This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…

Language revitalization efforts have been critiqued for creating and reproducing linguistic, epistemological, and pedagogical hierarchies that might run counter to a community's needs and interests. Drawing on a seven-year ethnographic and collaborative research with the Maya cultural promoters of the Caste War Museum in Tihosuco, Mexico, we…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

In this paper, we review how eye tracking, which offers millisecond-precise information about how language learners orient their visual attention, can be used to investigate a variety of processes involved in the multifaceted endeavor of second language acquisition (SLA). In particular, we review the last 15 years of research in SLA, in which…

Judgment tasks (JTs, often called acceptability or grammaticality judgment tasks) are found extensively throughout the history of second language (L2) research. Data from such instruments have been used to investigate a range of hypotheses and phenomena, from generativist theories to instructional effectiveness. Though popular and convenient, JTs…

This paper traces the development of two roughly synonymous nominalizing suffixes during the Early Modern English period, the Romance "-ity" and the native "-ness." The aim is to assess whether these suffixes were favored in particular registers or followed similar paths of development, and to ascertain whether the ongoing…

In her 2017 article 'Research into practice: Listening strategies in an instructed classroom setting,' Suzanne Graham outlines ways that research-derived principles of listening instruction have (not) been adopted in second language (L2) classrooms. She organizes her argument into three categories, discussing research findings that have not been…

Three experimental studies are presented testing the choice of a left or a right dislocation in Catalan, depending on the bridging relation between the dislocate and its antecedent. We make the hypothesis that the stronger the anaphoric link between the dislocate and its antecedent, the more appropriate a right dislocation is, whereas the opposite…

Using the lenses of bilingualism and social justice, I reflect on relevant conceptual and methodological issues encountered in the study of the linguistic development of heritage language speakers. Themes examined include the early but varying timing of heritage language learning; the surrounding linguistic environment, including the link between…

I have been interested in the study of language since I was a very young kid, and this caused me to give up everything else just to focus on the study of language. Applied linguistics has specifically been my passion and blessing, and every now and then I prepare a bibliography of research on applied linguistics for people who are interested in…

This article offers a methodological synthesis spanning 35 years of instructed second language acquisition research on the efficacy of form-focused instruction. Eighty-eight (quasi-) experimental studies were sampled from six academic journals: "Applied Linguistics," "Language Learning," "Language Teaching Research,"…

The major aim of the current paper is to review and discuss three prevailing approaches to the study of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) since the middle of the twentieth century: Contrastive Analysis (CA, henceforth), Error Analysis (EA) and Interlanguage (IL). It begins with a general overview of how the CA approach was formulated and developed…

This paper uses conversation analysis (CA) to trace changes in one learner's repair practices during a repetitive storytelling activity in an intermediate-level ESL classroom. An analysis of the learner's phonological and grammatical repairs is guided by two questions: How are the repair sequences organized, and what changes occur in the sequences…

Through two elicited production experiments we investigated how preschool Italian-speaking children access the left periphery of the clause with respect to topics in Clitic Left Dislocation (ClLD) structures. Since the discourse conditions of the experiments are felicitous for the production of passives as well, we also investigated children's…

This paper suggests six areas of vocabulary research which the author believes would be fruitful for future research. They include (1) developing a practical model of vocabulary acquisition, (2) understanding how vocabulary knowledge develops from receptive to productive mastery, (3) getting lexical teaching/learning principles into vocabulary and…