This article reports the results of a study of vocabulary development by learners of Japanese during a year abroad in Japan. The particular feature of this study is that it compares the performance of two cohorts, studying at the same UK university and in degrees in Japanese in which the period of study abroad (SA) is undertaken at different…

Taking a contextual approach to research on language learner beliefs, this longitudinal study of 49 Swiss university students learning Danish as a foreign language investigates how and why the participants change their beliefs over time. At the beginning of the three-semester language course, the participants believe that form-focussed approaches…

To date, research into vocabulary learning strategies has mainly made use of questionnaires about studying preferences in general or of interviews following a specific study task, focusing on finding out which strategies were most popular. The present investigation attempts to provide more insight into the effects of the parameters of timing and…

This article reports on an investigation of the suitability of mobile vocabulary games for inducing a state of incidental vocabulary acquisition. Draw Something, a social digital drawing game in which players draw and guess words, was selected as a focus for this investigation. Results from an exploratory factor analysis of the questionnaire data…

This paper reports a study comparing the effects of vocabulary instruction on recognition and recall through provision of either an L1 equivalent or an L2 (French) definition. Instruction was in the context of a focus-on-meaning listening activity. The study employed a quasi-experimental design, involving 262 Year 9 learners of French in seven…

Based on a prior study by Chen and Truscott, the present study investigated the possible effects of repetition (repeated exposure) and L1 lexicalization on the incidental acquisition and retention of 10 English target words by 90 Persian-speaking EFL learners at an Iranian university. Seven aspects of vocabulary knowledge were measured, including…

This article reports the results of two studies on the vocabulary growth of advanced learners of English as a foreign language in an English-medium degree programme. Growth in learners' written receptive and productive vocabularies was investigated in one cross-sectional and one longitudinal study over three years. The effect of word frequency on…

Vocabulary is an essential component of language. It is central to reading ability, writing ability and listening ability, and the most important aspect of second-language (L2) knowledge for academic achievement. The aim of this paper is to investigate quantitatively some of the factors that make some L2 words more difficult to learn and retain…

In spite of the vast numbers of articles devoted to vocabulary acquisition in a foreign language, few studies address the contribution of lexical knowledge to spoken fluency. The present article begins with basic definitions of the temporal characteristics of oral fluency, summarizing L1 research over several decades, and then presents fluency…

As teachers, people often dream of research results which will tell them, with scientific accuracy, what is going to work in their classroom. However, as researchers, people know how elusive such "recipes" or "best methods" are. Conventional quantitative research methods have been designed to identify the effect of "factor X" in a given context,…

Examined open-ended production tasks in higher level testing in French-as-a-second-language courses in the United Kingdom. The article studied the effect of teachers' linguistic background, training, experience, and ability on their marking of students' oral language tests; the reliability of marking criteria; and the validity of assessing…