East (2014) presented a largely qualitative study that uncovered how beginning teachers of languages other than English developed their understandings about task-based language teaching (TBLT) as they took part in a year-long initial teacher education programme in New Zealand. This paper reports a comparative re-production. It complements a recent…

Social Virtual Reality (VR) applications enable real-time interpersonal conversation and allow users to perform activities together. They have the potential of changing the ways learners practise speaking a foreign language. Following a previous study (Jauregi Ondarra, Gruber, & Canto, 2020), we designed the present study to explore how…

While translation has been used for centuries for the purpose of language learning, there is no doubt that recent approaches in the area of language and translation pedagogy have helped re-conceptualise -- and re-operationalise -- translation in radically new ways. In the last two decades, the role of translation in language teaching and learning…

In second language acquisition, it is well known that an early age of onset and an extensive amount of naturalistic input are key elements promoting successful learning outcomes. What is less well known is what outcomes we can expect when the main source of these elements is full-immersion schooling, defined for the purposes of this study as a…

The growing interest in identity and language education over the past two decades, coupled with increased interest in digital technology and transnationalism, has resulted in a rich body of work that has informed language learning, teaching, and research. To keep abreast of these developments in identity research, the authors propose a series of…

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the…

The age at which people acquire a word influences word recognition, known as the age of acquisition (AoA) effect. In the first language (L1), AoA effects are widely found in various languages and experimental tasks. Arbitrary Mapping Hypothesis proposes that AoA effects reflect the loss of network plasticity during the learning of mappings between…

Task complexity and communication modes are two task design and implementation factors that have been found to affect second language (L2) learners' oral performance. While increasing task complexity and developing tasks according to the features of face-to-face and computer-mediated communication modes can optimise L2 production, few studies…

The study addresses the research gap of how being a speaker of a Slavic language influences the ability to convey tempo-aspectual meanings in Romance languages by examining personal and impersonal narratives delivered in written and spoken mode by learners of L3 Spanish and L3 Italian with L1 Slovak and L2 English. Narratives are analysed…

Writing in a language different from one's mother tongue is a daunting task. The same challenge may apply to languages that have diglossic features whose spoken form differs from the written form. This article investigates Arab students' writing behaviors (fluency, pauses, and revision) in response to an argumentative composition in their L1…

Vocabulary acquisition is a fundamental element of mastering the English language, necessitating a comprehensive lexicon that evolves through experiential learning to facilitate accurate comprehension and production of language. The current study examined the impact of Total Physical Response (TPR) tasks on the vocabulary acquisition of Thai…

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

This study reports syllable position effects on second language (L2) Portuguese speech perception, revealing that L2 segmental learning may be prone to an influence from the suprasegmental level. The results show that first language (L1) Mandarin learners had diminished performance on the discrimination between the target Portuguese liquids (/l/…

The present study investigates the students' perceptions of applying performance tasks based on the GRASPS framework, exploring and seeking to explain the relationships between these tasks and English language learning. Data was collected over one semester in 14 public secondary schools in Ecuador, and it consisted of a questionnaire applied to…

To this day, there are only a few studies that have used a controlled instructional intervention on specific linguistic structures to investigate if language instruction is beneficial for heritage learners (HLs), in the same way it is for second (L2) language learners, and more research in this area is rapidly needed (Bowles, 2018). The results…