During spoken word processing, native (L1) listeners use allophonic variation to predictively rule out word competitors and speed up word recognition. There is some evidence that second language (L2) learners develop an awareness of allophonic distributions in their L2, but whether they use their knowledge to facilitate word recognition online,…

The results of a self-paced reading study with advanced German, Dutch and French second language (L2) learners of English showed that their online comprehension of early closure (EC) sentences which are initially misanalysed by native English speakers (e.g. "While John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped") was affected by whether or…

Based on Sloin's (1996b) thinking for speaking approach, the study examines L1 influence on the use of English deictic Motion verbs for Chinese EFL learners and French EFL learners. The aim is to find out whether language learners will be influenced by the particular Thinking for Speaking acquired in L1 in the process of L2 acquisition. It is…

This study adopts Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) theory of linguistic typology and Slobin's (2003, 2004) hypothesis of Thinking-for-Speaking to investigate the use of additional expressions of Manner in the expression of Motion events by Chinese EFL learners in comparison with French EFL learners. The aim is to find out the Thinking-for-Speaking…

A Virtual Resource Center (VRC) has been brought into use since 2008 as an integral part of a task-based language teaching and learning program for Business English courses at Nantes University, France. The objective of the center is to enable students to work autonomously and individually on their language problems so as to improve their language…

This study aims to examine language dominance and language switching effects in a series of monolingual and multilingual lexical decisions in which participants have to decide if the presented letter string is a word or not, regardless of language. Thirty participants (12 French-English bilinguals and 18 French-English-Spanish trilinguals) were…

Describes an experiment whose principal aim was to examine how a classroom silent period, devoted almost exclusively to aural comprehension, operates. In the case of the French adult learners of English involved in this study, 60 hours proved to be a satisfactory period. (SED)