The goals of this research were twofold. First, to measure changes in cultural awareness levels between two groups of students in their third semester of a Spanish class. The trained group formed by university students from the USA collaborated with another group of university students from Colombia using Skype. The second aim was to identify…

Considering the acquisition of past tense uses by L2 Spanish advanced learners with closely related L1s (French, Portuguese), this study attempts to identify factors associated with variability, such as negative transfer or interface integration. We report data on the acquisition, by adult L1 French and Portuguese learners at B2 and C1 CEFR…

The present study examines potential age and microparametric effects in childhood bilinguals (currently adults) in an understudied language pairing, Polish-Spanish. Specifically, a Spanish group (N = 28) and a Sequential child bilingual (N = 22) and a Simultaneous bilingual (N = 8) group living in Misiones, Argentina, completed three experimental…

The present study sought to evaluate the pragmatic competence of heritage learners of Spanish in regard to compliment sequences and the impact that pragmatic lessons would have on these students. To this end, pre and post tests to assess pragmatic recognition in regard to Spanish compliments were designed by the researchers and completed by the…

This study investigates the impact of a high-level and a low-level process-based L2 comprehension training on L1 French students' listening performances. These students (N = 108) of English, Spanish, and German came from five different classes. After a L2 comprehension pretest, the participants were divided into two experimental groups. During the…

The purpose of this study was to examine fourth-grade English-Spanish bilingual students' ability to recognize and transfer knowledge of cognate word ending rules from English to Spanish and from Spanish to English. Cognate transformational word ending rules are strategies for tapping into the students' linguistic background and for opening…

There is an ongoing debate among L2 educators regarding the best way for students to achieve effective communication and language spontaneity. The flipped classroom refers to an educational model where the traditional practice of dedicating class time to direct instruction is flipped so that students receive initial instruction at home and then…

Listening is widely regarded as an important skill that is difficult and necessary to teach in L2 classrooms. Listening requires both top-down and bottom-up processing, yet pedagogical techniques for the latter are often lacking. This study explores the efficacy of pronunciation instruction (PI) for improving learners' bottom-up processing. The…

This study examined the effectiveness of explicit instruction and feedback, focusing on degrees of prior knowledge of the personal "a" in intermediate level second language (L2) Spanish. On the pretest, participants (n = 58) completed grammaticality judgment and picture description tasks, which found that learners had different degrees…

This study considers the role of L1 phonological influence in L2 English past tense morphology production by native speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese. While these L1s share similar phonological restrictions on consonant cluster formation needed for English past tense morphology, differences arise in L1 syntax (only Mandarin lacks…

Standards of academic performance place a high demand on students' English language. To help Spanish-speaking preschoolers who are developing English as a second language meet these demands, researchers recommend strengthening their first language to facilitate development of their second language. Head Start teachers and research assistants…

The acquisition of verbal morphology presents challenges for many second language (L2) learners, in part because they do not readily process those forms during sentence comprehension. Instead, L2 learners rely on lexical-semantic cues (e.g., temporal adverbs and explicit subjects). This study investigated the role of task-essential training in…

This study investigated the role of corrective feedback timing in the acquisition of Spanish noun--adjective gender agreement. Forty-five learners completed a communicative task via synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) in one of three groups (immediate, delayed, control). The immediate-feedback group received error reformulations…

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programmes are mushrooming in many different contexts. However, research has mainly focused on their impact on foreign language learning and to a lesser extent on L1 development, whereas the number of studies undertaken in multilingual contexts in which more than two languages coexist is negligible.…

Adult second/foreign language acquisition is extremely challenging for many learners, with pronunciation often the one aspect in which otherwise very proficient language users fall short. Although a great deal of research has found that formal instruction in phonetics/phonology may improve learner pronunciation, no study has yet addressed the…