Research has indicated that lexical richness is an important indicator of second language (L2) proficiency. However, most research has examined written, cross-sectional English L2 corpora and does not necessarily indicate how spoken lexical use develops over time or whether observed trends are stable across L2s. This study adds to previous…

Although lexical diversity is often used as a measure of productive proficiency (e.g., as an aspect of lexical complexity) in SLA studies involving oral tasks, relatively little research has been conducted to support the reliability and/or validity of these indices in spoken contexts. Furthermore, SLA researchers commonly use indices of lexical…

Second language (L2) teachers may shy away from self-assessments because of warnings that students are not accurate self-assessors. This information stems from meta-analyses in which self-assessment scores on average did not correlate highly with proficiency test results. However, researchers mostly used Pearson correlations, when polyserial could…

In the Afro-Colombian community of San Basilio de Palenque, there are school-based efforts to revitalize the once-endangered creole language Palenquero. At present, most Palenquero language classes do not include grammatical instruction, active student production, or corrective feedback, and there is little or no communication in Palenquero…

This aptitude-treatment interaction study investigated the extent to which explicit and implicit cognitive abilities are differentially related to learning outcomes under two corrective feedback conditions. One hundred and thirteen intermediate English learners of Spanish were randomly assigned to an implicit feedback (recast), explicit feedback…

The current study examined the effects of task condition (TC; single vs. dual) and proficiency level (PL) on self-monitoring of second language (L2) speakers. Data were collected from sixty-six female L2 learners of English performing two speaking tasks under two task conditions. While performance in the single-task condition involved only…

This study builds upon previous research investigating the construct validity of phraseological complexity as an index of L2 development and proficiency. Whereas previous studies have focused on cross-sectional comparisons of written productions across proficiency levels, the current study compares the "longitudinal" development of…

Elicited imitation tasks (EITs) have been shown to be a valid, reliable, and practical method for establishing second-language (L2) oral proficiency across a variety of languages. Nevertheless, research that has validated existing EITs has most often explored a narrow range of learner proficiencies or has examined how well the EIT distinguishes…

The current study examined the extent to which cognitive fluency (CF) contributes to utterance fluency (UF) at the level of constructs. A total of 128 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed four speaking tasks--argumentative task, picture narrative task, reading-to-speaking task, and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task--and a battery…

Elicited imitation (EI), a short-cut measure of global proficiency in second language (L2) research, requires participants to listen to sentences and repeat them as closely as possible. To support instrument sharing and assessment of L2 proficiency for longitudinal and crosslinguistic research, we created a parallel form of an EI task (EIT) for L2…

This study investigated the constructs underlying second language (L2) word association (WA) with regard to three dimensions of lexical competence--size, organization, and accessibility--and the lexical performance of speech. One-hundred and thirteen Japanese learners of English completed a computer-delivered oral WA task along with three…

This study assessed the extent to which captions, textually unenhanced and enhanced, can draw learners' attention to and promote the acquisition of a second language (L2) grammatical construction. A pretest-posttest-delayed posttest experimental design was employed. Seventy-two Korean learners of English were randomly assigned to an enhanced…

The current study investigates the effects of more explicit versus more implicit corrective feedback on beginner Mandarin learners' perception and production of Mandarin tones. The effects of oral corrective feedback have been extensively investigated for various domains of second language acquisition (see Mackey & Goo, 2007). For phonological…

This exploratory study aimed to examine whether early exposure to Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) provides facilitation in word-knowledge development in collegiate CHL learners by comparing word-level subskills, including oral vocabulary knowledge, print vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and lexical inferencing ability, between…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether processability theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998, 2005) accounts for the emergence of grammatical forms and structures in comprehension. Sixty-one learners of English participated in oral interviews that elicited a variety of structures relevant to PT. Learners were divided into two groups: those who…