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,…

We examined negative transfer from English and Spanish to Portuguese pronunciation. Participants were native English speakers, some of whom spoke Spanish. Participants completed a computer-based Portuguese pronunciation tutorial and then pronounced trained letter-to-sound correspondences in unfamiliar Portuguese words; some shared orthographic…

Communicative competence is the ultimate goal of most learners of a second language and intelligible pronunciation a fundamental part of it. Unfortunately, learners often lack the opportunity to explore how intelligible their speech is for different audiences. Our research investigates whether synchronous-voice computer-mediated communication…

Hemispheric asymmetry was examined for native English speakers identifying consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) non-words presented in standard printed form, in standard handwritten cursive form or in handwritten cursive with the letters separated by small gaps. For all three conditions, fewer errors occurred when stimuli were presented to the right…

Errors involving universal quantification are common in contexts depicting sets of individuals in partial, one-to-one correspondence. In this article, we explore whether quantifier-spreading errors are more common with distributive quantifiers each and every than with all. In Experiments 1 and 2, 96 children (5- to 9-year-olds) viewed pairs of…

This study examined the development of reading and reading-related skills for native and nonnative speakers of English through the first and second grades. Tasks assessing reading, phonological, and language processing were administered to 36 native English speakers (NS) and 38 children who spoke English as a second language (ELL). Both ELL and NS…

Two samples of college student writing, paragraphs from freshman compositions, are analyzed for presence or absence of two characteristics of literate prose, decontextualization and autonomy. Writing is decontextualized and autonomous when whatever is needed for its comprehension is included in the words of the text, and comprehension is not…

This paper analyses the use of the word "where" in texts written by Malay-speaking learners of English. Data from a learner corpus is compared with data from two corpora of academic writing by native English-speaker writers. Considerable over-use of "where" is found: this is explained as a consequence of various patterns of misuse of "where" and…

The present study examines pragmatic production of monolingual (L1 Castilian) and bilingual (L1 Catalan, L2 Castilian) learners of English in a foreign language learning context, that of the Valencian Community in Spain. We particularly focused on proficiency-level effects and on the role of the task type in the use of request acts peripheral…