The current study reported an empirical investigation that tested the collective and individual effects of morphological awareness and cognate awareness on Japanese word learning among Chinese learners of Japanese. 131 Chinese learners of Japanese participated in this study. They completed morphological awareness measurements (morpheme…

Very few studies have investigated second language (L2) knowledge of word parts. The present study was set to measure L2 recognition of 35 English prefixes and the factors that might predict scores. The form and meaning sections of Sasao and Webb's Word Part Levels Test were administered to 152 Arabic learners of English as a foreign language…

Word learning in a second language (L2) is a complex process, which is affected by learner-related (e.g., morphological awareness) and language-related (e.g., word semantic transparency) factors. Morphological awareness is learners' sensitivity to the morphological structure of printed words, and semantic transparency is the degree to which…

This study investigates the validity of syntactic priming as a measure of implicit language aptitude. Syntactic priming refers to the tendency to reproduce a linguistic structure due to a previous exposure to the structure. The validity of the construct was verified by collating evidence for divergent validity--whether it is dissociable from…

While metalinguistic awareness (MLA) has been shown to play a crucial role in second and third language acquisition, a variety of methodological approaches point to the difficulty of operationalising the concept. The present study provides a critical analysis of MLA in relation to its measurement by means of a French-language test of…

Morphological awareness is regarded as a significant predictor of vocabulary acquisition, reading comprehension, and the advancement of various literary competences. Thus, the present study sought to investigate tertiary EFL students' morphological awareness of English in terms of morphological identification and morphological structure awareness.…

The study investigates whether differences in metalinguistic information contained in written corrective feedback (CF) mediate its effectiveness for second language (L2) development. To address this, metalinguistic CF was distinguished into three types in terms of how specific its metalinguistic information was. They were then compared among…

This quasi-experimental study, using a pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest design, investigated the effects of two comprehensive corrective feedback strategies: direct corrective feedback (DCF), and metalinguistic explanation (ME) on L2 learners' written syntactic accuracy. The participants were 90 Turkish EFL learners. After ensuring…

The present quasi-experimental study investigated the comparative effects of metalinguistic clue (MC) and metalinguistic explanation (ME) on the accurate use of Japanese transaction expressions. The study recruited 25 learners in a second-semester Japanese course (i.e. non-introduced group) and 17 students in a fourth-semester course (i.e.…

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 present study aimed at investigating the effects of the two types of teacher feedback--direct corrective feedback (DCF) and metalinguistic explanation (ME)--on the development of EFL learners' knowledge of the English indefinite article and on their use of it in writing. For this study, 58 college students classified into three groups (two…

This paper investigates the relationship between multilingualism, code-switching, target language contact and pragmatic and grammatical awareness in learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Participants (N = 144) were university students enrolled in English language courses at a German university. The study employed a cross-sectional…

This article reports on part of a mixed-methods study framed by sociocultural theory and aimed at assessing the impact of an intervention to promote metalinguistic awareness in language study abroad sojourners. Participants utilized a social media platform as a space to develop personalized e-portfolios for the purpose of in-depth metalinguistic…

This study investigated second language distribution of Chinese connectives by tallying responses on a mini-discourse completion test taken by English-speaking learners with different language learning backgrounds and at different proficiency levels. The results showed that an underuse pattern underlay practically all Chinese connectives as a…

The present study aimed at developing English as a foreign language (EFL) college students' translation performance through raising their awareness of related syntactic and semantic errors. During the pilot study, the researcher analyzed fifty translated passages from students' assignments. The aim of this systematic analysis was necessary to…