Second Language Acquisition Literature Research Articles

Using corpora from Natural Language Processing for investigating crosslinguistic influence

Language transfer or crosslinguistic influence (CLI), referring to the influence of an L1 on the learning of an L2, is a significant aspect of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Much work in this area is data-driven, and consequently, large L2 corpora have been constructed for use in CLI analyses. The field of Natural Language Processing, and in particular the specific task of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), also has corpora that can be of use in these kinds of analyses. In this paper, we take the FCE corpus, a popular dataset of English as a Second Language (ESL) learner texts used for Grammatical Error Correction model training, and use it to analyse the relationship between the distributions of errors and the first languages of the ESL learners. We carry out a detailed analysis of three error types, and demonstrate that the errors made by ESL learners have a statistically significant relationship with linguistic characteristics of their first languages, suggesting the existence of both positive and negative transfer. The analysis aligns with results from the SLA literature, and validates the use of GEC corpora for use in CLI analysis.

Realizing Corrective Feedback in Task-Based Chatbots Engineered for Second Language Learning

Building on the work of customized chatbots for language teaching and learning and the second-language acquisition literature on corrective feedback (CF), this article showcases an innovative practice for building a tailored and task-based chatbot to provide CF. Given that extant chatbots are generally not sensitive to learners’ grammatical errors, we illustrate a way to install a CF function by using ‘action and parameters’ and ‘define prompts’ options in the chatbot-building platform known as Google DialogflowTM. Our study, which included upper-grade English-as-a-foreign language learners in South Korea, demonstrated that customized chatbots could offer CF when students made non-target utterances and elicit learner uptake successfully. Based on our innovation, we then provide directions for pedagogy on chatbot-based language learning.

The relation of second language acquisition, instructed second language acquisition, and language teaching from the lens of second language tense-aspect

AbstractThis article examines the relationships between second language acquisition (SLA), instructed second language acquisition (ISLA), and language teaching by examining them from the lens of the research on the acquisition and teaching of second language (L2) tense-aspect in the last 20 years (2000–2021). Review 1 examines 56 instructional effect studies on the acquisition of L2 tense-aspect, and Review 2 examines 38 pedagogical proposals for the teaching of L2 tense-aspect. The reviews investigate to what extent instructional effect studies and pedagogical proposals with tense-aspect as the target of investigation and instruction (a) provide a linguistic description of the instructional target, (b) engage with previous research, (c) implement results from previous research to design assessment or instruction, and (d) include elaborate descriptions of teaching interventions and teaching materials. The results show that there are clear attempts to establish connections between research and practice. However, neither instructional effect studies nor pedagogical proposals always engage with the SLA literature on the acquisition of tense-aspect; nor do they engage fully with language teaching.

The Case for a True Task-Based Curriculum for Medical Spanish Courses

Issue For decades, professional healthcare schools have invested considerable time and resources into the development and implementation of medical Spanish courses. However, most (if not all) of these courses and programs were developed without significant input from experts in the fields of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA). This resulted in programs and courses which differ in every conceivable way, most notably in course objectives, course content, and assessment measures. Despite multiple calls by applied linguists over the years, there has never been a systematic evaluation of medical Spanish programs through the lens of applied linguistics. The literature to date also demonstrates a near-complete absence of collaboration between medical school faculty, applied linguists, and language teachers, furthering the divide between what is now well-documented in the applied linguistics and SLA literature and the reported classroom practices in the medical Spanish context. Evidence This article begins by contextualizing the development of medical Spanish courses under a backdrop of a critical need for multilingual medical professionals to better address documented healthcare disparities for Low English Proficiency (LEP) Spanish speakers, a steadily growing population in the United States. Then, the article introduces Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) as an opportunity for unprecedented collaboration between healthcare practitioners, medical Spanish course instructors, and applied linguists to improve medical Spanish curricular offerings. It goes on to identify specific opportunities for collaboration between medical Spanish professionals (instructors, course designers, program administrators) and applied linguists by highlighting three major areas for further development in the medical Spanish context. This collaboration would result in a pedagogical framework strongly rooted in applied linguistics research findings with direct, measurable impacts on both L2 Spanish learners in medical Spanish courses and the patients they will serve. Implications Based on identified opportunities for curricular and programmatic improvement in published medical Spanish course reports, this article provides a rationale for TBLT as well as an overview of the process of TBLT course development. This detailed overview of TBLT course development with specific reference to the medical Spanish context presents an argument for the adoption of TBLT as an evidence-based and pedagogically viable alternative to current course offerings in medical Spanish programs. This article aims to identify a clear path forward to enable medical school program administrators and course and curriculum designers to take concrete steps to align courses with current best practices in second language pedagogy in order to optimize Spanish learning outcomes for their programs’ specific students.

Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language: Theories and Practices

Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language: Theories and Practices

La valutazione della complessità sintattica nella classe di lingua Un’analisi delle riflessioni di insegnanti di italiano L2

This paper aims to investigate how language teachers perceive syntactic complexity in L2 writing and to what extent teachers’ judgments are related to current theoretical views in the research literature on Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Sixteen L2 teachers were asked to evaluate the syntactic complexity of a sample of argumentative texts written by L2 university students of Italian. In the panel discussion that followed, teachers discussed the motivations behind their assigned scores and the feedback they had proposed. The results revealed that teachers tended to focus primarily on accuracy and comprehensibility, and much less on syntactic complexity. Teachers’ reflections appeared to be only partly aligned with existing theoretical views on syntactic complexity in the SLA literature.

Implicit Teaching Strategies on Grammar Instruction: Students’ Prevailing Stance

Grammar teaching in foreign language education has been maintained by most theories as one thing playing a significant role in facilitating the process of learning to read, write, speak, and understand a foreign language. However, scholars label that role as controversial both in the research of second language acquisition (SLA) and language pedagogy. Thus, such condition results in a potential cause of confusion to teachers and students, then leads the researchers to a thoughtful theoretical debate on the topic of the way grammar should be taught: explicitly or implicitly. The aim of the present case study was to gain an insight into the prevailing stance of Indonesian English students on grammar teaching enrolled in a senior high school. To this end, a questionnaire as well as interview sessions were developed and validated based on one construct pair from SLA literature: explicit versus implicit instruction. The findings, in general, showed that the students were found to prefer implicit over explicit instruction. Nonetheless, the stance somewhat changed depending on the proficiency level of students. As an implication, this study supported Indonesian English students to maintain their stance on implicit teaching strategies on grammar instruction, regarding the help they can get in the process of natural acquisition of language.

CROSSLINGUISTIC INFLUENCE IN ENGLISH AS THE WEAKER LANGUAGE OF FRENCH-ENGLISH AND POLISH-ENGLISH BILINGUAL CHILDREN

This study aims to assess the extent of crosslinguistic influence in English as the weaker language of unbalanced bilingual children, and to compare the extent of such influence to that reported in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. Additionally, by comparing children from different L1 backgrounds, we aim to see if typological distance impacts crosslinguistic influence. We collected elicited speech samples from 16 Polish-English and 44 French-English children who have had dual language input from birth, but whose English is weaker mostly because it is absent outside the home environment. The crosslinguistic error rates (an average of 6%) are lower for our participants than averages found in SLA literature, but still considerably high. Although French- and Polish-dominant children present comparable error profiles, the extent of crosslinguistic influence tends to be greater in the case of French-English bilinguals than for Polish-English bilinguals, which may reflect the perceived distance between the languages.

Research meets practice

At the recent CLTA-S2 conference, a spirited debate occurred between critics of second language acquisition (SLA) research and researchers who embraced it. Fascinating as it was, neither camp appeared to have convinced the other, but, more important, the debate left much of the audience flummoxed. In this paper, I intend to provide a follow-up, attempting to clarify a) the relationship between research and teaching in the context of Chinese as a second language (CSL), b) misunderstandings on the part of critics over research findings, and c) potential pitfalls in interpreting the SLA literature. My goal is to encourage, as well as contribute to, further communication between the two camps, for the ultimate good of CSL instruction and learning.

Student teacher beliefs on grammar instruction

The role of grammar teaching in foreign language education is a controversial one both in second language acquisition (SLA) research and language pedagogy and, as a result, a potential source of confusion to student teachers. The objective of this study was to gain insight into the beliefs on grammar teaching of student teachers of English as a foreign language enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education programmes at Dutch universities of applied sciences. To this end a questionnaire was developed and validated based on four construct pairs from SLA literature: meaning- versus form-focused instruction, focus on form (FonF) versus focus on forms (FonFs), implicit versus explicit instruction, and inductive versus deductive instruction. Overall, respondents ( n = 832) were found to prefer form-focused, explicit, inductive instruction, and FonFs. However, higher-year undergraduates’ and postgraduates’ results showed a trend towards a preference for more meaning-focused and implicit instruction, and FonF. When learner level was factored in, however, these forms of language instruction were considered subordinate to more traditional form-focused approaches for teaching higher-level language learners.

