Second and foreign language teachers often say that they correct students' oral errors "naturally" in their classes. In fact, the operationalization of incidental oral corrective feedback also states that it arises "naturally" in a communicative task. This notion was confirmed in a study that I conducted with four ESL teachers…

The problem addressed in this quantitative experimental study was that students were having more difficulty learning from audiovisual lessons than necessary because educators had eliminated textual references, based on early findings from CLT research. In more recent studies, CLT researchers estimated that long-term memory schemas may be used by…

"Viva voce" exams are used in many disciplines as a test of students' knowledge and skills. Whilst acknowledged as a useful form of assessment, vivas commonly lead to a great deal of anxiety for students. This anxiety is also apparent for vivas in phonetics, where the students must produce and recognise sounds drawn from across the…

People prefer words with inward directed consonantal patterns (e.g., MENIKA) compared to outward patterns (KENIMA), because inward (outward) articulation movements resemble positive (negative) mouth actions such as swallowing (spitting). This effect might rely on covert articulation simulations, or subvocalizations, since it occurs also under…

Children's development of the functional category of articles can be explained in two ways. One approach assumes that children are equipped with innate knowledge of the category, while the other assumes that children's early articles are limited-scope formulae. Using Eisenbeiss's (2000) criteria for determining the status of DPs, developed for a…

This study tests the theoretical predictions regarding effects of increasing task complexity (Robinson, 2001a, 2001b, 2007, 2010; Robinson & Gilabert, 2007) for second language (L2) pronunciation. Specifically, we examine whether more complex tasks (a) lead to greater incidence of pronunciation-focused language-related episodes (LREs) and (b)…

This experimental study examines the role of oral and written repetition strategies in consolidating new vocabulary in the classroom context. The participants in this study were divided into three treatment groups: oral, written and oral+written. A pretest and three delayed post-tests given at one day, one week and six weeks intervals were…

To understand spoken language, listeners combine acoustic-phonetic input with expectations derived from context (Dahan & Magnuson, 2006). Eye-tracking studies on semantic context have demonstrated that the activation levels of competing lexical candidates depend on the relative strengths of the bottom-up input and top-down expectations (cf.…

This study investigated whether language control during language production in bilinguals generalizes across modalities, and to what extent the language control system is shaped by competition for the same articulators. Using a cued language-switching paradigm, we investigated whether switch costs are observed when hearing signers switch between a…

This article reports on a study examining second language (L2) teachers' understanding of speech fluency and their self-reported classroom practices for promoting it. Qualitative and quantitative data collected from 84 L2 teachers in England were analysed to answer the research questions. In addition to the descriptive statistics and lexical…

Nonmainstream American English, or dialect, among children may have important implications for reading research and practice. However, much of the research involving relations between dialect and literacy has analyzed dialect use in only one context and has omitted students with speech, language, and learning disabilities. Consequently, we…

The objective of the present study was to examine the effect of the activity-based oral expression course on the speech self-efficacy of psychological counseling and guidance students. The study group included 80 freshmen students in the Psychological Counseling and Guidance Department in the Faculty of Education of a university located in western…

The present study explores the independent and interactive effects of task complexity and task modality on linguistic dimensions of second language (L2) performance and investigates how these effects are modulated by individual differences in working memory capacity. Thirty-two intermediate learners of L2 Spanish completed less and more complex…

Virtual worlds have been described as low anxiety environments (Dickey, 2005), where students may feel "shielded" behind their avatars (Rosell-Aguilar, 2005: 432). The aim of this article is to analyse the evolution of the Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) levels experienced by a group of participants who used the virtual world "Second…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare change in emergent literacy skills of preschool children with and without hearing loss over a 6-month period. Method: Participants included 19 children with hearing loss and 14 children with normal hearing. Children with hearing loss used amplification and spoken language. Participants completed…