Arabic orthography is mainly presented either in shallow orthography (with all diacritics) for novice students or in deep orthography (without diacritics) for superior readers. However, the shallow orthography is heavily loaded with diacritics which may burden the reading process, whereas deep orthography can cause ambiguity (heterophonic…

This research addresses implicit learning of temporal meanings in English by adult non-native readers of German, a language without morphosyntactic imperfective aspect. Twenty-four learners from mixed first languages participated in a norming study assessing unenhanced aspect awareness. Then, in a second experiment, 91 native-German learners…

For elementary learners of Japanese, one of the main difficulties in reading is to distinguish words written in kana. This paper reports on a survey of elementary level learners with two different levels of proficiency to investigate the effectiveness of Japanese graded readers with parts of speech color-coded to distinguish nouns, verbs,…

Reading comprehension in L2 has been shown to be correlated to vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. However, little is known about the relative contribution of morphosyntactic knowledge in this language competence. In the present study we investigated the contribution of morphosyntactic knowledge of some particular grammatical elements to the…

We report 2 self-paced reading experiments investigating the longevity of structural priming effects in comprehending reduced relative clauses among adult Chinese-speaking learners of English. Experiment 1 showed that structural priming occurred both when prime and target sentences were immediately adjacent and when they were separated by 1 or 2…

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…

The extent to which learners benefit from instruction may be largely dependent on their individual abilities. However, there is relatively little work on the interaction between instructional effectiveness in second language learning and learner individual factors. In this study, we investigated the relationship between instruction, individual…

Previous research investigating the effectiveness of textual enhancement as a tool to draw adult second language (L2) learners' attention to the targeted linguistic form has consistently produced mixed results. This article examines how L2 form recognition and reading comprehension are affected by different types of textual enhancement.…

The present study examines how glossing of second language (L2) texts affects L2 learners' reading comprehension as well as their learning of L2 grammar and vocabulary. It employed a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest design with two treatment sessions. The target features were English unaccusativity and 10 pseudo-word items.…

In this study, we examine explicit information and aptitude within processing instruction. Forty-six learners of German in their third semester of study were divided into two groups: those who received explicit information prior to treatment (+EI) and those who did not (-EI). Participants also took the grammatical sensitivity portion of the Modern…

The theme for this year's annual graduate student conference of the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature (LLL) was "Your Voice, My Voice: Literature, Language, Culture and Society." Translation and interpretation guided the theme for the conference, with Dr. Marvin Puakea Nogelmeier of the Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian…

Proponents of Processing Instruction (VanPatten, 2005) claim that learners benefit most when presented with both referential and affective structured input activities. Following a classic pretest-posttest design, the present study investigates the role of these two types of activities on the learning of the Spanish subjunctive. Groups differed…

Explicit systematic phonics instruction is more effective for native English-speaking children learning to read and write than non explicit phonics instruction (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). This study goes beyond native speakers, and explores the effects that systematic and explicit phonics instruction has on…

In this article, we extend Firth and Wagner's (1997) call for an ontological perspective that (re)unites the individual and the social by proposing some fundamental implications that this call has for second language (L2) classroom praxis and teacher education. We propose that the (re)unification of language and culture (re)establishes the unity…

A study investigated the effects of varying the morphological characteristics of input on comprehension and input processing. Nine targeted subjunctive verbs in a text were substituted with infinitives and a nonsense morpheme. Passage comprehension, measured by recall, was significantly lower for the correct, subjunctive forms than for incorrect…