Our study proposes the use of a free classification task for investigating the dimensions used by listeners in their perception of nonnative sounds and for predicting the perceptual discriminability of nonnative contrasts. In a free classification task, participants freely group auditory stimuli based on their perceived similarity. The results can…

While studies have shown that additional language (Lx) learners build on knowledge of previously acquired languages (Ringbom 2007), the natural interaction between languages is rarely exploited in Lx classrooms. This study explores the nature of metalinguistic reflections and crosslinguistic connections during plurilingual consciousness-raising…

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 study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

This study investigates the perception of the three Mandarin high vowels /i, u, y/ after dental, retroflex, and palatal fricatives and affricates (/s/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate][superscript voiceless glottal fricative]/; /[voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless…

Despite the unquestionable academic interest on corpus-based approaches to language education, the use of corpora by teachers in their everyday practice is still not very widespread. One way to promote usage of corpora in language teaching is by making pedagogically appropriate corpora, labelled with different types of problems (for instance,…

Some listeners exhibit higher sensitivity to subphonemic acoustic differences (i.e., higher speech gradiency). Here, we asked whether higher gradiency in a listener's first language (L1) facilitates foreign language learning and explored the possible sources of individual differences in L1 gradiency. To address these questions, we tested 164…

Items in the mental lexicon have three storage and processing strata, the concept, lemma, and lexeme, which equate to semantic, syntactic and phonological information. Lexical items relate to each other at each stratum. Bilingual lexicons, which contain items from all languages, may contain cognates, items sharing concepts and with overlapping…

The present study explored perceptual and articulatory techniques addressing the pronunciation of Spanish rhotics by means of a week-long computerized training. Through a quasi-experimental design approach, the study tested the utility of the online training and its effects on the phonetic production of taps [voiced alveolar tap or flap] and…

This study probed EFL learners' negotiation of meaning and negotiation strategy in two unfocused and two focused tasks using a counterbalanced design. Each of the focused/unfocused tasks included one opinion-exchange and decision-making task type, which resulted in four particular task conditions. To this end, 36 Iranian intermediate EFL learners…

This study investigated the post-reading comprehension questions and task types in the "Four Corners" series based on Freeman's (2014) taxonomy, which was developed, specifically, for the L2 reading context covering a wider range of question types compared with previous taxonomies. While literature abounds with studies investigating the…

This study aimed to investigate how initiating acts affect refusal strategies realization. The subjects were 45 English Education Program students of Universitas Muhammadiyah Palembang. The study used Discourse Completion Task (DCT) which consisted of 12 situations covering four initiating acts; suggestion, request, offer, and invitations, and the…

Language learners are underserved if there are unlearned meanings of a word that they think they have already learned. For example, "circle" as a noun is well known, whereas its use as a verb is not. For artificial-intelligence-based support systems for learning vocabulary, assessing each learner's knowledge of such atypical but common…

Teacher cognition has attracted increased attention among second language (L2) researchers and practitioners, likely because of its potential consequences for classroom practices, such as teaching and assessment. Prior research has revealed links between teacher beliefs about pronunciation teaching and teachers' own experience (e.g. amount of…

The research investigated pragmatic transfer in responses to English tag questions by L1 Thai learners based on Interlanguage Pragmatics, specifically pragmatic transfer (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993). The L1 Thai learners were categorized into two groups according to their English proficiency levels: advanced and intermediate. Oral and written…