The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

Due to the relevance of the discussions on the use of counterbalance for content-based and form-focused second language instruction, the purpose of this study is to present some pedagogical strategies to teach and reinforce the correct use of articles, gender and number of nouns in Portuguese when teaching Language and Arts (first grade) and…

"Vos" is regularly used in "paisa" (of Antioquia) Spanish, although written "vos" is considered non- normative. Recent research shows an augmented presence of written "vos" in public domains (Weyers 2016a, 2016b), which is viewed favorably by a majority of "paisas" (Weyers, forthcoming). So, what…

Immersion students' language abilities are generally characterized by strong receptive skills (listening, reading) and less developed productive skills (speaking, writing) when compared with L1 speakers of the immersion language (e.g., Allen et al. 1990; Cummins 1998; Harley 1992). In this paper we report results from a six-month mixed-methods…

In L2 (second language) pedagogy, texts are commonly distinguished based on whether language instruction was a consideration in their creation. Texts that are not created for L2 instruction, or "authentic texts," have been thought to represent the target language in an accurate and reliable way (Zyzik and Polio 2017). Conversely, texts…

The incorporation of literary texts in advanced beginner and intermediate level language classrooms (high school Spanish, years 2-4; university Spanish, semesters 2-4) can seem intimidating. The thoughtful exploration of literary texts takes time away from other content, specifically grammar and vocabulary, which often seem more straightforward to…

Research on second language Spanish encompasses a sophisticated and broad-reaching body of work. Nevertheless, there is a bias in this literature toward English-speaking learners. The implication of this bias is that our search for universal trends of acquisition is undermined by an inability to distinguish between challenges that are specific to…

Despite the growing number of heritage language (HL) learners in language courses, the interaction between second language (L2) and HL learners has not been fully explored in the research, and thus, it still remains unclear whether mixed (L2-HL) or matched (L2-L2, HL-HL) dyads are more beneficial for language learning. This study investigates…

This current study proposes a comparative method of teaching authorial style, using four versions of "Exemplo XI," an often-anthologized tale about the "mago" of Toledo, Don Illán, from the "Conde Lucanor," a series of interlinked tales by the early fourteenth-century author Don Juan Manuel. Teaching a medieval text…

This current study reports the findings of sociolinguistic research investigating the place of the "voseo" in the Spanish language curriculum in the United States. The study describes the results of questionnaire responses from 177 US Spanish teachers and survey responses from 560 US college students of Spanish. Both instruments sought…

This current study suggests that future secondary Spanish language teachers must be more like athletic coaches to ensure student success and score a so-called win in the classroom. Teachers must retool and redesign outdated and ineffectual curricula and instructional strategies to improve student performance. Focusing on language proficiency,…

In seeking to both confirm previous conclusions and expand the literature of the field with a different group of participants, McNulty (2012) was (partially) replicated. Three instructional interventions were designed to ascertain which activity type was responsible for learner gains. One treatment group (R) included referential-only practice…

The aim of a discourse-pragmatic approach to teaching the indicative/subjunctive contrast in Spanish is to engage students to move beyond grammar and semantics and enter the domain of language use in complete texts. Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research have mostly focused on the morphology, semantics and syntactic aspects of…

The present study investigates whether the implementation of a dictogloss task within a proactive Focus on Form approach (e.g., Long 1991; Long and Robinson 1998) has significant effects on the acquisition of Spanish present subjunctive. A total of sixty-six learners in a fifth-semester Spanish course participated in the study and were assigned to…

The purpose of this paper is to compare structured input (SI) with other input-based instructional treatments. The input-based instructional types include: input flood (IF), text enhancement (TE), SI activities, and focused input (FI; SI without implicit negative feedback). Participants included 145 adult learners enrolled in an intermediate…