From one of the leading figures in the field of second language acquisition and second language teaching, "While We're on the Topic..." offers an up-to-date overview of six principles underlying contemporary communicative language teaching. In a conversational style, Bill VanPatten addresses principles related to the nature of…

Purpose: Evidence for tense marking in child-directed speech varies both across languages (Guasti, 2002; Legate & Yang, 2007) and across speakers of a single language (Hadley, Rispoli, Fitzgerald, & Bahnsen, 2011). The purpose of this study was to understand how parent interaction styles and register use overlap with the tense-marking…

This article reports on a study which took place in the context of the design and development of an online dictionary prototype for learners of French. Aspects of the "usability", i.e. the quality of the "learner-task-dictionary interaction" of the prototype were tested. Micro-tasks were designed to focus on learners'…

This paper is a research in the second Language acquisition (SLA) with its focus on the role of input, interaction and output in the development of oral fluency in the EFL context from both a theoretical point of view and a case study. Two instruments were used: tests of oral fluency and face-to-face interviews. The findings showed that non-native…

Interaction has been argued to promote noticing of L2 form in a context crucial to learning--when there is a mismatch between the input and the learner's interlanguage (IL) grammar (Gass & Varonis, 1994; Long, 1996; Pica, 1994). This paper investigates the extent to which learners may notice native speakers' reformulations of their IL grammar in…

This study examines the role of task-based conversation in second language (L2) grammatical development, focusing on the short-term effects of both negative feedback and positive evidence on the acquisition of two Japanese structures. The data are drawn from 55 L2 learners of Japanese at a beginning level of proficiency in an Australian tertiary…

This paper investigates the effects of input and interaction as separate entities and in combination. We further investigate these effects as a function of different language areas. One hundred two learners of L2 Spanish were provided with input on (a) Spanish gender agreement (noun + adjective), (b) "estar" + location, and (c) seven vocabulary…