The present study investigates the relationship between L2 metalinguistic knowledge and L2 achievement among intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners studying at a large scale Turkish university. Metalinguistic knowledge refers to the ability to correct a grammatically incorrect structure in English and explain why it is incorrect, and…

Purpose: This study examined the extent to which children born preterm (< 37 weeks) and/or who have low birth weight (< 2,500 g) catch up with their full term peers in terms of their language abilities at early school age (= 5 to < 9 years). Method: A systematic literature search identified empirical studies that fit the inclusion…

This study investigates the knowledge of binding in 21 English-speaking children with SLI, aged 6;08-16;05, compared to 21 children with WS, language- and age-matched, and 21 language-matched control children, aged 4-7;10. Our results demonstrate no difficulties in the interpretation of reflexive or personal pronouns in SLI, revealing an intact…

The present study is a follow-up study of Çakir (2016b) which focused on the wh-adverbial & which NP constructions asymmetry within island structures in Turkish. The characteristics of wh-adverbial nasil "how" is compared with the which-NP constructions "hangisekilde" "in what way" and "hangihalde"…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder are likely to experience difficulties with morphosyntax, especially regular past tense marking. Few studies have evaluated the effectiveness of intervention to improve morphosyntax in young school-aged children with DLD. This study investigated the efficacy of combined explicit and implicit…

This study aims to test the extent to which 80 Kuwaiti EFL learners are aware of prenominal adjective ordering system in English, particularly how it affects Kuwaiti EFL learners' grasp on English grammar. In addition, it checks whether the English proficiency level of the participants plays a role in their answers on the test. Therefore, a…

Reading comprehension is based on the efficient accomplishment of several cognitive processes at the word, sentence, and text level. To the extent that each of these processes contributes to reading comprehension, it can cause reading difficulties if it is deficient. To identify individual sources of reading difficulties, tools are required that…

Is there an ideal time window for language acquisition after which nativelike representation and processing are unattainable? Although this question has been heavily debated, no consensus has been reached. Here, we present evidence for a sensitive period in language development and show that it is specific to grammar. We conducted a masked priming…

This article proposes that second language learners can use indirect positive evidence (IPE) to acquire a phonological grammar that is a subset of their L1 grammar. IPE is evidence from errors in the learner's L1 made by native speakers of the learner's L2. It has been assumed that subset grammars may be acquired using direct or indirect negative…

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 aim of the present study is to compare the writing products of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students using accuracy and grammatical complexity as measures. It also aims at examining the development of the morphological, syntactic, lexical, spelling, and punctuation errors committed by these learners when writing in English.…

Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…

This study attempts to ascertain if the WebCAPE placement exam can be used to measure improvement in an upper division grammar course. The WebCAPE online placement exam is a widely used instrument designed to help university language programs place students into the basic language course best corresponding to their proficiency level. This is done…

The present study aimed to examine whether distributed practice works better than massed practice for proceduralization of grammatical knowledge. Learners of Japanese as a second language were trained on an element of Japanese morphology under either massed or distributed practice conditions. Results showed that massed practice led to accurate…

The usefulness of explicit knowledge of the second language is a matter of controversy in the field of second language acquisition. In this regard, it has been argued that explicit representations might be useful for some structures but not for others (R. Ellis, 2006; Roehr & Gánem-Gutiérrez, 2009). The goal of this study was to examine…