Volume 60, Issue 2

This study examines the co-occurrence of speech and gestures based on a multimodal corpus to investigate the extent to which speech-accompanying gestures differ between Chinese as L1 and English as L2 speech among speakers of different L2 proficiency levels. Thirty-two Chinese-speaking learners of English, equally distributed between advanced (C1) and low-intermediate (B1) proficiency levels were recruited. The face-to-face casual conversation in L1 and L2 among friends were video-recorded, and speech-accompanying gestures were then coded for different types: deictic gestures, iconic gestures, metaphoric gestures, beats, and others. The analysis of overall frequencies of L2 gestures, English proficiency level was found to have a significant effect; in particular, speakers at higher levels of L2 proficiency are more likely to produce more beats and iconic gestures in conversational interaction for additional emphasis, while less proficient L2 speakers tended to produce more deictic gestures, accompanied with other communication strategies. Furthermore, the comparison of the types of gestures that accompanied the speakers’ L1 and L2 conversation show that except metaphoric gestures, speakers tended to produce more beats, deictic and iconic gestures in L2 than in L1, with similar results found in both advanced and low-intermediate learners.

Research on L3 acquisition has highlighted the importance of cross-linguistic influence in adult language acquisition. Specifically, the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) for L3 acquisition predicts full transfer from the most structurally similar background language at the initial stages of acquisition. However, it is unclear how language background might affect transfer. Furthermore, it is not known how applicable the TPM is to instructed L3 language acquisition. Consequently, this study examines Spanish/English bilinguals, their knowledge of mood distinctions in subjunctive-dominant contexts in Spanish and their transfer of that knowledge at the beginning stages of instructed L3 Portuguese acquisition. Data from eight L1 Spanish, 22 L2 Spanish, and 38 Spanish heritage bilinguals were analyzed to determine if the groups differed in their knowledge of mood distinctions, first in Spanish and subsequently in Portuguese. Results indicate a significant role of language background on all tasks.

With the aim of developing a more reliable understanding of the effects of task complexity and learner-internal factors on L2 performance, a 2×2 within-between participant study was designed to examine the effects intentional reasoning has on L2 performance, and whether learner language proficiency and working memory mediates these effects. Forty- eight learners of English performed two video-based narrative tasks of varying degrees of intentional reasoning, after taking Oxford Placement Test, Elicited Imitation Tasks and backward-digit span tasks. The results demonstrate that intentional reasoning had significant effects on complexity and accuracy, but no impact on fluency. Regression analyses indicated that proficiency and working memory reliably predicted accuracy across both task types. However, language proficiency and working memory contributed differentially to models predicting lexical complexity and speed fluency in the two task types, highlighting the interaction between task complexity and learner-internal factors.

This paper provides a taxonomy of errors in the use of English articles by Hong Kong Cantonese ESL learners. A study was conducted with 387 Hong Kong Cantonese ESL learners, including 65 students from three local universities and 322 students from five local secondary schools. They did two free writing tasks of about 200–300 words. Over 600 pieces of free writing were obtained. The use of English articles was analyzed and errors were identified. Irrespective of learners’ proficiency levels, similar types of article errors have been observed. While over-extension errors and under-extension errors are both quite common, co-occurrence errors are nearly non-existent. Intended generic reference triggers most problems, although this reference has been least attempted. The function of the noun phrase in which an article error occurs may play a part in error severity, with Object creating most problems for learners, yet the precise effects of noun functions are yet to be determined. It is suggested that more emphasis be put on the teaching of English articles to learners at different proficiency levels. Advanced learners, such as university students, should be engaged in metalinguistic analyses uncovering the subtle differences between the use of different articles in the same linguistic context.

This article compares gender assignment on known nouns by intermediate (n=15) and advanced (n=15) second language (L2) learners of Spanish (L1 English) and native Spanish speakers (n=15). Participants completed a written vocabulary task, which asked the meaning and gender of 63 nouns. Gender assignment scores revealed that only intermediate and native speaker groups scored significantly differently on known nouns, as shown by the vocabulary task. Results indicated that intermediate learners assigned the incorrect gender to known nouns significantly more than native speakers. Both L2 learner groups made errors on high frequency known nouns, whereas the few native speaker errors were on low frequency known nouns. Along with think-aloud data which showed the effectiveness of strategies that directly link the noun with its article, these results indicate that nouns need to be taught as units rather than bare nouns, using distributional co-occurrence relations.

