theoretical implications for future studies and pedagogical implications for teaching affixes.

This study presents data from an experiment on the interpretation of thematic and non-thematic verbs in second language (L2) English by three groups of adult native Chinese speakers and a group of native English speakers. English allows non-thematic verbs to raise but requires thematic verbs to remain in-situ . In contrast, neither thematic nor non-thematic verbs are allowed to raise in Chinese. The results indicate that there is a discrepancy between native and non-native mental representations of the grammars concerned; whereas native grammars require English thematic verbs to remain in-situ but allow non-thematic verbs to raise, neither thematic nor non-thematic verbs are allowed to raise in learners L2 English grammars. Results of the study argue against the Valueless Features Hypothesis (Eubank 1993/94. On the transfer of parametric values in L2 development. Language Acquisition 3. 183–208, 1994. Optionality and the initial state in L2 development. In T. Hoekstra & B. Schwartz (eds), Language acquisition studies in generative grammar: Papers in Honour of Kenneth Wexler from the 1991 GLOW Workshop , 369–388. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996. Negation in early German-English interlanguage: More valueless features in the L2 initial state. Second Language Research 12. 73–106.), which posits that the L1 syntactic features of INFL are initially inert and are not transferred. Instead, the results support the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou 2007. The interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 23. 215–242.), which argues for the inaccessibility of uninterpretable syntactic features beyond a critical period. In particular, it is argued that uninterpretable syntactic features not selected during early stages of primary language acquisition become inaccessible in subsequent language acquisition. The results suggest that there may be cases where apparent target-like performance conceals non-target-like underlying competence.

Research has demonstrated that cognates are processed and acquired more readily than noncognates regardless of whether the languages share a common script or etymological background (e. g., Japanese and English). Very little research, however, has focused on the prevalence and frequency of cognates in orthographically distinct languages. Using Japanese word frequency data, the present study demonstrates that between 49 % and 22 % of the most common 10000 words in English are cognate in Japanese, depending on the frequency threshold used. The analysis is extended to the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000), which is shown to be between 59 % and 30 % cognate. Finally, a lexical familiarity study revealed that Japanese cognate frequency was a reliable indicator of whether the word was known to the majority of Japanese speakers. Based on the findings and drawing upon research in psycholinguistics, a number of recommendations are put forward for future studies in applied linguistics.