This study examines the knowledge representation of Japanese university students assessed using grammaticality judgement tests (GJTs) and a metalinguistic knowledge test (MKT). The study also investigates the role of automatised and non-automatised explicit knowledge in general L2 language proficiency. Participants were 87 late learners of English…

The current study examines the role of instruction in developing L2 learners' ability to comprehend two types of implicatures: indirect refusals and indirect opinions. According to Taguchi (2005), these implicatures differ in the degrees of conventionality involved in producing them, hence requiring different degrees of processing effort on the…

Studies that have measured pragmatic fluency in the form of planning time and speech rate, as indicators of processing ability, have confirmed that learners' processing ability and pragmatic knowledge are independent from each other. The present study is a longitudinal, developmental investigation which investigates whether the study abroad stay…

As language acquisition research supports the value of the interactive scaffolded environment and awareness-raising communicative tasks for the development of pragmatic knowledge, the present study attempted to investigate the effect of Collaborative Translation Task (CTT) on learning and retention of request speech act strategies. The main…

This study of second language idiom acquisition investigates the interaction of two factors, the L1 effect and the effect of supportive context in the L2 input, when both are available to learners. An experiment consisting of a pretest, a computer-assisted instructional treatment session and a posttest employed three idiom types that differed in…

Metalinguistic knowledge is regarded as an important factor in the development of writing. However, little attention has been paid to the metalinguistic knowledge of L2 writers in non-anglophone contexts. This study investigates L1-Turkish-speaking, first-year university students' metalinguistic knowledge of the lexical phrases they use in their…

The current study investigated the extent to which L2 learners' productive vocabulary knowledge could predict multiple dimensions of spontaneous speech production. A total of 39 English as a foreign language (EFL) participants with varying L2 proficiency levels first completed a productive vocabulary knowledge task (Lex30). Their spontaneous…

Recent findings in the field of pragmatics have revealed that pragmatic accuracy (knowledge) and pragmatic speed (processing ability) function as two distinct and non-parallel components of pragmatic competence. Anderson's adaptive control of thought--rational (ACT-R) model, which emphasises the development of skill through repeated practice,…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

The present study sets out to explore the distinctive roles played by two working memory (WM) components in various aspects of L2 task-based speech planning and performance. A group of 40 post-intermediate proficiency level Chinese EFL learners took part in the empirical study. Following the tenets and basic principles of the…