A word-spotting task is used in Spanish to test the way in which polysyllabic letter-strings are parsed in this language. Monosyllabic words (e.g., "bar") embedded at the beginning of a pseudoword were immediately followed by either a coda-forming consonant (e.g., "barto") or a vowel (e.g., "baros"). In the former…

The emergence of videoconferencing tools in the 1990s provided language learners with opportunities to carry out speaking practice anytime and anywhere. However, the presence of Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) in this interactional setting can hinder such ubiquitous benefits as FLA inhibits learning and communication in the Foreign Language (FL)…

Due to the scarcity of studies analysing Spanish-speaking students' acquisition of pragmatic competence in English, this paper focuses on the preliminary stage of a longitudinal study on the impact that Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication (SCMC) has on the use of apologies and the acquisition of intercultural communicative competence. In…

The methods to measure vocabulary size vary across disciplines. This heterogeneity hinders direct comparisons between studies and slows down the understanding of research findings. A quick, free and efficient test of English language proficiency, LexTALE, was recently developed to remedy this problem. LexTALE has been validated and shown to be an…

This study investigates the impact of same-language subtitles on the immersion into audiovisual narratives as a function of the viewer's language (native or foreigner). Students from two universities in Australia and one in Spain were assigned randomly to one of two experimental groups, in which they saw a drama with the original English…

This article attempts to shed some light on the possible learning benefits for language acquisition and intercultural development of authentic social interaction with expert peers through computer mediated communication (CMC) tools. The environments used in this study are video communication and the 3D virtual world "Second Life." For…

This study addresses the development of the request strategies used in two service encounter scenarios by 31 nonnative speakers of Spanish spending 4 months living and studying in Valencia, Spain. The main method of data collection was an open role-play in which participants interacted with a Spanish native speaker. Results show that while there…

Within a European project on Networked Interaction in Foreign Language Acquisition and Research (NIFLAR), "Second Life" was used as a 3D virtual world in which language students can communicate synchronously with native speakers in the target language, while undertaking action together. For this context, a set of design principles for…

Online collaborative writing tasks are frequently undertaken in forums and wikis. Variation between these two communication modes has yet to be examined, particularly type of feedback and its effects. We investigated the type of feedback and the impact of English native-speakers' feedback on Spanish peers' discourse restructuring in the context of…

The aim of this work is to analyse how Spanish readers react to English discourse markers in a text. We carry out an empirical study in which we ask three research question: (a) if there is any relationship between presence of discourse markers or absence of discourse markers and reading comprehension in English as a foreign language, (b) if there…

Examined the ability of bilingual college students from Catalonia, Spain to learn a new vowel contrast as indicated by classifying the vowel, discriminating two vowels, and judging its "category-goodness." Found a lack of behavioral plasticity and that early, extensive exposure to a second language was sufficient to attain the…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…