This article presents a theoretical review of and methodological guidelines for the study of two key notions in second language acquisition research, complexity and difficulty. The term "complexity" has gained considerable currency over the past decades and has taken on a wide range of meanings. We argue for a more restricted…

The affective turn in the second language (L2) acquisition literature has witnessed a shift from the periphery to a clear focus on emotions. Nevertheless, this shift tends to examine emotion separately from cognition. Vygotsky's "perezhivanie" provides a theoretical lens to explore the inextricable interconnectedness of emotion and…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

Second-language (L2) knowledge of English is an essential communication tool in the contemporary era of globalization in many research and business fields. Among the important tasks in English education is the measurement of student proficiency. While various tests purport to measure proficiency in learning English, repeated preparation and…

The United States government is perennially in need of employees with proficiency in critical foreign languages to communicate with foreign counterparts and maintain relationships worldwide. In order to fulfill this need, the government devotes significant resources training federal employees to advanced levels of language proficiency through…

The research report describes the ability of Kazakh preschool children to tell narratives relating to mental states, and the connection with theory of mind tasks about false beliefs. Three groups of preschool children (N = 29; 3-, 4-, and 5- year-olds) from the city of Almaty were tested in the Kazakh language. The results show very high…

Although most children learn to communicate in their first language (L1), there is normal and expected variation in their rate of acquisition across all components of the language system. Until recently, most second language acquisition and second language (L2) researchers have assumed that individual differences (IDs) in L1 acquisition are small…

The study investigates how psychological and social factors relate to productive collocation knowledge in late L2 learners of Swedish (French L1) (N = 59). The individual factors are language aptitude (measured through the LLAMA aptitude test), reported language use, social networks, acculturation, and personality. Multiple linear regression…

Early childhood language experiences influence how a child's mind and brain process language and acquire literacy. For children growing up bilingual, their two languages interact in their minds, and these cross-linguistic influences can lead to unique neurocognitive mechanisms for language and reading compared to monolinguals. In this…

Bilingual environments are more complex than monolingual environments. To adapt to this complexity, bilingual infants may navigate their environment in fundamentally different ways than monolingual infants. Drawing from visual, social, and linguistic processing, in this article, I present evidence to suggest that bilingual and monolingual learners…

The present study carried out a bibliometric analysis of L2 eye-tracking research. VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and CitNetExplorer were used for the analysis. The data were 245 articles indexed by Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The study identified the research topics, trends, promising research directions, influential authors and documents, and…

As the culture of the American elementary classroom continues to diversify, teachers' practices must also evolve to best meet the needs of students, specifically, English Learners (ELs). This article encourages elementary educators to include music in their general education curriculum by highlighting the lack of music education in the classroom,…

Acquiring and retaining vocabulary knowledge are two of the most important aspects of second language (L2) learning. Some scholars (e.g. Hedrick, Harmom, & Linerode, 2004; Nation, 1999; Stone & Urquhart, 2008) advocate that we should re-think and explore in depth the importance of vocabulary. According to Wilkins (1972), "while…

The present research aims to assess literacy acquisition in children becoming bilingual via second language immersion in school. We adopt a cognitive components approach, assessing text-level reading comprehension, a complex literacy skill, as well as underlying cognitive and linguistic components in 144 children aged 7 to 14 (72 immersion…

This article describes the development of "Bande à Part", a mobile music application (app) for second language (L2) learners of French. Our focus on the pedagogical use of music results from the reported benefits that it offers language learners (e.g., it encourages repetitive exposure to the L2 in an enjoyable way, it extends the reach…