The study examined the realization of refusal of request speech act in Persian, English, and Balouchi languages. 219 individuals participated in the study. Discourse completion task was employed to elicit the participants’ refusals. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square were used to analyze the data. The findings revealed the existence of statistically significant differences among the three groups of speakers concerning both the total frequencies and the frequencies of direct, indirect, and adjuncts to refusals strategies. Furthermore, concerning social status, no statistically significant differences were detected either for total number of strategies or for the number of strategies in main categories in each language, except for the indirect strategies among Persian speakers. In Persian language, with the increase in the interlocutors’ social status level, the increase in the number of indirect strategies was discerned. Likewise, the frequency differences of some semantic formulas were statistically significant regarding the social status in each language.

Many second language (L2) studies have shown that naturalistic L2 acquisition beginning from childhood leads to nativelike proficiency. The current study investigated whether the acquisition of such proficiency would be guaranteed, by examining a potential gap in the seemingly nativelike L2 proficiency of child L2 starters. At issue was the productive knowledge of noun – verb collocations by child L2 starters of Japanese ( n =74, age 13 – 18) whose age of arrival (AOA) was between 0 and 11 and whose length of residence (LOR) was between 5 and 18 years. The collocation test included only items that were easy for native speakers (NSs) ( n =162, age 13) age-matched for the youngest L2 participants. About one-third of the L2 participants, including the earliest arrivals, scored below the NS range on the collocation test. The current study concludes that early L2 onset does not guarantee nativelike productive knowledge of collocations, even when the collocations in question are very easy for NSs. The study also discusses pedagogical implications for child L2 starters, who are generally believed to become nativelike with ease.

This study investigated the impact of mixed instruction as compared with segmental instruction on Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ perception of English phonemic contrasts. Results of a discrimination test revealed that mixed instruction significantly improved the participants’ performance to the same extent as the segmental instruction. Besides, the two types of instruction had the same impacts on the learners’ perception of consonant contrasts and vowel contrasts. In addition, the learners were found to be bad at discriminating consonants contrasting place and vowels contrasting height. The comparable effect of the two types of instruction suggests that the mixed instruction was more efficient than the segmental instruction, as the latter focused solely on phonemes, while the former only devoted one-fourth of the time to phonemes. Based on these findings, we offer some pedagogical suggestions for L2 pronunciation teaching and learning in China and in similar contexts.

Here we present a longitudinal study of collocation, highlighting bigram development in L2 writing over a five-month span. Our analysis is primarily based on the learner corpus, a collection of 570 untimed L2 writing which is benchmarked against a reference corpus, the BNC. We applied two measures, the mean MI and the average t , computed from the learner corpus, to quantify both overall performance and individual variation. Interviews with three learners were conducted to explore factors contributing to the dynamism of bigram development. Our study found that, across the five times of writing, (1) learners’ command of bigrams, those of high quality in particular, is fairly unstable; (2) inter- and intra- individual variations account for the individual differences in managing bigrams over time; and (3) learners’ perception of collocation and their allocation of resources add to the dynamism of bigram development. Our study implies that teaching collocation from a dynamic perspective deserves increased attention. It is advisable to consider individual differences when allocating resources in teaching collocation.

Inflectional morphology causes persistent difficulties for second language (L2) learners (Montrul, Silvina & Kim Potowski. 2007. Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 11(3). 301–328; Montrul, Silvina, Israel de la Fuente, Justin Davidson & Rebecca Foote. 2013. The role of experience in the acquisition and production of diminutives and gender in Spanish: Evidence from L2 learners and heritage speakers. Second Language Research 29(1). 87–118). Learners operate with a default gender value, and overgeneralize the masculine forms of determiners and modifiers (White, Lydia, Elena Valenzuela, Martyna Kozlowska-Macgregor & Ingrid Leung. 2004. Gender and number agreement in nonnative Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics 25(1). 105–133; Schlig 2003). 111 essays written were collected containing 799 correct uses and 281 errors from Dutch students whose written ability in Spanish is A2 (Common European Framework). The results show that singular masculine nominal agreement marking at the determiner is significantly better produced by Dutch L2 learners of Spanish than when the marking of nominal agreement is plural, feminine or at the adjective. This study corroborates the previous results where learners operate with a default gender value and overgeneralize the masculine forms of determiners. Also these results show that L2 learners of Spanish are significantly less accurate in gender agreement with adjectives than with determiners.

