Learning whether English nouns are countable or not is a source of great difficulty for many ESL/EFL learners. In the present study, a grammaticality judgement task comprised of a range of nouns representative of the different facets of the countability system in English was distributed to 82 native speakers of English (NSs) and 98 non-native…

The present study evaluated the effects of explicit instruction on advanced French second language (L2) learners' (n = 18) contextually appropriate use of two stylistic variables (/l/ deletion vs. retention and "ne" deletion vs. retention) using two different task types. A planned and unplanned oral task was used to assess students'…

This study looks at a case study research on a language awareness workshop in a New York public school with a dual language (Spanish/English) program. A learner-centred lesson, taught in Spanish, focused on basic personal information exchanges for in-service teachers who taught only in English and who had some limited knowledge of Spanish. The…

This study explores whether and to what degree explicit form-focused instruction (FFI) facilitates the use of morphosyntactic forms in second language oral production and also whether it has differential effects on morphosyntactic forms with different linguistic variables. Twenty-seven university-level Chinese EFL participants were randomly…

Previous research has shown that learners of English might experience considerable difficulty when giving constructive criticism to peers in instructional settings. Unlike native speakers, they tend to soften their criticism far less frequently while aggravating it far more often, and thus require pedagogical help in this area. The present study…

This study is part of a larger investigation of the usefulness of instruction designed to raise cross-linguistic awareness in young Francophone learners of English in Quebec. In the research reported here, the focus is on cognates. Since previous research shows that learners typically fail to recognise many helpful similarities between words in a…

Within the Japanese English Language Teaching context and consistent with the dominant conversation role assigned to the native English speaker teacher, there exists a belief that the most effective manner in which to teach and promote multilingualism and intercultural understanding is through restricting students to monolingual practices and…

This narrative interview study of a Spanish learner documents and explains apparent contradictions in a student's story when reporting on why she continues to take Spanish even when she does not like it or perform well in foreign language courses. A dialectical approach to human activity based on sociocultural theory is used to make sense of her…

This study investigates ESL learners' semantic awareness of English words by attempting to estimate a threshold beyond which ESL learners can be said to have reached native-like semantic knowledge. The "Vocabulary Levels Test," originally designed by Nation (1990) and later revised and expanded by Schmitt (2000), was used to operationalise this…

This paper reports on two studies that investigated the effectiveness of a contrastive analysis type of pedagogical intervention, which aimed to promote interlanguage development in the use and understanding of English possessive determiners (PDs) among adolescent second language (L2) learners. The first research question asked whether explicit…

Learning the intonation of a foreign language entails complex perceptive and productive processes mostly beyond the common awareness level. Its instruction demands a thorough understanding of its prosodic features and the appropriate pedagogical practices and resources. This paper reports the findings from a computer-assisted study of the learning…

Argues for the use of computer-stored corpora in courses in grammar awareness for teachers of mother-tongue English. It is suggested that the ability to do grammar entails a set of skills rather than a body of knowledge and that corpora provide excellent data for doing grammar. Questions regarding the comparison of different methodologies are…

This study examines interviews with 46 undergraduates to explore if participants with differing language and cultural backgrounds view plagiarism or textual appropriation primarily as a) a language problem because of a lack of words of one's own, or b) a cultural challenge as a result of either some first language (L1) cultural training to…