Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1962) indicates that human learning is mainly a social and cultural process that occurs through meaningful negotiation and interaction (scaffolding) between learners. The present study investigates whether training student reviewers can help them provide stronger scaffolding for their peers through…

This dissertation investigates whether and how learners' heritage language (HL) background and explicitness of feedback influence second language (L2) pragmatic development of Korean referent honorifics through conversational interaction. Specifically, this study focuses on HL learners versus non-heritage language (NHL) learners and recasts versus…

Repair practices used by teachers who work with children with specific speech and language difficulties (SSLDs) have hitherto remained largely unexplored. Such classrooms therefore offer a new context for researching repairs and considering how they compare with non-SSLD interactions. Repair trajectories are of interest because they are dialogic…

Error analysis involves detecting, diagnosing, and correcting discrepancies between the text produced so far (TPSF) and the writers mental representation of what the text should be. The use of different writing modes, like keyboard-based word processing and speech recognition, causes different type of errors during text production. While many…

Mathematics teachers are often asked, "What is the most difficult topic for you to teach?" Their answer is teaching students to count. The concepts can be challenging and slippery to apply in problems. Many times, no rigid procedures or formulas can be used to solve the problems directly, and students simply do not know where or how to approach…

While previous research has indicated that learners with field-dependence (FD) and field-independence (FI) cognitive styles benefit differentially from different instructional modes, previous corrective feedback studies have ignored the issue of matching error correction strategies to learners' cognitive style. To shed some light on this issue,…

Individualized tutoring and feedback by trained language instructors are known to be optimal for language learning. Providing them is time-consuming and costly, however, and therefore not feasible for the majority of language learners. This applies particularly to pronunciation, where corrective feedback should ideally be synchronous, which makes…

The present article reports the findings of a study that explored(1) whether direct written corrective feedback (CF) can help high-proficient L2 learners, who has already achieved a rather high level of accuracy in English, improve in the accurate use of two functions of English articles (the use of "a" for first mention and…

Although thoroughly analysed in adult second language acquisition (L2A), the acquisition of subject properties in child L2A has not received so much attention and the majority of studies deal with longitudinal data or only with a single subject property. This study contributes new cross-sectional data from 5-year-old Spanish children acquiring…

Sixty-five Japanese learners of English participated in the current study, which investigated the acquisitional value of form-focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) on learners' pronunciation development. All students received a 4-hr FFI treatment designed to encourage them to notice and practice the target feature of…

The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between proactive and reactive Focus on Form (FonF) and gestures. Two English classes in a public high school in Japan taught by a native speaker of English were observed and videotaped for 96 min and analyzed. Overall, 64 proactive FonF and 43 reactive FonF were provided. Among them,…

This study investigated the use of wikis for collaborative writing projects. Fourth- and sixth-semester German students wrote several of the regularly assigned essay topics during one semester in collaboration with another student using a wiki. Participants used a variety of strategies in the planning, writing and revision phases of their essays.…

The role of teacher-student interaction and collaboration in solving linguistic problems has recently been in the center of SLA research. Accordingly, this study investigated the effect of Oral Interactive Feedback (OIF) on the accuracy and complexity of Iranian intermediate EFL learners' writing. After ensuring the homogeneity using Preliminary…

This study investigated the effectiveness of oral metalinguistic feedback and recasts as well as the effect of focused tasks (FT) in the development of implicit and explicit knowledge during video-conference interactions. This was accomplished by partial replication of a study performed in a classroom setting. Three groups of Brazilian EFL…

This study focuses on the use of wikis in collaborative writing projects in foreign language learning classrooms. A total of 34 intermediate level university students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) were asked to accomplish three different wiki-based collaborative writing tasks, (argumentative, informative and decision-making) working…