The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

Research on the language-literature divide in undergraduate second language programs documents the challenge of engaging literature learners in classroom discourse which is conducive to their developing interpersonal speaking skills as measured on the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Scale. In this study, Integrated Performance Assessments (IPAs) were…

Educational institutions with world language requirements face increasing student demand to offer Spanish Language for Specific Purposes (SPSP) courses at lower proficiency levels to fulfill language requirements. Language for specific purposes courses are designed to fulfill the communicative needs of students within a specific professional…

This study compares Spanish instructors' use of preterite and imperfect in the foreign language classroom to the distribution of these forms in large-scale corpora, which represent the input learners would potentially receive in a naturalistic learning context. Twenty-four 50-minute class sessions were recorded, and all tokens of preterite and…

The Simple View of Reading (SVR) model posits that reading is the product of word decoding and language comprehension and that oral language (listening) comprehension is the best predictor of reading comprehension once word-decoding skill has been established. The SVR model also proposes that there are good readers and three types of poor…

The present study investigates whether the implementation of a dictogloss task within a proactive Focus on Form approach (e.g., Long 1991; Long and Robinson 1998) has significant effects on the acquisition of Spanish present subjunctive. A total of sixty-six learners in a fifth-semester Spanish course participated in the study and were assigned to…

Although previous research has documented the relationship between voice-onset time (VOT) and the production of foreign accent in English and Spanish, less is known about the role of this cue in perception. VOT refers to the aspiration that occurs between the release of a stop consonant and the beginning of the following segment. In Spanish and…

The current study examines English-speaking learners of Spanish and their pragmatic development of request forms during a six-week immersion program in Madrid, Spain. Elicited production and intuition data were analyzed, focusing on personal deictic orientation, directness evidenced by clause type, and the use of "por favor"…

During the last decade, researchers of foreign language pedagogy have become increasingly interested in the "language-literature divide" (Donato and Brooks 2004). The purpose of the current study is to contribute to this growing body of research by investigating the extent to which whole class discussions in three third-year…

Short-term study abroad programs of less than a semester are becoming increasingly popular among undergraduate students in the United States. However, little research has examined the changes in students' cultural sensitivity through their participation in such programs or what factors may predict growth and improvement in such areas. This study…

This pilot study investigates whether requiring participation in community-based learning can motivate intermediate level Spanish learners to engage in more frequent interaction in Spanish outside of the classroom and course requirements. Using the theoretical framework of willingness to communicate in a second language, this study combines both…

Over the past four decades, scholars have debated the pedagogical and sociolinguistic needs of heritage language learners. It is widely accepted that these learners present several characteristics that are different from those of foreign (or non-heritage) language learners. However, scholars have also pointed to similarities between the two groups…

Following observations and interviews with transnational children that have one or more years of school in the United States and are now in school in Mexico, it was determined that the Mexican public school system has no mechanism in place to offer them the support they need. Therefore, I collaborated with Mexican university students to seek…

This article contributes to the literature on the use of the present tense to refer to past events in oral narratives, otherwise known as the Conversational Historical Present (CHP) (Wolfson 1978). Previous research has found that the CHP switches with the past (Wolfson 1979) frequently with verbs of saying and achievement verbs (Dunn 1998; Van…

The present study examines the effect of self-evaluation on Spanish oral performance of nine second-language university students in an intermediate conversation course. Participants were asked to submit multiple drafts of digital video recordings of themselves practicing language functions throughout a semester. Participants also reflected on…