This study explores whether and to what extent the background information supplied by 10,155 immigrants who took an official language test in Norwegian affected their chances of passing one, two, or all three parts of the test. The background information included in the analysis was prior education, region (location of their home country),…

The present systematic review examines what factors determine when, how and to what extent previous linguistic experience (from the first language, second language or both languages) affects the initial stages and beyond of adult third language (L3) acquisition. In doing so, we address what a bird's eye view of the data tells us regarding…

Generation 1 learners are adult-arrival immigrants who enter U.S. education through adult ESL. Verbatim speech was collected from interviews and observations of six Generation 1 learners in their first college term. This taxonomic analysis presents learners' descriptions of their college reading. Learners held complex understandings of reading,…

In this study, we investigated the learning of indexical features by English-speaking adults using a novel experimental paradigm. In a conceptual replication of Rácz, Hay, and Pierrehumbert (2017), participants learned an allomorphy pattern cued by a given social context. The social contexts were represented by conversation partners who differed…

Reading research has recognized the strong relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension. However, we are still perplexed by the precise nature of how readers access and retrieve word meanings while reading. We have not reached a consensus on "what it means to know a word" (e.g., Anderson & Nagy, 1991; Nation, 2001) or…

This paper presents an exploratory-interpretive study of two multilingual adults acquiring Norwegian through extensive reading. The study examined social and cognitive aspects of language acquisition, and individual factors, such as the language learning behaviors, experiences, attitudes, and beliefs of the participants. The data were collected…

What are the effects of experience on subsequent learning? We explored the effects of language-specific word order knowledge on the acquisition of sequential conditional information. Korean and English adults were engaged in a sequence learning task involving three different sets of stimuli: auditory linguistic (nonsense syllables), visual…

Providing learners with control over their learning does not always result in improved learning. For instance, research on tool-use in computer-based learning environments has demonstrated that tool-use behavior of learners is often suboptimal and does not fully support learning. Advice, or guided instruction, has been recognized as an…

This study investigates transfer at the third-language (L3) initial state, testing between the following possibilities: (1) the first language (L1) transfer hypothesis (an L1 effect for all adult acquisition), (2) the second language (L2) transfer hypothesis, where the L2 blocks L1 transfer (often referred to in the recent literature as the "L2…

Language proficiency is a crucial factor for immigrants to integrate successfully in the new society in all aspects of life, especially in the labor market. As a result, there is great importance in acquiring the new language as quickly and effectively as possible. Several factors affect second language acquisition, including motivation, age,…

This article investigates verb placement, especially Verb second (V2), in post-puberty second language (L2) learners of two closely related Germanic V2 languages: Swedish and German. Hakansson, "et al." (2002) have adduced data from first language (L1) Swedish-speaking learners of German in support of the claim that the syntactic property of V2…

This study investigated the effects of culture-specific background knowledge and inferences upon second-language readers' comprehension of text. Ten Korean adult second-language readers were asked to think aloud as they read a short story from another culture and then answer a detailed set of postreading questions. (20 references) (VWL)

Investigates whether reading instruction for adult English-as-a-Second-Language students should focus on fostering linguistic ability or on increasing background knowledge. Demonstrates that both linguistic knowledge and prior knowledge contribute significantly to reading comprehension. Argues that an integrative approach to reading instruction is…