This systematic review reports on research investigating the impact of multi-word unit (MWU) input on young learners' second language (L2) attainment in instructed settings. Recent findings suggest that L2 learners can generalise from MWU input, abstract patterns and employ such schemata productively via slot-filling, indicating that MWUs are key…

Competent L2 writing has been described in research in terms of an increasing incidence, variety, and length of clauses; a countervailing compactness and tightness with reduced number of clauses even as clause length expands; and various interrelationships between syntactic realizations of texts and the genres they represent. These partly…

Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

This scientific paper presents a corpus-based investigative research of German collocations; in text comprehension, a new method for identification of collocations is presented, as well as a scientific discussion of the types of collocations for which this new analysis method is suitable. The article further explores the consequences of using…

Researchers have observed that in spoken German, the conjunctions "weil" and "obwohl" commonly occur with verb-second (V2) instead of verb-final (V[subscript f]) word order (Gaumann, 1983; Gänthner, 1993, 1996; Uhmann, 1998). Current findings document that this syntactic variant of "weil/obwohl-structures" has an…

The aim of this study was twofold: first, to develop an experimental technique as a tool to investigate learning outcomes of spontaneous, naturalistic second language (L2) learning under controlled laboratory conditions; and second, to explore how this technique can be used to understand the basic conditions and limits of this learning. Two…

Acquisition and improvement of literary translation competence is an important undertaking in teaching literary translation with the aim to enable the student to translate into the target language the content, expressive power, language style, and an equal function of the literary text. This essay pursues the aim of helping to create and improve…

Relevance of the issue stated in the article is determined by the fact that there is a lack of research devoted to the methods of teaching English and German collocations. The aim of our work is to determine methods of teaching English and German collocations to Russian university students studying foreign languages through experimental testing.…

The extent to which learners benefit from instruction may be largely dependent on their individual abilities. However, there is relatively little work on the interaction between instructional effectiveness in second language learning and learner individual factors. In this study, we investigated the relationship between instruction, individual…

The present experimental study examined whether a different focus during a pre-task planning observation task affects learners' subsequent oral task performance. Forty-eight ninth-grade students learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to two different planning conditions: video observations with a focus on language (FonL) and…

In this paper, we explore the results of a short-term concept-based pedagogical intervention on the learning of declension as a meaning-making resource among US university learners of German. The pedagogical approached derived its principles from Vygotskian sociocultural psychology, namely the role of explicit, scientific (i.e., abstract and…

Research on data-driven learning (DDL), or teaching and learning languages with the help of electronic corpora, has shown that it is both effective and efficient. Nevertheless, DDL is still far from common pedagogical practice, not least because the empirical research on it is still limited and narrowly focused. This study addresses some gaps in…

Phraseology has long been used in L2 teaching of academic writing, and corpus linguistics has played a major role in the compilation and assessment of academic phrases. However, there are only a few interactive academic writing tools in which corpus methodology is implemented in a real-time design to support formulation processes. In this paper,…

Whereas there exists a plethora of research on collocations and formulaic language in English, this article contributes towards a somewhat less developed area: the understanding and teaching of formulaic language in German as a foreign language. It analyses formulaic sequences and collocations in German writing (corpus-driven) and provides modern…