With a forward-looking and problem-solving mindset, this article aims to combine theoretical knowledge and empirical evidence from different schools of thought in the field of second language (L2) learning and teaching--namely, instructed second language acquisition, generative linguistics, and an ecological perspective that includes multiple…

Although English and German are both Germanic languages, due to various historical changes, many of their cognates are no longer easily recognizable. This study examined whether knowledge of language history can be beneficial to learners when learning English-German cognates. Thirty-five English-speaking second language (L2) learners of…

Competent L2 writing has been described in research in terms of an increasing incidence, variety, and length of clauses; a countervailing compactness and tightness with reduced number of clauses even as clause length expands; and various interrelationships between syntactic realizations of texts and the genres they represent. These partly…

Lexical proficiency in a second language (L2) has long been effectively assessed through the measurement of various lexical indices, or textual characteristics that act as observable indicators of such conceptual categories as lexical richness, diversity, sophistication, and fluency. While many studies have established links between these lexical…

Applied linguists have been exploring approaches to second language acquisition and competence that move beyond a prioritization of cognition and grammar that was derived from the foundational structuralist legacy in linguistics. Recently, for example, they have collaborated in putting together an integrated alternative model (Douglas Fir Group,…

The effects of learner- and task-related variables on second language (L2) writing syntactic complexity (SC) have been extensively investigated. However, previous research has rarely assessed the reliability of computational tools for analyzing the SC of L2 spoken production, and we know less about the effects of such variables on L2 speaking SC.…

In this article we introduce Positive Psychology (PP), a relatively new subfield of psychology, and outline its development since the year 2000. We describe ways in which PP represents an exciting addition to the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) literature and the ways it is already influencing trends in education generally, thus creating…

To date, attempts at empirically validating a construct of academic vocabulary in the form of a frequency list in languages other than English remain conspicuously absent in peer-reviewed journals. This study aims to close this gap by using Russian as a case study to develop an academic vocabulary list and prove its viability through a variety of…

This study examines the putative benefits of explicit phonetic instruction, high variability phonetic training, and their effects on adult nonnative speakers' Mandarin tone productions. Monolingual first language (L1) English speakers (n = 80), intermediate second language (L2) Mandarin learners (n = 40), and L1 Mandarin speakers (n = 40) took…

This article reports two intervention studies testing the effects of plurilingual teaching on grammatical development among primary-school students learning English as a foreign language (FL). In a pre-posttest control-group design, more than 200 9-10-year old majority language German and minority language students received plurilingual FL…

Linguistic complexity serves as an important measure of second language (L2) writing development. Complexity indices, however, rarely feature in the studies of learner languages other than English. Additionally, L2 writing studies have been criticized for the lack of consistency in defining proficiency. The current study addresses these gaps by…

This special issue contains reports of research on a variety of variables that are hypothesized to have an impact on how practice affects language learning. This includes spacing of practice opportunities, the provision of feedback, training working memory, and oral versus written input. Each study is complex and clearly contextualized within the…

This study draws on multimodal conversation analysis to emically account for moments in second language (L2) English interaction in which speakers appear to be visualizing text as they talk. One way they do this is by slotting out elements of a turn-in-progress in the air, shifting their hand in a slotting gesture from left to right as they say…

This study examined how mode of input affects the learning of pronunciation and form-meaning connection of second language (L2) words. Seventy-five Japanese learners of English were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions (reading while listening, reading only, listening only), studied 40 low-frequency words while viewing their corresponding…

In commercial materials for the teaching of second language (L2) pronunciation, common bottom-up approaches segment phonology into a series of discrete and decontextualized linguistic components with rules that students are encouraged to internalize. Such approaches seem out of step with recent second language acquisition (SLA) theory and research…