This paper investigates the difficulties adult second language (L2) users of English encounter with plosive consonants in the L2. It presents the results of a task examining the acquisition of plosive voicing contrasts by college students with Cypriot Greek (CG) linguistic background. The task focused on the types of errors involving plosive…

We ask whether an adult learner's knowledge of their native language impedes statistical learning in a new language beyond just word segmentation (as previously shown). In particular, we examine the impact of native-language word-form phonotactics on learners' ability to segment words into their component morphemes and learn phonologically…

Increased English learner accuracy can be achieved by leading students through six stages of awareness. The first three awareness stages build up students' motivation to improve, and the second three provide learners with crucial input for change. The final result is "sustained language awareness," resulting in ongoing…

A comparison of the error profiles of monolingual (child L1) learners of Dutch, Moroccan children (child L2) and Moroccan adults (adult L2) learning Dutch as their L2 shows that participants in all groups massively overgeneralize [-neuter] articles to [+neuter] contexts. In all groups, the reverse gender mistake infrequently occurs. Gender…

The patterns of acquisition of the passe compose and imperfect tenses in French among 16 adult beginning and intermediate students were studied. Based on 15-minute speech samples in which both verb tenses were elicited by seeded questions and cues for descriptive and narrative monologues, the intermediate learners had greater success with the…

A study of the acquisition of the auxiliary (tense, modal, perfect, and progressive) by 36 adult learners of English as a second language at three levels whose first languages were Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish is reported. The students were given three tests, on oral production, written production, and written reception. Nineteen verb structures…

This study analyzes Spanish and German errors committed by adult native speakers of English enrolled in elementary and intermediate levels. Four written samples were collected for each target language, over a period of five months. Errors were categorized according to their possible source. Types of errors were ordered according to their…

Examines the role and significance of systematic error correction and explicit grammatical explanation in adult foreign language education. The type and nature of certain grammatical errors which are characteristic of the interlanguage of Arab learners of English as a second language and which seem insusceptible to defossilization are…

The role of language transfer in the acquisition of English as a second language as indicated in the production of relative clauses was examined. Analysis of adult Arab students' written responses to a variety of test types revealed that (1) language transfer is a significant factor in second language acquisition; (2) there is a distinction…

This study focuses on a native speaker of Chinese, in her 40's, who began to learn English in her late 20's when she emigrated to the United States. It was discovered that the subject was able to self-correct nearly every error she made in casual speech when the errors were pointed out to her after their commission. Furthermore, in nearly every…

Current research on adult second language learning suggests that study is necessary to separate interference variables from intralinguistic variables and to determine the relative difficulty of structures in each group. This research on the acquisition of the English relative clause was specifically designed to test the transfer hypothesis…

Discusses the value of classifying the errors adult language learners make and of comparing them to errors made by children. It is suggested that teachers correct student errors in the same way parents correct children's errors in order to encourage successful learning. (CFM)

A case study of second language development in a college student focused on comparative changes in the development of oral and written skills over a period of two years. The subject was a Russian student of English as a second language who had recently arrived in the United States. Errors and syntactic maturity were analyzed in writing samples…