The current project longitudinally investigated the extent to which first-year Japanese university students developed their second language (L2) oral ability in relation to increased input in foreign language classrooms. Their spontaneous speech was elicited at the beginning, middle and end of one academic year, and then judged by linguistically…

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

The current study examined how form-focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) as output enhancement facilitated second language (L2) perception of Mandarin tones at both the phonetic and phonological levels by 41 Cantonese learners of Mandarin. Two experimental groups, FFI only and FFI-CF, received a 90-min FFI treatment…

Since the famous Truscott's "The case against grammar correction in L2 writing class" (1996) there has been an ongoing debate in SLA research about the value of corrective feedback and its different forms. A growing number of empirical research is now investigating the question, and although more and more evidence is obtained against Truscott's…

In Estonian, as in a number of other languages, the nuclear pitch accent is often low and level. This paper presents two studies of this phenomenon. The first, a phonetic analysis of carefully structured read sentences shows that low accentuation can also spread to the prenuclear accents in an intonational phrase. The resulting sentence contours…