"The Modern Language Journal" has long been an important venue for the publication of research and reflection on the teaching and learning of foreign languages (FL) in classroom contexts. In this article, we offer a perspective on the contemporary FL classroom, informed by a descriptive survey of all studies that took place in FL classes…

Research in the field of third language acquisition has consistently identified two key factors which have an effect on the ways in which the two known languages may influence the acquisition of a third. These factors are language distance (typology) and language status (more specifically, second language, L2, or non-native language status). To…

English learners of French whose first language (L1) does not mark the perfective/imperfective distinction have shown verb semantic influence and an overall preference for perfective over imperfective in their use of second language (L2) tense-aspect markers. This study investigated whether learners whose L1 marks the perfective/imperfective…

This paper reports on two studies that investigated the effectiveness of a contrastive analysis type of pedagogical intervention, which aimed to promote interlanguage development in the use and understanding of English possessive determiners (PDs) among adolescent second language (L2) learners. The first research question asked whether explicit…