EFL learners’ strategy use during task-based interaction in Second Life

Motivated by theoretical and pedagogical concerns that the link between second language (L2) learners’ second language acquisition (SLA) and language use in 3D multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) is still not fully connected in current SLA literature, this study examined the patterns of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ employment of communication strategies during task-based interaction in Second Life (SL). Nine adult EFL learners worldwide were recruited, and they used their avatars to negotiate meaning with peers in interactional tasks via voice chat in SL. Results reveal that confirmation checks, clarification requests, and comprehension checks were the most frequently used strategies. Other types of strategy use were also discovered, such as a request for help, self-correction, and topic shift – accompanied by a metacognitive strategy and spell-out-the-word that had not been previously documented in task-based research in 3D MUVEs. This study demonstrated that SL could offer an optimal venue for EFL learners’ language acquisition to take place and prompt their cognitive processing during task-based interaction. Additionally, 3D multimodal resources afforded by SL provide additional visual support for EFL students’ input acquisition and output modifications. A call for more research on voice-based task interaction in 3D MUVEs is also needed.

Rationalizing the Attitude-Acquisition Conundrum in Cameroon Pidgin English

This paper seeks to rationalize the attitude-acquisition conundrum which is witnessed with Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), an English-based pidgin spoken in Cameroon. According to Baker (1992: 10), ‘attitude’ refers to a hypothetical construct used to explain the direction and persistence of human behavior. In second-language acquisition literature, the use of the term ‘attitude’ has very often conjured up associated notions such as behavior, motivation, prestige and importance, which are seen to be important determinants of levels of success in L2 learning/acquisition. A positive attitude is said to fortify the motivation to learn a language; to be a successful learner, a positive attitude towards the target language is necessary. However, as McKenzie (2008: 4) notes, the relationship between attitude and L2 learning/acquisition is a rather complex one, which varies according to social context. Among other things, a positive attitude towards an L2 is also driven by factors such as (1) the socioeconomic value of the L2, (2) the L2's status-raising potential and (3) its perceived instrumental value.

Defining grammatical difficulty: a student teacher perspective

Numerous second language acquisition (SLA) researchers have tried to define grammatical difficulty in second and foreign language acquisition – often as part of an attempt to relate the efficacy of different types of instruction to the degree of difficulty of grammatical structures. The resulting proliferation of definitions and the lack of a unifying framework have made the easy–difficult distinction a muddled concept. This paper attempts to clear up some of the confusion by reviewing the definitions SLA literature offers and relating these to (student) teachers’ cognitions on grammatical difficulty, a perspective largely ignored in SLA publications despite its potential for a more integrative and holistic view on the topic. To this end, a total of 727 undergraduate and postgraduate student teachers of English were surveyed in two empirical studies. Quantitative and qualitative analyses – in combination with the findings from SLA literature – yielded a model comprising four interrelated categories of factors that determine grammatical difficulty: (1) grammar feature; (2) pedagogical arrangement; (3) teacher quality; and (4) learner characteristics. In addition, the resulting model is discussed as a basis for future research into the changing cognitions of student teachers as they become more experienced.

The use of statistics in L2 acquisition research

Second language acquisition (SLA) as a discipline has not had a long history and, as any new discipline, has seen growing pains over the years. This research timeline traces the development of the increased and more sophisticated use of statistics in SLA research and the increasing demands for rigor in their use. Use of statistical procedures has been increasing in the SLA literature, but the tools themselves have not developed from within the field; rather the increased use stems from greater statistical sophistication on the part of users. In other words, SLA is not an innovator but an increasingly knowledgeable borrower and adapter of statistical procedures.

`To be a native speaker means not to be a nonnative speaker’

The construct of the native speaker is germane to second language acquisition (SLA) research; it underlies, and permeates, a significant bulk of SLA theory construction and empirical research. Nevertheless, it is one of the least investigated (and for that matter, least understood) concepts in the field. Even a cursory reading of the major SLA literature would not yield one readily available definition that captures the essential uses that have been made of the concept: including, but not limited to, setting the native speaker as a goal or a model for SLA or using the native speaker as a yardstick to measure second language knowledge. As is, the concept remains assumed-based on common sense observation and intuition-rather than exposed to scientific inquiry. In this article I would like to draw attention to this pivotal yet much neglected concept by reviewing Davies (1991; 2003) on the native speaker. A by no means exhaustive account, the books outline principal parameters for considering the native speaker concept, thereby providing a useful basis for further inquiry.

