This article foregrounds the role of the learner's experienced and expressive body in the process of action-oriented intercultural second language acquisition (SLA), drawing on phenomenological and related research on embodiment. It suggests that processes of perception, cognition, intentionality, and action are fundamentally shaped by the…

Multimodality has been a growing research interest in the field of applied linguistics. With the actor-network theory as an analytic framework, the purpose of the present study was to explore how university students of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) take advantage of both material and non-material semiotic resources while being…

Adopting a broader dialogical conceptual lens on interactive listening, this study examines advanced adult learners' language use and thought processes during a problem-solving task. Twenty English as a second language (L2) students from a Scottish university participated in the study. They worked in pairs on the task before taking part in…

The relevance of the present issue is caused be the strong need in alternative methods of learning foreign language and the need in language training and retraining for the modern professionals. The aim of the article is to identify the basic techniques and skills in using various modern techniques in the context of modern educational tasks. The…

This dissertation investigated the effects of technological mediation on second language (L2) learning, focusing, as a case study, on gains in listening perception of the subtle but important feature of pitch placement in Japanese. Pitch accent can be difficult to perceive for non-native speakers whose first language (L1) does not rely on pitch or…

Given that the linguistic articulators for sign language are also used to produce co-speech gesture, we examined whether one year of academic instruction in American Sign Language (ASL) impacts the rate and nature of gestures produced when speaking English. A survey study revealed that 75% of ASL learners (N = 95), but only 14% of Romance language…

In this article, we describe a programme of qualitative research and interpretive analysis around an approach to foreign language pedagogy that aimed to develop learners' symbolic competence through experience with and examination of the signs in acts of communication. Learners were presented with the problem of visually representing the abstract…

Recent research in psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that co-speech gestures are semantically integrated with speech during language comprehension and development. The present study explored whether gestures also play a role in language learning in adults. In Experiment 1, we exposed adults to a brief training session presenting novel…

This article examines how eight advanced ESL learners attend to and utilize the nonverbal information found in a video text. Using verbal report methodology in which test-takers verbalized aloud their thought processes while taking a video listening test, the results suggested that the test-takers varied in how they attended to and utilized the…

This paper investigates the potential relationship of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) to gesture and second language learning. It is asserted that the ZPD is both a tool and a result, not a tool for result; it is both product and process at the same time. The process of learning a new language/culture in the case of a person who is…