Much research has been conducted in adult second language learning through interaction, but knowledge about the child language learner has remained scarce. To address social language development in middle childhood, the article presents a longitudinal case study concerning a nine-year-old L1 Russian-speaking learner of Finnish. The data consist of…

This article provides an overview of the research on morpho-syntactic challenges in Swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD), compared with typically developing (TD) children learning Swedish as their first and second language (L1/L2). Children with DLD show vulnerabilities with verb finiteness, the possessive…

This investigation responds to the need for longitudinal data-driven research on additional-language (AL) acquisition by examining grammatical-gender marking among AL learners of French during a 21-month period, which included an academic year abroad (LANGSNAP corpus). The analysis of oral production consists of a generalized linear mixed model…

This study examined the acquisition of the Russian indefinite determiners ("kakoj"-"to" "which"-"to" and "kakoj"-"nibud" "which"-"nibud'') encoding scopal specificity by English and Korean native speakers within the feature-based contrastive framework (Lardiere 2008, 2009).…

This article explores the online processing of singular he and she and singular they by learners of English to discover whether singular they presents a processing problem for non-native speakers (NNSs). It also examines the extent to which such issues may vary as a function of L2 proficiency at B2, C1, and C2 levels. A self-paced reading study…

Communicative adequacy is a key construct in second language research, as the primary goal of most language learners is to communicate successfully in real-world situations. Nevertheless, little is known about what linguistic features contribute to communicatively adequate speech. This study fills this gap by investigating the extent to which…

This article reports on the findings of an empirical study that relates translation studies and research on language acquisition/attrition by looking at the interpretation of overt pronominal subjects, previously found to be problematic in both domains. The focus is on the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Italian by two…

This article documents how second language (L2) Spanish learners in an American high school formulated explicit grammar rules during three inductive lessons on the pronominal clitic "se." Following Adair-Hauck "et al." (2010), each lesson first presented a property of "se" within a narrative text, and then had learners inductively "Co-construct"…

The present study adds to our understanding of how learners employ lexical and grammatical phenomena to communicate in writing in different types of interlanguage discourse. A multidimensional (factor) analysis of a corpus of L2 Spanish writing (202,241 words) generated by second- and third-year, university-level learners was performed. The…

The term "intelligibility" is widely viewed as denoting an ideologically neutral concept and therefore useful in speculating about the future of the English language, especially in the context of its expansion at the current exponential rate and the danger or otherwise of its breaking up into mutually incomprehensible languages, the way Latin did…

Discourse particles are ubiquitous in spoken discourse. Yet despite their pervasiveness very few studies attempt to look at their use in the pedagogical setting. Drawing on data from an intercultural corpus of speech and a textbook database, the present study compares the use of discourse particles by expert users of English in Hong Kong with…

The call for longitudinal evidence on the efficacy of written corrective feedback (WCF) for ESL (English as a second language) writers has been made repeatedly since Truscott (1996) claimed that it is ineffective, harmful, and should therefore be abandoned. This article discusses some of the theoretical issues raised against the practice, outlines…

Corpus-based research has shown that the frequency of use of particular grammatical structures and lexis in English is not always congruent with the content or ordering of explicit rules in pedagogical materials. The present study provides an additional example from French, focusing on word-order rules related to adjective position and the…

This paper examines an under-studied component of deep vocabulary knowledge, affective meaning, which is used to convey attitudes. Two affective dimensions, evaluation and potency, are examined to determine whether they influence the vocabulary choices of native speakers of American-English in describing interpersonal interactions. In Experiment…