Picture-based storytelling tasks, i. e. telling a story relying on some pictures, and short speech tasks, i. e. producing a speech with a given topic without pictures, are two types of oral narrative tasks widely adopted in previous studies. However, few have discussed what effects these two types of tasks may exert on second language learners’ speaking performance. In this study, sixty English as a foreign language learners, divided into lower- and higher-proficiency groups, performed a picture-based storytelling task and a short speech task. Stimulated recalls were collected from seventeen participants. Their oral discourses were analysed in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. Stimulated recalls were analysed based on Levelt’s speaking model. The short speech tasks raised participants’ accuracy and lexical complexity and were more effective for higher-proficient learners regarding structural complexity. The findings yield suggestions for designing oral narrative tasks for EFL learners with different L2 proficiency levels.

During normal reading, readers’ perceptions of time in a narrative shift according to grammatical and semantic cues. This study investigated the extent to which second-language (L2) readers’ interpretations of situations depicted in narratives are influenced by the grammatical aspect (perfective/progressive) and temporal duration (short/long) of intervening events. The study further examined whether reading fluency and L2 proficiency modulated how readers’ mentally constructed the depicted situations. Thirty-one L2 learners of English and 37 English-first-language (L1) controls completed a reading comprehension task in which each of 40 stories contained a target event with an inherent endpoint, with accomplishment verbs that were described as completed or in progress, followed by a short- or long-duration event. A reading-fluency task and a cloze test were administered. While grammatical marking played a significant role for both groups of participants, grammatical aspect and event duration showed an interaction only for L2 learners. The construction of a situation was modulated for both groups by reading fluency.

The present article aims at investigating the pro-drop phenomenon in L2 Spanish. The phenomenon of pro-drop or null subject is a typological feature of some languages, which are characterized by an implicit subject in cases of topic continuity. More specifically, behaviour regarding subject (dis)continuity in Spanish differs from French. This paper will offer a contrastive analysis on subject realisation by French learners of L2 Spanish compared to L1 Spanish speakers. So, the goal of this pilot study is to see if a different functioning in pro-drop in the mother tongue also influences the L2. The study is based upon a written description task presented to the two groups of participants: the experimental group of French mother tongue L2 Spanish language learners and the control group of Spanish native speakers.

Although adult and child differences have been a central issue in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) little is still known about the relationship between age and interaction. Within the interactionist framework, whose main claim is that conversation, especially when it generates negotiation of meaning, facilitates learning, researchers have suggested that children negotiate less than adults, at different rates and producing fewer moves to check comprehension. However, these claims have been made by comparing children and adults from different studies. In order to offer a more reliable comparison, we examine the interactions of 14 adults and 20 children, at similar levels of proficiency, performing a communicative oral task with (level and age) matched peers. Unlike suggested, children produce as much negotiation of meaning as adults and both age groups primarily use their moves to prevent misunderstandings. In light of these results, some previous claims are questioned and refined.

ESL learners often show great variation in article use. This study proposes that article use can be improved if the semantic feature (non)boundedness is introduced into ELT. This study argues that articles carry highly relevant information that is crucial, together with a number of other elements, for the signalling of aspectual values in English. It is argued that the signalling of aspectual values is the primary role of articles and that if ESL learners receive instruction on this role, they may learn how to signal aspectual values correctly, but also improve their article use thanks to a greater awareness of articles. The paper reports on an experiment conducted to test ESL learners’ response to such instruction and concludes that incorporating (non)boundedness into ESL instruction is both reasonable and necessary.