As technology continues to evolve, authentic multimedia-based teaching materials are widely used in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. However, they may lie beyond most language learners' proficiency level. The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of advance organizers in conjunction with the cognitive theory of…

This study examined the second language (L2) development of adult learners of Spanish at three levels of proficiency during and after a semester of instruction. A fundamental goal was to identify cognitive and psychosocial individual differences (IDs) that can explain between-learner variation over time in order to expand our understanding of the…

Study of echoic memory interference among students in college introductory Spanish and German courses revealed that students with weaker listening comprehension skills depended more upon vulnerable sensory codes in echoic memory, while students with stronger comprehension relied on stable higher-order codes. (Author/CB)

Two studies assessed the impact of short-term memory on English as a Second Language learning. The first involved 20 graduate students at a Taiwanese university, who were randomly divided into treatment and control groups. It investigated differences in the performance of phrase recollection when the information was chunked versus unchunked.…

A study of foreign students' English acquisition used short-term memory tasks to determine if phonological encoding of visually presented verbal material occurred during reading. Students not using oral repetition in English showed greater phonological interference and longer reaction times. Correlation with reading proficiency was small.…

A study investigated the immediate recall protocol as a means of determining what second language learners retain of a spoken text. Three factors in comprehension were considered: topic familiarity, topic accessibility, and topic structure. A dialogue, a news broadcast, and a popular song were all presented to groups of beginning-level students of…

Comparison of three training conditions for Spanish-vocabulary development with 30 deaf undergraduates found no significant differences for short-term memory. However, long-term-memory scores under the repeated writing condition were significantly higher than scores under the fingerspelling or silent-reading conditions. (Author/DB)

A study compared the effects of cognitive complexity on the speech production of 14 advanced non-native speakers of English and 14 native English-speakers. Cognitively simple and complex tasks were distinguished based on text type (narrative versus expository). Subjects read one narrative and one expository text in separate sessions, then wrote…