Although the distinction between explicit and implicit (automatized) knowledge of second or foreign language (L2) is of crucial importance to second language acquisition (SLA) theory and research, it has thus far not been directly applied to L2 pronunciation. The paper attempts to fill this gap by making an initial attempt to illustrate the…

This intervention study was conducted to assess the effects of three instructional approaches to L2 listening. That is, a metacognitive pedagogical cycle, an awareness-raising approach which combined reflections and short discussions of factors associated with successful L2 listening, and an approach that incorporated vocabulary as a prelistening…

The place of grammar instruction in second or foreign language (L2) pedagogy has always been highly controversial and although there is currently consensus that such pedagogic intervention is beneficial, numerous questions remain as to how it should most propitiously be conducted. Different theoretical perspectives have resulted in a wide array of…

The goal of the present study was to investigate the instructional potential of metacognitive strategies to improve listening comprehension and the automaticity of listening processes. A pretest-treatment-posttest design was adopted and used in seven sections of second-semester French. Differences were found based on initial listening proficiency…

Evidence that L2 learners of Spanish overgeneralize indirect object pronouns (OPs) to direct object contexts with human referents and direct OPs to indirect object contexts with nonhuman referents has been provided by Zyzik (2006), Malovrh (2008), and Olsen and Juffs (2022). However, the effect of instruction on this phenomenon has not been…

Due to the importance of metaphorical capacity for L2 learners, metaphor instruction is increasingly considered a crucial part of language education. To contribute to the still growing literature, the current study reports a project of teaching Chinese animal metaphors to learners of Mandarin as a foreign language, following the framework of…

The present study compared individual and collaborative vocabulary learning through two types of reading-based pedagogical tasks in an online elementary Arabic classroom. Fifty-two beginner learners of Arabic completed a pretest, a story-based task (either multiple-choice or gap-fill) with embedded novel vocabulary, and two posttests over a 2-week…

This study's goal was to determine if appropriately designed, completely virtual formats of language courses are able to engender in students speaking ability progress comparable to that fostered within traditional face-to-face (F2F) classrooms. The study further sought to clarify language learners' perceptions of online Japanese courses. The…

The shift to online instruction brought about by the novel coronavirus exacerbated language teaching and learning constraints already highlighted by foreign language (FL) research. However, it is important that FL courses keep preparing learners for global careers and interactions with native speakers--whether courses take place in-person,…

The present study examines the kinds of emotional scaffolding that occurred in online text chats in Japanese between 19 learners of Japanese at an Australian university and 19 native-speaking students at a Japanese university, together with the emotions that the learners experienced in relation to the scaffolding. The learners chatted in Japanese…

This study examined how a dialogic reading (DR) program with a component of multisensory learning (MS) of Chinese characters improved early Chinese reading and writing skills in L2 Chinese-speaking kindergarteners in Hong Kong. The DR + MS program was compared to the same DR program but focusing on morphological awareness (MA) training. A total of…

Duolingo is a commercial language-teaching platform that offers free courses on the web and on mobile apps. This study reports the ACTFL listening and reading proficiency levels of adult Duolingo learners who had completed beginning-level courses in Spanish or French. The participants (n = 225) were learners residing in the United States, had…

This multiple case study investigated the application of the genre-based approach (GBA) in a second-semester university-level Arabic class. This article depicts the linguistic features that make possible the recounting of habitual events (recount) in Arabic and outlines how during the GBA, both (1) the notion of purpose for writing and (2) the…

Research on incidental focus on form (FonF) has established associations among the nature of learner error, corrective feedback (CF), and effectiveness of CF measured through uptake. In this line of research, the analysis of learner error has been limited to errors with grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and spelling (nonformulaic). Consequently,…

Hundreds of millions of language learners around the globe study a second language with popular apps such as Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, Busuu, and Babbel. This study examined the effectiveness of one app, Babbel, for developing both receptive linguistic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, as well as oral communicative ability in Spanish as a second…