Key variables in language learning: what do learners believe about them?

This paper reports on a study which investigated the language learning beliefs of a group of students enrolled in an English for Academic Purposes course. The study drew on the results of an earlier study of language learning beliefs (Cotterall, 1995. Readiness for autonomy: investigating learner beliefs. System 23 (2), 195–205) which used factor analysis to identify six dimensions underlying learner responses to a questionnaire, and explored the relationship between each factor and autonomous language learning behaviour. This study extends the earlier work in three ways, Firstly, it adds new items based on the factor structure previously identified. Secondly, it incorporates items designed as a result of a survey of current research in second language acquisition (SLA). This survey identified factors which the literature suggests are important in successful language learning, particularly in autonomous language learning. Thirdly, it provides a learner perspective on topics in the SLA literature which researchers and teachers often claim as their domain. The paper discusses the beliefs reported by the subjects, and considers the implications of these beliefs for future research and for interventions in the learning process.

Transfer Constraints and Substrate Influence in Melanesian Pidgin

This study examines research on transfer in second language acquisition (SLA) in order to identify situational and linguistic factors which may constrain the influence of substrate languages on the developing grammar of a pidgin or creole. A distinction is made between the earlier transfer of L1 features by individuals attempting to use the superstrate language as an L2 for wider communication, and the later retention of a subset of these features by the community during a process of leveling which occurs during stabilization. The study outlines various transfer constraints and reinforcement principles proposed in both the second language acquisition and pidgin/creole studies literature. These are evaluated using Melanesian Pidgin and its Central-Eastern Oceanic (CEO) substrate languages as a test case. Of the potential constraints on transfer proposed in the SLA literature, the need for partial or specious congruence between superstrate and substrate structures appears to account best for the particular CEO features that were transferred. Perceptual salience accounts for the kinds of forms from English that were reanalyzed to fit CEO patterns. With regard to the retention of particular transferred features, the most significant reinforcement principle appears to be frequency in the contact environment.

The Study of Second Language Acquisition, by Rod Ellis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994. vii + 824 pp.

Oxford, The Study of Second Language Acquisition by Rod UK: Oxford University Press, 1994. vii + 824pp. Scarlett L. Ellis. Reviewed by Robbins University of California, Los Angeles of second language acquisition (SLA) research, now more is expanding rapidly and widening the scope both of its research interests and perspectives (e.g., cognitive, grammatical, neural, pragmatic, and socio-interactive aspects of language learning and use) and of its applicability to other fields (e.g., anthropology, cognitive psychology, second/foreign language teaching, sociology, theoretical linguistics). With three journals devoted primarily to SLA research (e.g., Language Learning, Second Language Research, Studies in Second Language Acquisition) and numerous others regularly publishing articles on the topic (e.g., Applied Language Learning, Applied Linguistics, Issues in Applied Linguistics, TESOL Quarterly), the task of presenting a comprehensive review of the literature on SLA has become a daunting one indeed. Ellis' The Study of Second Language Acquisition is an attempt to accomplish just that task. Ellis claims that the acceptance of SLA as a discipline in its own right depends upon its status as a defined field of inquiry and the existence of a body of research and knowledge related to it (p. 3). With this volume, he sets out to satisfy these defining criteria and thereby to establish SLA as a discipline in its own right. He first delimits the range and scope of the field of SLA research and then comprehensively reviews the existing SLA literature in a logically organized fashion so as to demonstrate the conceptual coherence of this broad, multi-perspective, and somewhat The field than 25 years old, diverse field. The Study of Second Language Acquisition is aimed primarily at future second/foreign language teachers who, Ellis argues, would benefit substantially from knowledge of SLA research. This book can provide teachers with invaluable insights and help them to make their assumptions about SLA explicit and, as a consequence, to more effectively evaluate their pedagogic practices (p. 4). The text is also aimed at introductory level SLA students and SLA researchers in need of a reference text. The text consists of 15 chapters organized into seven parts and is supplemented by an extensive glossary, a bibliography, and author and subject indices. Ellis sets out in Part One to define the field of SLA research by considering the basic questions which it seeks to answer and to Issues in Applied Linguistics ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 6 No. Regents of the University of California