This study examined the extent to which 40 students enrolled in upper level foreign language literary/cultural studies content courses showed evidence of incidental language learning over the course of a semester. Students completed a cloze passage and provided both writing and speaking samples at the beginning and end of the semester. In…

Achievement of advanced literacy as a goal of foreign language (FL) study within the available amount of time requires that FL departments construct a well-articulated program and optimize student learning at each stage of the curriculum. One essential element of such optimization is the development of assessment procedures to place students into…

This study investigates whether native Hmong speakers' first language (L1) lexical tone experience facilitates or interferes with their perception of Mandarin tones and whether training is effective for perceptual learning of second (L2) tones. In Experiment 1, 3 groups of beginning level learners of Mandarin with different L1 prosodic background…

This study examined variability in Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners' development of the Chinese numeral classifier system from a dynamic systems approach. Our data consisted of a longitudinal corpus of 657 essays written by CFL learners at lower and higher intermediate levels and a corpus of 100 essays written by native speakers (NSs)…

This study investigates whether practice with computer-administered feedback in the absence of meaning-focused interaction can help second language learners notice the corrective intent of recasts and develop linguistic accuracy. A group of 218 beginning Anglophone learners of Spanish received 1 of 4 types of automated feedback (no feedback,…

This study investigates the case of 7 female heritage learners of Spanish who have chosen, as adults, to enroll in online Spanish language instruction at the postsecondary level. Drawing on symbolic convergence theory, it identifies a cultural fantasy metanarrative that participants collectively constructed as they made sense of their language…

This article reports on a study that examined the effects of integrating corpus and contextualized lexicogrammar in foreign and second language teaching. The study was conducted in English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL) courses at 1 Chinese university and 2 U.S. universities, involving 244 participants (236…

This study examined the effect of emblematic gestures on the development and access of mental representations of French expressions among 112 college students in a first-semester French course. It found that groups that saw the emblematic gestures forgot significantly fewer sentences than the group that did not see the gestures. Contains 34…

An experimental, intensive German language course for graduate students at Washington State University is described. (RL)

A study investigated which of many possible variables in the student's language learning background (formal learning, exposure and use in class, extracurricular exposure and use, attitudes and motivation) were important in second-language learning. Subjects were 101 students in intensive English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL). Several success factors…

Discusses the possibility of anxiety in response to foreign- or second-language reading. Introduces the construct of foreign-language reading anxiety, offers a scale for its measurement, and reports on a preliminary study of reading anxiety in 30 intact first-semester classes of Spanish, Russian, and Japanese. (VWL)

Compared student retention of information in foreign-language videos in two advance organizer conditions. Participants were 67 college students enrolled in five sections of a beginning-level French course. Findings were interpreted as supportive of the premise that it is significantly better to incorporate an advance organizer with video than not.…

Discusses the design, results, and implications from a study involving beginning college-level language students who read a 142-page romance novel in their first semester of German. A treatment group followed the same standard first-semester syllabus as the comparison group, but replaced all standard reading assignments in the textbook with daily…

College students enrolled in an introductory French course viewed 12 French-language videos, with 1 group exposed to oral descriptions and pictures from the videos before viewing and a second group exposed to only oral descriptions. Students in the description-plus-pictures group demonstrated higher levels of comprehension than students in the…

Because interaction gives language learners an opportunity to modify their speech upon a signal of noncomprehension, it should also have a positive effect on native speakers' (NS) comprehension of nonnative speakers (NNS). This study shows that interaction does help NSs comprehend NNSs, contrasting the claims of an earlier study that found no…