Research has noted that virtual reality (VR) environments can lessen language learners' foreign language anxiety (FLA). However, previous research has relied primarily on participants' qualitative opinions, leading to a lack of studies empirically assessing how VR impacts anxiety and, consequently, second language (L2) oral production. This pilot…

An important part of the grammatical proficiency of students learning Turkish as a foreign language is the use of verb complements in terms of case suffixes used with verbs. The suffixes that determine the relations between nouns and verbs that make up the two main word categories of Turkish are case suffixes. Noun case suffixes, whose main…

The research built on the anthropological approach to text comprehension links philosophical and psycholinguistic perspectives of speech perception. The article analyzes the factors influencing adequate comprehension when perceiving foreign language oral speech, in terms of testees' approximately similar level of language competence and…

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…

This study examined the effect of benchmarking and peer-assessment activities on second language (L2) French learners' self-assessments of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency. The learners, who included 25 L2 French students enrolled in a 15-week university-level French course, recorded two oral presentations at the beginning and the end…

The general consensus in second language (L2) acquisition research that instruction facilitates L2 development has been confirmed in a growing number of meta-analyses and research syntheses conducted in an increasingly wide range of L2 areas, including, recently, pronunciation instruction. Yet, little research has been done on the…

This study argues for grounding the teaching of presentational communication in a foreign language (FL) in Making- and Design-related concepts. We use the example of creating personal narrative podcasts in an advanced collegiate FL course to demonstrate how these concepts facilitate student learning outcomes in relation to genre awareness, digital…

Canadian multilingualism and multiculturalism are on the rise. Yet, monolingual language instruction remains the standard: students are often discouraged from using their additional languages and teaching materials still lack a plurilingual lens. To further inform the practice of plurilingual pedagogies, this paper reports on results of a…

It is essential for foreign language learners to have adequate opportunities for speaking in order to enhance the acquisition of oral communicative competence. Although research over the last few years has dealt with the potential of podcasting for the development of oral competencies, little has been done towards its application in the…

Language tests are useful for many purposes, including monitoring language learning progress and evaluating language programs. This study investigated the interpretations and usefulness of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interview -- Computer (OPIc) scores across four languages at a large US…

Studies in second language acquisition (SLA) increasingly rely on measures of linguistic complexity to assess second language (L2) proficiency and development. While an important number of studies have risen to the call of studying a broader range of complexity related constructs (Bulté and Housen, 2012; Norris and Ortega, 2009), few have examined…

Answering calls to map college-level proficiency development (Modern Language Association, 2007) and longitudinally chart language learning (Barkaoui, 2014; Ortega & Byrnes, 2008), we mapped the oral proficiency growth of 1,922 lower-division college students of Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish (in the second, third, or fourth semester of…

This paper reports on a promising methodology for multilingualism studies that was trialled at the National Institute of Education (NIE) on the campus of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2018. The methodology named the Aural-Oral Transect (AOT) is a systematic, easy-to-implement, unbiased way of collecting quantitative data on…

Emotions are a fleeting experience, sometimes lasting only moments before dissipating. Prior research in SLA has either ignored emotions, underestimated their relevance, or has studied them as a relatively stable individual difference variable. In contrast, the present study takes an idiodynamic approach to examine the rapidly changing…

Six students and six parents were interviewed about the use of Cued Speech (CS) in an inclusive context in Quebec, Canada. The objective of the study was to describe their perceptions of the use of the French version of Cued Speech in high school and to identify factors that could influence these perceptions. The results of the semi-structured…