Curriculum development and empirical research in the field of second language acquisition could benefit the field of critical language pedagogy (CLP) and its practitioners. This article reviews central concepts in the organization of curriculum in CLP and compares them with another major curricular initiative in second language teaching, namely…

The Topic Hypothesis posits that Chinese language learners progress through a developmental sequence comprising five stages (Gao, 2009; Wang, 2011), which includes the Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure at stage 4 and the ba-construct at stage 5. According to this hypothesis, learners typically master the OSV structure before acquiring the…

Situated within Sociocultural theory (SCT), this article analyzed an existing data set (Toth, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, available at https://www.iris-database.org) to investigate learners' development through participation in a dialogic approach to grammar instruction called PACE. The target of instruction was the Spanish pronominal clitic…

The introduction of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (SCT) into the second language (L2) domain provides a potential site to explore the mechanisms underlying L2 learners' cognitive modification and the transformation of social understanding into the personal one. This study provided a picture of L2 personalization in two groups of advanced and…

Concept-based language instruction (C-BLI) is a pedagogy guided by sociocultural theory, which has been shown to be effective in facilitating second language learning. Typical activities include materialization by using a schema for a complete orienting basis of an action (SCOBA) and languaging, through which learners' internalization of…

The present work examines the impact of code-switching (CS) on novel word learning in adult second language (L2) learners of Spanish. Participants completed two sessions (1-3 days apart). In the first session, they were taught 32 nonwords corresponding to novel creatures. Training occurred across 4 conditions: (1) a sentence in English only, (2) a…

A large number of studies have explored grammar instruction through implicit and explicit instructional conditions. The general conclusion drawn from these studies points to the superiority of explicit instruction; however, the claim has been attenuated by a number of reservations raised regarding its generalizability across types of grammatical…

This study investigates the effects of four online vocabulary tasks on second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition among learners of different proficiency levels. While tasks are widely used to support L2 vocabulary learning, the efficacy of a task depends on the interplay between task and learner factors. Thus, choosing an appropriate task…

The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

The aim of this personal reflection is to revisit the major concepts that have informed my academic research in the area of applied linguistics and second language development, and show how my overall pedagogical approach has evolved, thanks to the contribution of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (SCT). The main focus of this paper is on the…

The present study draws on Flow Theory to examine the relationship between task repetition and the quality of learners' subjective experience during task execution. Flow is defined as a positive experiential state characterized by intense focus and involvement in meaningful and challenging, but doable tasks, which has been associated with enhanced…

From the perspective of complexity theory and based on Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis and the Triadic Componential Framework, this paper investigated the effect of manipulating task complexity along resource-dispersing dimension on L2 written performance. The results showed that: 1) Significant interactive effects were found between the two…

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of multilingual education, highlighting key issues, methodologies, and future directions in this area. Based on the theoretical foundations of Vygotsky and Krashen, as well as practical approaches such as project-based learning and task-based language learning, the study highlights the importance of…

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) and task-supported language teaching (TSLT) are often seen as incompatible as they draw on different theories of language learning and language teaching. The position adopted in this article, however, is that both approaches are needed especially in instructional contexts where 'pure' task-based teaching may be…

This article suggests three teaching ideas to help L2 learners improve speaking performances through form-focused instruction using formulaic language. Formulaic language is considered an effective way to foster speaking fluency because prefabricated chunks are faster to retrieve than constructing sentences word by word (Wray, 2002). In spite of…