An important issue in second-language acquisition concerns the role of explicit information (EI) and how it is affected by individual differences. The present study explored this question through a partial replication and extension of Fernández (2008: Experiment 2), which investigated the effects of EI in processing instruction (PI) for the…

This study investigates whether linguistic outcomes of second language (L2) learners' performance are consistent across oral and written modalities and, if so, whether the consistency remains across proficiency levels. The study also explores whether the linguistic outcomes of speaking, writing, or both are related to working memory capacity.…

As an alternative to conventional instruction and evaluation methods, dynamic assessment aims to promote language learning by utilising an interactive approach. As a subset of dynamic assessment, the interventionist approach to dynamic assessment focuses on mediation from implicit to explicit. In spite of its central role in language learning and…

This study replicates Felser and Roberts (2007), which used a cross-modal picture priming task to examine indirect-object dependency processing in classroom L2 learners. The replication focuses on early L2 learners with extensive naturalistic L2 exposure (n = 22)--an understudied group in the literature--and investigates whether these learners, in…

While the relationship between language experience and foreign language aptitude (FLA) has been studied extensively, little is known about the underlying intermediate link between them. This study investigates whether multilingual learning experience is correlated with FLA and whether working memory (WM) mediates this relationship. A total of 93…

The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has revolutionized language education. For teachers and students, it provides more options for personalized learning that can be utilized inside or outside of the classroom with real-time feedback. While AI has been pivotal in making language education accessible for students, including…

Learning a language is one typical and common cognitive phenomenon among human beings. What matters even most, is the additional language learning and advantages it may confer; an issue which cannot be simply overlooked in cognitive studies. The developmental effect of learning an additional language on memory is something that is confirmed in…

Lexical ability, an umbrella term to cover various knowledge and skills pertaining to words in print, is a key component in reading comprehension. Little is known how different facets of lexical ability jointly contribute to L2 reading comprehension and how the contributions may differ between higher- and lower-proficiency L2 learners. This study,…

Since its first adoption as a computational model for language learning, evidence has accumulated that Rescorla-Wagner error-correction learning (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) captures several aspects of language processing. Whereas previous studies have provided general support for the Rescorla-Wagner rule by using it to explain the behavior of…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

We report on a conceptual replication of Révész (2012) in order to investigate the idea whether learners provided with recasts do engage in different kinds of behavioral engagement as a function of their working memory and if/how this engagement comes to bear on performance on different measures. Engagement with recasts was measured through a…

This paper examines how research in second language acquisition has approached the study of cognitive individual differences in the process and product of L2 writing from a theoretical and empirical perspective, paying special attention to the three empirical studies included in this special issue. The paper is divided into three sections. The…

Usage-based theory has proposed that learning of linguistic constructions is facilitated by input that contains few high-frequency exemplars, in what is known as a skewed (or Zipfian) input distribution. Early empirical work provided support to this idea, but subsequent L2 research has provided mixed findings. However, previous approaches have not…

"How can teachers help students improve their second language (L2) speaking accuracy?" This is a question that most L2 educators ask themselves every day. Although L2 writing is a popular topic among Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers, the consideration that L2 writing has the potential to act as a scaffold for L2 speaking…

The present study aims to examine incidental vocabulary learning from different genres of captioned videos while considering frequency, vocabulary knowledge, comprehension, and working memory. A total of 210 learners who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) were assigned to 6 treatment conditions that differed in terms of video genres…