Instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) research has recently attracted more focal attention due to the publications of three books and as the theme of the 2016 Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) conference that celebrated its 35th anniversary in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Recent definitions (e.g. Loewen, 2015) have…

Null hypothesis testing has long since been the 'go-to analytic approach' in quantitative second language (L2) research (Norris, 2015, p. 97). To many, however, years of reliance on this approach has resulted in a crisis of inference across the social and behavioral sciences (e.g., Rouder et al., 2016). As an alternative to the null hypothesis…

This paper presents the results from two studies on anaphoric reference to quantifying expressions (QEs) in Swedish, contributing to the current cross-linguistic discussion on this issue. For English it has been shown that the polarity of the QE (positive vs negative) determines the anaphoric set reference (to the referens set, REFSET, or to the…

The present study aims at exploring the way in which English implicit demonstrative reference is rendered into Arabic through analyzing a number of sentences in the novel "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," written by J. K. Rowling (2010), and its Arabic translated version by Ahmad Hassan Mohammed (2010). The scrutiny of the…

In this study, Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Conversation Analysis (CA) is discussed as methods of data analysis. Both CL as a quantitative tool and CA as a qualitative tool have their own strengths and weaknesses for applied linguistics studies. So, the tenets of each view are evaluated and the similarities and differences between them are…

This study is the first to explore language attitudes of the endangered Faifi language in SA. Understanding these attitudes is crucial for future language revitalization efforts. Employing a conceptual framework from LA research, data were collected via an online Arabic questionnaire with a sample of 258 participants. This paper aims to explore…

Makassar language (bM) is a language of ethnic groups which is taught as local content subjects in schools, both in oral and written literary traditions. This study aimed to examine the behavior of affixes and clitic morphosyntactics in the passivation of Makassar sentences. Field research methods were used by applying the conversational…

This paper discussed the relationship between language, ecology, and culture, and claimed that the study of linguistic communication as pragmatics should not be confined to the traditional context, but should focus on a broader ecological environment. It analyzed the context of practical communication from the perspective of language ecology…

Understanding how native speakers acquire the phonological patterns in their language is a key task for the field of phonology. Numerous studies have suggested that phonological learning is a biased process: certain phonological patterns are easily accessed and learned by the speakers, while others show acquisition difficulties. These differences…

The current study investigates second language acquisition of Chinese object ellipsis to probe the development of features transferred from learners' native language without robust confirming or disconfirming evidence in the second language (L2) input. It is argued that Chinese allows object ellipsis licensed by a verb with a [VCase] feature but…

For the past five years, the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository has been documenting intricacies of the Alutiiq language with the help of Elder speakers and a grant from the National Science Foundation (#1360839). The project's primary focus has been recording vocabulary, grammar, and ways of speaking for this threatened Native Alaskan…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become widespread in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a growing body of literature has been produced in recent years. We surveyed 61 SLA papers that use ERPs to study L2 sentence processing in healthy late learners. Our main aim was to provide a critical summary of findings from the decade…

While monolingual speakers can use contrastive pitch accents to predict upcoming referents, bilingual speakers do not always use this cue predictively in their L2. The current study examines the role of recent exposure for predictive processing in native German (L1) second language learners of English (L2). In Experiment 1, participants followed…

Increasingly, speakers of minoritized languages around the world are becoming uprooted due to economic pressures, political forces, and environmental destabilization. As communities leave their traditional homelands, they often experience accelerated language shift. Although youth are in a critical position to further transmit their languages to…

Understanding how language is used in specific contexts and the reasons for this can be helped by examining historical change in genres. In this study focusing on business communication, texts serving the same purpose of demanding payment for a debt but separated by 4,000 years are analysed. The ancient text is a Sumerian cuneiform tablet which is…