Although lexical diversity is often used as a measure of productive proficiency (e.g., as an aspect of lexical complexity) in SLA studies involving oral tasks, relatively little research has been conducted to support the reliability and/or validity of these indices in spoken contexts. Furthermore, SLA researchers commonly use indices of lexical…

This study used eye-tracking to investigate the real-time processing of phonetic and semantic radicals (components of Chinese characters that give clues to their pronunciation and meaning) by intermediate-level university Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners. Additionally, the study examined how knowledge and awareness of radicals affect…

The relationship between written and spoken recall (SR) has primarily been analyzed with English-speaking monolinguals. Written recall (WR) has been reported more accurate due to higher cognitive load and attention required to produce a text. This study examined the written and spoken text recall relationship in L2 learners of Russian and analyzed…

Learning Chinese characters could be challenging for many CSL learners due to the distinction in orthographic features between the Chinese written system and their first languages. While acquisition of orthographic knowledge could be important for learning Chinese characters, how they can gain knowledge about different aspects of Chinese…

This study investigates whether re-thinking the separation of lexis and grammar in language testing could lead to more valid inferences about proficiency across modes. As argued by Römer, typical scoring rubrics ignore important information about proficiency encoded at the lexis-grammar interface, in particular how the co-selection of lexical and…

Purpose: The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study was to determine whether English learners who participated in transitional kindergarten perform equally or better than English learners who did not participate in transitional kindergarten in the areas of oral language, written language, and overall language as measured by the…

This study aims to improve English Language Teaching (ELT) student teachers' teaching practice process with comprehensive and diverse feedback from four different mentors (two national and two international) and to help them better prepare lesson plans and micro-teaching considering intercultural perspectives. Non-parametric tests were used to…

Students always need sincere and kind guidance from the teachers. Hence, a true customer orientation is instrumental in teaching English as it is always good to understand the students' needs to improve their performance. This paper addresses the requirement to understand the students' needs and then teach accordingly to improve the quality of the…

This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided…

This study investigated the effects of task complexity on child learners' second language (L2) gains, the relationship between aptitude and L2 development, and the extent to which task complexity influences this relationship when recasts are provided. Sixty child EFL learners were assigned to two experimental groups. During the treatment, one…

Lexical richness makes an important contribution to L2 writing quality. To explore its importance, the study aims to identify and explain how lexical richness manifests in argumentative essays written in the final exam of reading and writing class by thirty-five undergraduates. The lexical richness consists of four interrelated elements: lexical…

Despite a growing amount of research on collaborative dialogue during task performance, little attention has been given to the occurrence of collaborative dialogue across task modality and its impact on language development. To expand our current understanding of task modality effects on learning opportunities, we examined the process of engaging…

This paper studies the pragmatic competence of U.S. heritage speakers of Spanish in an attempt to determine (a) the degree of pragmatic transfer from English to Spanish experienced by heritage speakers when producing different types of requests in Spanish; and (b) how to best teach pragmatics to students of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL).…

This study explored the pedagogical benefits of flipped online kanji (i.e., Chinese characters used in Japanese) instruction integrated into college-level introductory and intermediate Japanese language courses. Using a quasi-experimental mixed design, the investigation looked at the effects of two instructional approaches: (1) a flip approach in…

Corpus linguistics identifies the qualitative difference in the characteristics of spoken discourse vs. written academic discourse. Whereas spoken discourse makes greater use of finite dependent clauses functioning as constituents in other clauses, written academic discourse incorporates noun phrase constituents and complex phrases. This claim can…