As part of a larger project investigating language awareness in plurilingual settings across educational levels through a multiple case study, this article zooms in on students' language awareness as it unfolds in a classroom in a Danish upper secondary school, in the context of a compulsory, plurilingual general language awareness course.…

Research examining rule formation and second language (L2) explicit knowledge during guided inductive instruction has focused on co-constructed metalanguage or depth of processing (DoP) using think-aloud protocols, but without analyzing rule features. Studies have not focused on the architecture of the rules that L2 learners create individually.…

This article reports two intervention studies testing the effects of plurilingual teaching on grammatical development among primary-school students learning English as a foreign language (FL). In a pre-posttest control-group design, more than 200 9-10-year old majority language German and minority language students received plurilingual FL…

This article analyzes the instructed learning of the English article system by second language (L2) learners. The Competition Model (MacWhinney, 1987, 2012) was adopted as the theoretical framework for analyzing the cues to article usage and for designing effective computer-based article instruction. Study 1 found that article cues followed a…

This study examined the contributions of morphological awareness (MA) to second language (L2) word meaning inferencing in English-speaking adult learners of Chinese (N = 50). Three research questions were posed: Are L2 learners sensitive to the morphological structure of unknown multi-character words? Does first language (L1) MA contribute to L2…

Within limited-input language classrooms, understanding the effect of distribution of practice (spacing between practice) on learning is critical, yet evidence is conflicting and of limited relevance for young learners. For second language (L2) grammar learning, some studies reveal advantages for spacing of 7 days or more, but others for shorter…

The present study investigated a group of cognitive individual differences considered advantageous in second language learning and their role in language learning under implicit and explicit feedback conditions using both language awareness and language development measures. The study further investigated whether different types of awareness are…

The logographic nature of the Chinese writing system creates a huge hurdle for Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners. Existing literature (e.g., Shen, [Shen, H. H., 2010]; Taft & Chung, [Taft, M., 1999]) suggests that radical knowledge facilitates character learning. In this project, we selected 48 compound characters in eight radical…

This study introduces an approach to providing corrective feedback to L2 learners termed analogy-based corrective feedback that is motivated by analogical learning theories and syntactic alignment in dialogue. Learners are presented with a structurally similar synonymous version of their output where the erroneous form is corrected, and they must…

This article reports on a classroom-based study that investigated the effectiveness of direct written corrective feedback in relation to learner differences in grammatical sensitivity and knowledge of metalanguage. The study employed a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design with two treatment sessions. Eighty-nine Greek English as a foreign…

Adopting a functional perspective that views grammar as a rich resource for making contextualized meanings in a culture- and language-specific way, the article reconsiders the role of explicit grammar instruction in developing communicative abilities of second language learners. It draws on two distinct but complementary research frameworks,…

Many second language acquisition researchers (e.g., Doughty & Williams, 1998; R. Ellis, 2007; Long, 1996, 2007; Lyster, Lightbown, & Spada, 1999; Russell & Spada, 2006) have advocated the use of negative feedback to promote learner noticing of errors and the internalization of correct forms. At the same time, the true efficacy of this practice is…

This study investigates the contribution of second-language (L2) morphological awareness to foreign language reading comprehension. Tenth graders (n = 188) at a South Korean high school were assessed on 6 reading- and language-related variables: phonological decoding, listening comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, passage-level reading…

Recent research has shown that certain learners' responses to feedback, specifically repair and modified output, are predictive of subsequent second language (L2) development. Yet, little is understood about why these responses are associated with second language acquisition (SLA). The current study investigated this question by exploring the…

This paper suggests that a dynamic systems theory (DST) provides an adequate conceptual metaphor for discussing multilingual development. Multilingual acquisition is a nonlinear and complex dynamic process depending on a number of interacting factors. Variability plays a crucial role in the multilingual system as it changes over time (Herdina &…