Volume 59, Issue 2

Although claims about the nature of EFL/ESL learners’ knowledge (i. e., implicit and/or explicit) are essential to many debates in foreign/second language development, few studies have sought to evaluate the effects of linguistic and/or contextual variables on the two knowledge types. This study, accordingly, undertook to examine the effects of different explicit and implicit types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of four easy and difficult forms as assessed by different implicit and explicit outcome measures. The instruments utilized to assess students’ learning were: oral elicited imitation, untimed and timed grammaticality judgment, and metalinguistic knowledge tests. A pretest and two posttests were administered to 150 novice learners immediately after FFI and again after a 4-week delay. Immediate and durable effects of FFI were found for the easy and difficult target forms on both implicit and explicit knowledge measures. Specifically, the study indicated that explicit and implicit types of FFI were significantly more beneficial for explicitly-easy and implicitly-easy language forms respectively. The findings of this study may contribute a different set of insights to our understanding of the efficacy of varying types of FFI on learners’ controlled and/or spontaneous use of easy and difficult structures at early stages of L2 development.

Received Pronunciation (RP) holds prestige not only in the UK, but also in many Outer and Expanding Circle countries and, even in the US, but the TRAP-BATH split (TBS) in RP, which refers to the shift from the vowel /a/ to /ɑː/, has still remained ambiguous because this sound shift contains inconsistent realizations that occur in identical codas, as illustrated in such lexical pairs as class but gas, path but math, last but enthusiast . What makes this sound feature more complicated is sociolinguistic variation. Although earlier discoveries have enhanced our understanding of the TBS, neither a definitive word list nor lexical frequency are provided for learners to enunciate BATH words. To provide RP learners with a linguistic index to learn BATH lexical set, this study expanded Wells’s study by including additional 16 phonetic environments, which generated a total of 304 relevant words for examining their pronunciation defined by dictionaries. The findings show that 13 out of the 30 environments can trigger the TBS more than 50% of the time. In particular, seven of them can completely predict the TBS (over 91%), and one of them can fully do so (83%). This feature appears as a regular conditioned sound pattern if well-defined by its phonetic environments.

This study investigated the effect of first language (L1) transfer in the recognition of second language (L2) collocations and unacceptable word combinations across low-intermediate to advanced learners of English, and the relationship between proficiency and the recognition of L2 collocations. The study targeted learners from two different L1 backgrounds and native speakers of English in order to disentangle the effect of L1 transfer from the effect of intralingual factors. Four types of English verb-noun combinations were included: English-Korean-Mandarin, English-only, Korean-only, and Mandarin-only phrases. A phrase acceptability judgment task and a phrase recognition report were used. The performances of 92 participants were analyzed using mixed effects modeling. The results from both Korean and Mandarin groups revealed no L1 influence in the recognition of unacceptable L2 word combinations, even at low levels of proficiency. The results also showed that L2 proficiency predicts learners’ ability to rule out grammatical-but-unacceptable L2 word combinations, but not the ability to recognize L2 collocations

Despite the growing body of research on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in second language writing, differences in CAF across ESL and EFL learner productions remain underexplored. Thus, this study sought to determine whether there is a systematic difference in the CAF of English writing among ESL and EFL college students. For this purpose, a total of 1,870 essays were collected from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English-Written or ICNALE-Written. The findings reveal different patterns in various measures of CAF in the written outputs of both the ESL and EFL groups. These findings suggest that writing complexity, accuracy, and fluency are not only influenced by proficiency level but also by learners’ L1 background. Findings further show moderate to high positive correlations between and among the components of each language dimension (i. e. complexity, accuracy, and fluency). Implications for ESL writing pedagogy and future studies are discussed.

The current study examined the effects of dynamic versus non-dynamic corrective feedback on second language (L2) learners’ writing accuracy in dyadic and small group contexts. Dynamic feedback was operationalized in terms of graduated assistance which is tailored to learners’ zone of proximal development (ZPD). Non-dynamic feedback, on the other hand, was operationalized as explicit corrections with no concern for learners’ ZPD. 96 EFL learners were assigned into two experimental groups as well as a control one. Half of the participants in each treatment condition received corrective feedback in groups of four and the other half received feedback on their errors during dyadic interactions with an instructor. The results obtained from two dependent measures, a writing test and an error identification test, revealed that dynamic feedback was more effective than explicit corrections for enhancing writing accuracy. Moreover, the findings revealed that dynamic feedback was more effective when provided to a group of learners than when provided to a single learner during dyadic interactions.

This study investigated the effects of learners’ first language (L1), lexical aspect of verbs, and proficiency levels on their use of the English progressive aspect. It analyzed spoken data from learners of three different L1s (Chinese, German, and Spanish) in an international learner corpus (LINSEI), in comparison with native speech in a comparable native speaker corpus (LOCNEC). The analysis reveals that regardless of learners’ L1 and proficiency levels, their use of progressive markings is predominantly associated with activity verbs (prototypes), supporting the association prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen, Roger W. & Yasuhiro Shirai. 1994. Discourse motivations for some cognitive acquisition principles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16(2). 133–156). Contrary to the fourth prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis, both intermediate and advanced learners use stative progressives, and especially intermediate L1 Spanish learners overuse stative progressives, indicating a complex interaction between L1 and proficiency on non-prototypical form-meaning associations. The results suggest that L1 effect, lexical aspect of verbs, and proficiency levels jointly drive tense-aspect acquisition.