There is a significant diaspora of Mixtec people residing along California's Central Coast, mostly working in the agricultural sector. The new realities in the diaspora have brought Mixtec varieties in contact in new contexts where they co-exist with other Mexican Indigenous languages, as well as with Spanish and English. We urgently need more…

Situated within Sociocultural theory (SCT), this article analyzed an existing data set (Toth, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, available at https://www.iris-database.org) to investigate learners' development through participation in a dialogic approach to grammar instruction called PACE. The target of instruction was the Spanish pronominal clitic…

The study addresses the research gap of how being a speaker of a Slavic language influences the ability to convey tempo-aspectual meanings in Romance languages by examining personal and impersonal narratives delivered in written and spoken mode by learners of L3 Spanish and L3 Italian with L1 Slovak and L2 English. Narratives are analysed…

To probe the limits of attention raising through form-focused instruction, second-language research must adapt to the needs of a technologically driven learning environment. In this study, we used a randomized control design to investigate the effect of captioned media on the learning of vocabulary and grammar in L2 Spanish (n = 369 learners).…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

Collaborative writing tasks have been claimed to offer language learning opportunities because they implicitly draw learners' attention to form. Nevertheless, their efficacy has been claimed to be moderated by proficiency, as low proficiency learners tend to override form over meaning. These claims, however, are mostly based on adult learners and…

The prior language knowledge of learners for whom the target language is not the first foreign language poses a different starting learning situation that should merit pedagogical attention. The present paper seeks to contribute to the question of which pedagogical considerations can be made in regard to the role of prior language knowledge beyond…

At some UK universities, non-credit bearing courses for the general public are offered in a wide range of languages, often taught by hourly paid staff. Ensuring similar, high quality learning experiences and learning outcomes across languages can be a challenge. This study inquired into the viability and value of a consciousness-raising approach,…

This anniversary volume of the Association for the Teaching of Spanish in Higher Education in the United Kingdom is a compilation of contributions made by members and delegates at the 2019 ELEUK annual conference held at the University of Edinburgh. Throughout the book, authors share their teaching, assessment, and research practice in the area of…

This paper aims to explore the reasons behind the limited dissemination of Adamczewski's Metaoperational approach to language beyond the French academic sphere. The theory, which developed in and by contrastivity between 1976 and 2005, is built on the basic assumption that utterances exhibit on their surface observable traces of the utterer's…

Previous studies have shown that multilingual speakers are influenced by their native (L1) and non-native (L2) grammars when learning a new language. But, so far, these studies have mostly used untimed metalinguistic tasks. Here we examine whether multilinguals' prior grammars also affect their sensitivity to morphosyntactic constraints during…

Most heritage language learners (HLLs) of Spanish cannot produce grammatical terminology, simple grammatical analysis, and/or simple grammatical items on demand. Possible causes are: the naturalistic manner in which language was acquired, lack of opportunities to learn basic concepts in beginning courses (because they were skipped), or the belief…

The usefulness of explicit knowledge of the second language is a matter of controversy in the field of second language acquisition. In this regard, it has been argued that explicit representations might be useful for some structures but not for others (R. Ellis, 2006; Roehr & Gánem-Gutiérrez, 2009). The goal of this study was to examine…

The study examines performance on an evaluation instrument for classroom use for the purpose of improving instruction that focuses on awareness of language in reading and writing. Findings are reported on the piloting of the first in a series of literacy assessments with students from a rural elementary school in Ecuador. All students who…

In this paper, we discuss the benefits of using online translators in the foreign language classroom. Specifically, we discuss how faulty online translator output can be used to create activities that help raise metalinguistic awareness of second language grammar and of the differences between grammatical constructions in the first and second…