Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty with novel L2 phonological contrasts, limiting their ability to establish contrastive lexical representations of L2 words. It has been demonstrated that the availability of orthographic input (OI), and variables interacting with OI, can shape the inferences learners make about L2…

The role of explicit information (EI) as an independent variable in instructed SLA is largely underresearched. Using the framework of processing instruction, however, a series of offline studies has found no effect for EI (e.g., Benati, 2004; Sanz & Morgan-Short, 2004; VanPatten & Oikkenon, 1996). Fernandez (2008) presented two online experiments…

After discussing the ties between language teaching and second language acquisition research, the present paper reviews the role that second language acquisition research has played on two recent pedagogical proposals. First, communicative language teaching, advocated in the early eighties, in which focus on the code was excluded, and then the…