The Imperfect/Preterite aspectual contrast is one of the most studied topics in Spanish as a second language research. However, there are few works focused on describing the acquisition of modal uses of the Imperfect by L2 speakers. This paper investigates the L1 Russian L2 Spanish speakers' mastery of politeness, evidential and nonfactual modal…

This study examines whether the second language acquisition (L2A) of syntactic properties at the interfaces is problematic for L2 learners. English verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) was tested as an interface property which involves feature interpretability. Two subtle contrasts of VPE at different grammar-internal interfaces were examined: (a) copula…

This study investigates the role of age of first exposure in the acquisition and processing of English articles in an EFL setting. Fifty advanced Korean learners of English participated in a grammatical acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task. The participants were divided into two groups depending on the initial age at which…

The purpose of this study was to analyze six English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' trajectories of discriminating near-synonyms in a data-driven learning task. Since the learners find it considerably difficult to learn subtle meaning differences of near-synonyms, corpus-based data-driven learning may provide an opportunity for them to…

This mixed-methods study investigates writers' task representation and the factors affecting it in test-like and non-test-like conditions. Five advanced-level L2 writers wrote two argumentative essays each, one in test-like conditions and the other in non-test-like conditions where the participants were allowed to use all the time and online…

This study investigated whether task complexity may affect L2 speaking performance as predicted by the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2011), and whether the effect of task complexity may interact with individual differences in working memory capacity. A total of twenty Korean advanced-level EFL learners performed two separate picture description…

Using structural equation modeling analysis, this study examined the contribution of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge to second language reading comprehension among 190 advanced Chinese English as a foreign language learners. Vocabulary knowledge was measured in both breadth (Vocabulary Levels Test) and depth (Word Associates Test);…

In order to give language learners a fighting chance outside the classroom, teachers must provide them with consciousness-raising opportunities for developing pragmatic awareness. By attending to pragmatic factors in second-language (L2) situations, student will be better able to make informed choices in negotiating effective communication. This…

This study compares the performances of 16 advanced and 19 beginning English language learners on a listening comprehension task that focused on linguistic and pragmatic processing. Processing pragmatic meaning differs from processing linguistic meaning because pragmatic meaning requires the listener to understand not only linguistic information,…