Possessive determiners (PDs) "his" and "her" are challenging for L2 learners to acquire, and this difficulty has been attributed to several factors, including negative L1 transfer effects (White et al., 2007). What researchers have not yet considered is how PDs are acquired by learners whose L1 predicts positive transfer…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

The Direct Method, a pedagogical approach for teaching additional languages through immersion, emphasizes oral interaction and everyday language usage to facilitate language acquisition. This method discourages reliance on translation and minimizes emphasis on grammatical rules. However, a fundamental question arises about the effectiveness of…

Teletandem (Telles, 2009) is a model of telecollaboration in which pairs of foreign language students from different countries meet regularly and virtually to learn each other's languages. Within this context, participants are expected to help their partners learn by providing feedback. The multimodal nature of this type of environment, however,…

Using Swain's (1985) output hypothesis as a basis, this article investigated the effect an immediate repeated oral task had on the performance of participants. Two groups of beginner learners of English as an additional language in Brazil performed a decision-making oral task in groups. Drawing from Lynch and MacLean's (2001) carousel task, the…

This article explores the language of bimodal bilinguals (i.e., hearing children of Deaf parents who are exposed to sign language at home and to spoken language in the surrounding community). In similar bilingual contexts involving pairs of spoken languages, the language used at home, which differs from that of the community, is referred to as the…

This article reports the initial findings of an MA in Applied Linguistics on the effect collaborative and individual strategic planning have on performance of an oral task by young learners of English as an L2 in Brazil. Strategic planning (Ellis, 2003, 2005) is an important concept within the task-based approach (TBA), as this condition may…

Anxiety is a dimension of L2 speaking that has been heavily investigated over the past several decades, but there is a paucity of research investigating instruction aiming at lowering anxiety. While research suggests drama lowers L2 learners' anxiety, it is unclear to what extent anxiety is affected by drama. This article reports results from a…

Although the development of second language (L2) oral fluency has been widely investigated over the past several decades, there remains a paucity of research examining language instruction specifically aimed at improving this cognitive skill. In this study, the researchers investigate how instructional techniques adapted from drama can positively…

The current study aimed at investigating how mobile seamless technology can be used to enhance the pragmatic competence of learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL). 34 overseas CSL learners participated in this study. They were randomly assigned into two groups: the classroom group, executing language tasks in fake contexts in a traditional…

The 'Global Student Collective' is a telecollaboration project on the International Foundation Year (IFY) programme at the University of Southampton. IFY students were connected with volunteers in Brazil, India, Hungary, and Italy online in order to find out more about their countries. The project required the students to exercise multiple…

For Chinese as a second language (L2 Chinese), there has been little research into "distinguishing features" (Fulcher, 1996; Iwashita et al., 2008) used in scoring L2 Chinese speaking performance. The study reported here investigates the relationship between the distinguishing features of L2 Chinese spoken performances and the scores…

This paper reports the results of a study on the use of a learner response system (LRS) by a group of students of English as a foreign language (L2). Via a methodology that included the analysis of survey questionnaires and open-ended oral interviews, the study examined learners' perceptions of the use of an LRS by a group of 30 Brazilians…

The ability to speak English offers young adults in Brazil opportunities to prepare for the global job market and promotes cross cultural understanding, which are national curriculum goals for public education. The study reported in this article documents the implementation of the "Empregabilidade," "Tecnologia e…

This volume celebrates the life and groundbreaking work of Richard Schmidt, the developer of the influential Noticing Hypothesis in the field of second language acquisition. The 19 chapters encompass a compelling collection of cutting­-edge research studies exploring such constructs as noticing, attention, and awareness from multiple perspectives,…