This study examined the responses of 39 first-year, 63 second-year, 20 third-year, and 19 fourth-year US college learners of German when they were asked what forms of L2 grammar they, respectively, find particularly difficult; do not expect to ever acquire fully; and believe are not necessary for self-expression. Nominal morphology--particularly…

Johns reports in his text "Kibbitzing one-to-ones" (1997) that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps apprentice writers to make progress in independent text revision. Expecting this progress to be based on the development of expert-like ways to observe language features, I integrated Johns' so-called kibbitzing…

In an analysis of learners' reflections taken in real time, this study attempts to unveil what learners attend to during a task session. A total of 110 Japanese learners of English noted rationales for their form selections of epistemic modal verbs. The data were then coded and tallied to enable quantitative analysis and to examine the association…

This paper presents an alternative analysis of the two Japanese existential verbs: aru and iru. By appealing to the notion of conceptualisation that pervades the cognitive linguistic literature, I demonstrate that the two verbs pattern as motion verbs, and not simply as verbs of existence and/or location. Throughout the paper, I demonstrate that…

This study investigates learners' knowledge of word classes (i.e. noun, verb, adjective) in their second language (L2). Although some L2 studies have examined the problem of word class indirectly through a focus on vocabulary and the teaching of derivational morphology (Morin, 2003, 2006; Schmitt & Zimmerman, 2002), little is known about learners'…

Discusses a visual representation of the English verb system. This system helps overcome difficulties with the opaqueness of metalanguage and with distinguishing between key notions such as "tense" and "aspect." The article shows how learners can fathom the abstract meanings involved through the use of 'icons' that obviate the…

Describes an exercise in lexical analysis, involving verbs of sound in English and Spanish. The aim of the exercise is to enable students to discover underlying patterns of meaning that are representative of lexical-conceptual structure. (Author/VL)