The acquisition of communicative competence in second and foreign languages requires the incorporation of verbal and non-verbal elements. Notwithstanding, few studies have performed empirical research into the acquisition of non-verbal signs. This research studies the learning of emblematic gestures for students of Spanish in the USA using an…

Studies have documented the significance of scaffolding as a sociocultural theory driven type of assistance for the development of English as foreign language (EFL) learners' language skills in general; however, the comparative efficacy of various cognitive and/or metacognitive scaffolding procedures for EFL learners' listening comprehension…

This study explores whether middle-school students can exploit explicitly addressed crosslinguistic lexical similarities between German and English to learn vocabulary more efficiently. Across six weeks, 260 Swiss German learners of English as a foreign language (17 classes) completed three vocabulary learning tests (T1, T2 and T3). Additionally,…

This study explored second language (L2) competence in discontinuous discursive formulaic sequences, namely Chinese correlative connectives (CCCs; e.g. yinwei . . . suy 'because . . . so'), in relation to the determinants of formulaic sequence acquisition by scrutinizing L2 Chinese learners' performance on two controlled tasks. Mixed-effects…

This study discusses the impact of interactionist output-oriented approaches, specifically, the effects of collaborative text reconstruction on subjunctive recognition and production in the written modality by English-dominant Spanish second-language learners. It also examines whether students' text length and text complexity increase after…

This study employs eye-tracking to investigate how first (L1) and second language (L2) glosses affect lexical uptake and reading behaviors in L2 learners of English. The study also explores the relationship between lexical uptake and reading behaviors as a function of gloss type. To investigate this, 81 Korean university students were asked to…

Existing research has established captions as effective second-language (L2) or foreign language (FL) listening comprehension aids. However, due to the transient nature of captions, not all learners are capable of attending to captions in all cases. Previous work posited that to leverage the impact of technologies in learning and instruction, a…

The present study investigates the effects of two subsequent learning contexts, formal instruction (FI) at home and a 3-month stay abroad (SA), on vocabulary acquisition in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing and speaking. Data were collected from 30 Catalan/Spanish learners of English before and after each learning period using a written…

Research on second language (L2) grammar in task-based language learning has yielded inconsistent results regarding the effects of task-complexity, prompting calls for more nuanced analyses of L2 development and task performance. The present cross-sectional study contributes to this discussion by comparing the performance of 245 learners of German…

The present study examined the interaction effects between teachers' choice of language in lexical explanation and second language (L2) learners' proficiency level on the learning of phrasal verbs and listening comprehension in a meaning-focused listening activity. Undergraduate L2 learners with two different levels of proficiency (intermediate…

The extent to which learners benefit from instruction may be largely dependent on their individual abilities. However, there is relatively little work on the interaction between instructional effectiveness in second language learning and learner individual factors. In this study, we investigated the relationship between instruction, individual…

The present mixed-methods study examined the role of learner appraisals of speech tasks in second language (L2) French fluency. Forty adult learners in a Canadian immersion program participated in the study that compared four sources of data: (1) objectively measured utterance fluency in participants' performances of three narrative tasks…

While learners' engagement has been recognized as important for second language (L2) learning in task-based language teaching (TBLT), how engagement is manifest in learners' L2 use during task performance and how tasks can be designed to facilitate better engagement have not received enough attention in the L2 research. This study investigates the…