Learning whether English nouns are countable or not is a source of great difficulty for many ESL/EFL learners. In the present study, a grammaticality judgement task comprised of a range of nouns representative of the different facets of the countability system in English was distributed to 82 native speakers of English (NSs) and 98 non-native…

The contribution of phonological memory to syntactic abilities has been demonstrated in various populations, but its relationship to metasyntactic abilities, defined as the ability to control syntactic aspects of language, remains largely unexplored. This study therefore aims to examine the contribution of phonological memory in the completion of…

This study investigates the role of morphological awareness in the incidental learning of Mandarin Chinese characters among Chinese as second language (CSL) learners. Participants of the study were 20 college-level international students, uniformly Thai in language background, enrolled to study CSL at Southwest University, Chongqing, China. The…

This study explores L2 learners' awareness of meaning of L2 conventional expressions and the effect of form-meaning associations on the use of the expressions in L2 pragmatics. Definitions and examples were elicited through an aural Vocabulary Knowledge Scale modified for expressions. Elicited definitions were used to explore the meanings that…

As email requests from students to professors have become increasingly common in academic settings, research has also shown second-language (L2) students' unfamiliarity with email etiquette in L2 has adversely affected their communication with their professors. The present study examines whether giving corrective feedback on students' performance…

This study explores whether and to what degree explicit form-focused instruction (FFI) facilitates the use of morphosyntactic forms in second language oral production and also whether it has differential effects on morphosyntactic forms with different linguistic variables. Twenty-seven university-level Chinese EFL participants were randomly…

Johns reports in his text "Kibbitzing one-to-ones" (1997) that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps apprentice writers to make progress in independent text revision. Expecting this progress to be based on the development of expert-like ways to observe language features, I integrated Johns' so-called kibbitzing…

The purpose of this study is to analyse the effect of metalinguistic instruction on students' metalinguistic knowledge on the one hand, and on students' performance in metalinguistic and oral production tasks on the other hand. Two groups of primary school students learning English as a foreign language were chosen. One of them (Rule group) was…

It is now generally agreed that "output" functions to promote language learning through focus on form. Empirical studies reveal that oral communicative tasks can arouse learners' negotiation of meaning, but they are not so effective in bringing about focus on form. Hence, researchers have suggested using collaborative writing tasks to…