The rise of English-medium education has led to considerable academic interest in communicative practices in multilingual university settings. However, there is still little research into disciplinary knowledge construction in higher education contexts where English is the academic lingua franca. To address this gap, we embrace the central role of…

This longitudinal study examined growth patterns of written syntactic complexity of Turkish learners of English. Using a nonexperimental corpus of 852 writing samples by 284 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners over three semesters, the study addressed the following questions: which indices of syntactic complexity characterize the writing…

Usage-based approaches to second language acquisition put a premium on the linguistic input that learners receive and predict that any sequences of words that learners encounter frequently will experience a processing advantage. The current study explores the processing of high-frequency sequences of words known as 'lexical bundles' in beginner…

The goal of this study was to determine the overall effects of pronunciation instruction (PI) as well as the sources and extent of variance in observed effects. Toward this end, a comprehensive search for primary studies was conducted, yielding 86 unique reports testing the effects of PI. Each study was then coded on substantive and methodological…

This article reports a meta-analysis of 42 experiments in 33 published studies involving processing instruction (PI) and production-based instruction (PB) used in the PI studies. The comparative effectiveness of PI and PB showed that although PI was more effective than PB for developing receptive knowledge, PB was just as effective as PI for…

This manuscript reports on a corpus-based comparison of native and nonnative graduate students' language production in an asynchronous learning environment. Using 486 discussion board postings from a five-year period (2009-2013), we analyzed the extent to which native and nonnative university students' writing differed in 10 measures of syntactic…

Alternative assessment procedures have made consistent inroads into second and foreign language assessment practices over the last decade. The original impetus for alternative assessment methods has been predicated more on the ideological appeal this approach offers than on firm empirical evidence that alternative assessment approaches actually…

Research is presented that investigates the amount of learner noticing produced by two types of grammar consciousness-raising treatments: teacher-fronted grammar lessons and interactive, grammar problem-solving tasks. Results indicate that task performance is as effective as formal instruction in promoting noticing. (Contains 33 references.)…