Derivational morphology (DM) and how it can be assessed have been investigated relatively rarely in language learning and testing research. The goal of this study is to add to the understanding of the nature of DM knowledge, exploring whether and how it is separable from vocabulary breadth. Eight L2 (second or foreign language) English DM…

Researchers working on "metasyntactic abilities" (i.e., the metalinguistic ability associated with syntax) face the problem of defining and measuring them. Metasyntactic abilities is a multifaceted concept, which encompasses various types of behaviours, from being able to intentionally manipulate syntactic structures to being able to…

Learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) tend to swap the two characters within a coordinative compound word in verbal identification and written production. This mixed methods study not only investigated how CFL learners identified intercharacter orthographic and semantic relationships within two-morpheme coordinative compound words, but…

Morpheme-based literacy training programs are widely used in German primary schools. This study investigated whether (1) morphological training is effective early in development (Grade 2) and (2) literacy gains can be attributed to advanced morphological processing. Fifty-two German-speaking second-graders participated in an eight-week…

The current era of globalization and emergence of English as an international language (EIL) has brought about new opportunities for L2 pragmatic learning and teaching. The common view of pragmatic learning as an approximation to native-likeness is changing towards conceiving pragmatic ability as a tool to interact with people of different…

Previous and current research identify Metalinguistic Awareness (MLA) as a possible cause of the positive effects of bilingualism on cognitive development and Third Language Acquisition (TLA). Although it has been acknowledged that MLA is strongly affected by literacy and grammar-related activities, only a few studies have focused on the context…

The Interface Hypothesis proposes that second language (L2) learners, even at highly proficient levels, often fail to integrate information at the external interfaces where grammar interacts with other cognitive systems. While much early L2 work has focused on the syntax-discourse interface or scalar implicatures at the semantics-pragmatics…

This study investigates preschoolers' ability to understand and produce novel metonyms. We gave forty-seven children (aged 2;9-5;9) and twenty-seven adults one comprehension task and two elicitation tasks. The first elicitation task investigated their ability to use metonyms as referential shorthands, and the second their willingness to name…

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…

This article is on pedagogical translanguaging, understood as planned instructional strategies used with a pedagogical purpose in a multilingual educational context. The paper reports a study on cognate identification and cognate awareness carried out in a multilingual primary school. The study aims at analyzing whether the identification of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a morphological awareness intervention on the spelling and writing of second-grade (n = 16) and third-grade (n = 10) students at risk for learning disabilities. The intervention was provided for 25 min per session 4 to 5 times per week for 5 weeks. Students were randomly assigned to the…

The present study explored the effect of task repetition with and without explicit instruction on EFL learners' (n = 26) explicit and implicit English regular past tense structure development. One group (REP) repeated the same task (n = 12) while another group (EI + REP) received explicit instruction between performances of the same task (n = 14).…

This study examined the role of error-type and working memory (WM) in the effectiveness of direct-metalinguistic and indirect written corrective feedback (WCF) on self error-correction in first-language writing. Fifty-one French first-year psychology students volunteered to participate in the experiment. They carried out a first-language…

This article synthesizes the roles of morphology in English reading acquisition and reports a meta-analytic structural equation modeling study (k = 107, N = 21,818) that tested the effects of morphological awareness (MA) on reading comprehension in school-aged readers. Moderator analysis was conducted through a set of subgroup comparisons based on…