The present study investigated the effects of different types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of French grammatical gender attribution. A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 140 participants in six intact French as a second language (L2) classes. The classes received six 80-minute instructional sessions consisting of…

There are grounds for believing that prompting language learners to infer the meaning of new lexical items is beneficial because inferring the meaning of lexical items and verifying one's inferences invites more cognitive investment than simply being presented with the meanings. However, concerns have been raised over the risk that wrong…

This study examined the use of a popular Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Google Voice Typing (GVT), to automatically assess English as second language pronunciation. It aimed to answer the following question: What is the relationship between GVT-rated scores and human-rated scores? To answer this question, we compared audio recordings of 56…

The vocabulary research of the 1980s and 1990s brought a breath of fresh air into the language classroom. Teachers in many remote EFL locations had long suspected that vocabulary was their learners' main challenge, but there was little research evidence to confirm this or say what to do about it. Then, suddenly, work by Nation, Laufer, Meara,…

This article discusses an innovation within one Canadian institution that focuses on linguistically responsive activities in an internationalized, Anglophone university. The study draws on recent research in applied linguistics that addresses language and content integration within disciplinary courses as an innovation. Drawing on Rogers' (1995)…

Willingness to communicate (WTC) research has recently witnessed a paradigm shift with the more recent studies looking at the shifting and dynamic nature of the variable. A growing body of literature has interpreted such dynamicity from a complex dynamic systems (CDS) perspective. The theory of CDS has four basic properties, one of which, and the…

Due to the growing status of English as the language of international communication, English immersion programs have been on the rise in China and the rest of the world. Though there has been much discussion on the theoretical and practical characteristics and features of immersion, current models are not adequate for explaining the…

A good mastery of a range of formulaic sequences appears to be an important component of successful language learning (Wood, 2015; Wray, 2002). Certain formulaic sequences, known as pragmatic formulas, play a vital role in developing second language pragmatic competence, as they are crucial for successful speech act realization (Bardovi-Harlig,…

This article highlights findings from evaluation of a bridging program for international students at a large Canadian university. Designed specifically for the postsecondary context, the program moved along the continuum from a general, skills-based approach to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching and learning, in which the focus may be on…

This article reports on a study that examined the effectiveness of an intervention using text messages to enhance the academic vocabulary acquisition of English language learners (ELLs). With a random control trial design, we compared students' learning gain of target vocabulary (direct effect) and its subsequent impact on academic vocabulary…

The usefulness of explicit knowledge of the second language is a matter of controversy in the field of second language acquisition. In this regard, it has been argued that explicit representations might be useful for some structures but not for others (R. Ellis, 2006; Roehr & Gánem-Gutiérrez, 2009). The goal of this study was to examine…

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the appropriateness of open-access reading materials for an intensive English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course, and to provide teachers with a set of criteria to select online texts systematically and efficiently. The Corpus for Veterinarians (VetCorpus) was compiled and analyzed using Lextutor corpus…

Lexical bundles are worthy of attention in both teaching and testing writing as they function as basic building blocks of discourse. This corpus-based study focuses on the rated writing responses to the email tasks in the Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program® General test (CELPIP-General) and explores the extent to which lexical…

This article reports on an English for academic purposes course designed following the tenets of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) to address the needs of language minority (LM) high school graduates entering Canadian universities. The language used in and required of post-secondary study is challenging for many LM students,…

Most of the laboratory studies on recasts have examined the role of intensive recasts provided repeatedly on the same target structure. This is different from the original definition of recasts as the reformulation of learner errors as they occur naturally and spontaneously in the course of communicative interaction. Using a within-group research…