The study investigates to what extent English as a second language (ESL) learners develop explicit and automatised explicit knowledge of two target-forms (third person singular 's' and future conditional if-clause) after input and output based instruction and whether learning effects differ depending on the target forms. The study follows a…

The acquisition of verbal morphology presents challenges for many second language (L2) learners, in part because they do not readily process those forms during sentence comprehension. Instead, L2 learners rely on lexical-semantic cues (e.g., temporal adverbs and explicit subjects). This study investigated the role of task-essential training in…

In the first phase of this study, how English simple past is being taught in the classroom was examined through a questionnaire. The findings report how primary and secondary teachers perceived the difficulties faced by Cantonese English as a second language learners when acquiring English simple past, and the dominant teaching approaches or…

Exploring the ways to develop a comprehensive learner-friendly telecollaborative model of learning led to the introduction of nonlinear dynamic motivation-oriented model. To foster self-regulated learner autonomy, the model aims at recruiting the potential behind formulaic sequences for L2 comprehension-production in response to immediate…

Findings from five experiments support the view that negation generates sarcastic utterance-interpretations by default. When presented in isolation, novel negative constructions ("Punctuality is not his forte," "Thoroughness is not her most distinctive feature"), free of semantic anomaly or internal incongruity, were…

This article reports on a study that investigated whether processing instruction(PI) or production-based instruction (PBI) is more effective for the teaching of regular past simple verb forms in English. In addition, this study examined whether explicit grammatical information (EI) mediates the effectiveness of PI or PBI. A total of 194 Turkish…

According to a dominant thesis, nominal endings are the privileged cues French children use to determine new nouns' gender subclass. Children will rely on phonology even in cases of discordance with natural gender. Two elicited production studies involving more than 250 4- to 17-year-olds showed that while French children did not base their gender…

This comparative, classroom-based study investigated the effect and effectiveness of introducing a focus on form approach to a content-based, occupation-specific language program for adults. Thirty-six adults in two classes participated in a 10-week study. One group of 16 adults received content-based instruction that included a focus on form…

EFL Learners often have problems using the past tense accurately. In an attempt to solve their problem, this study was carried out to examine the effects of using two different types of output tasks on noticing and learning the English past tense. Sixty female school-age EFL learners were divided into groups of 18, 19, and 23 participants. A…

This study aimed to isolate the effects of the two input activities in Processing Instruction: referential activities, which force learners to focus on a form and its meaning, and affective activities, which contain exemplars of the target form and require learners to process sentence meaning. One hundred and twenty 12-year-old Taiwanese learners…

This paper presents the results of a parallel classroom experiment investigating the effects of processing instruction, traditional instruction and meaning-based output instruction on the acquisition of the English past simple tense. The subjects involved in the present studies were Chinese and Greek school-age learners of English residing in…