ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics - Volume 168, Issue 2, 2017

Justice has been the topic of comparatively few papers in the fields of applied linguistics or language assessment. This may be due to the lack of a clear and agreed-upon definition on the one hand, or to the difficulty of operationalizing justice for test development on the other. This paper aims to remedy both problems by discussing prior conceptualizations of justice and by introducing six justice principles, which are based on theories of distributive justice that focus on human rights, fairness, equal opportunity, and dignity. The overarching aim of this paper is to advance the debate on justice, and to provide a consistent way of considering ethical and moral dilemmas that language testers face today.

The present article outlines the procedure and shows the outcomes of a think-aloud study intended to, first, find out what listening strategies Hong Kong students of Spanish use to comprehend a particular oral passage in the target language, second, discover what strategies the learners perceive to be the most effective, and, third, understand the participants’ perceptions of the think-aloud protocol. Such a protocol was developed during interviews in which students listened to a text in Spanish, and were asked to verbalize the processes they were using. After listening, they completed five comprehension questions, reflected on their strategic behaviour, and evaluated the protocol itself. Results reveal that problem identification and evaluation are the most used strategies; while the strategies of focusing attention, note taking, and cooperation are reported to be the most effective ones. Findings also show that students have a very positive view of the developed think-aloud protocol.

Interactive tasks are valuable tools for L2 learners and have long made their way into language lessons. Among the different task conditions, only few studies have dealt with procedural repetition, which consists of repeating the same task type with different contents and which is frequently used in schools. In this study we explore the effects of procedural repetition on the oral interactions of ten pairs of English learners (age 11) who had to repeat a task three times. Their negotiation strategies and general performance (accuracy, fluency and complexity) were analysed. Results show that, in the third repetition, the amount of confirmation checks and repetitions decreased significantly and accuracy timidly improved. All other aspects remained unaffected. The pedagogical implications of these results are also discussed.

Key accounts of morphological variability in L2 acquisition posit either deficits in the representation of abstract morphosyntactic features or the mapping between morpho-phonological forms and syntactic features due to computational limitations. This study extends previous research to L2 Italian, a richly inflected language. The production and grammatical intuitions of suppletive and affixal verb inflection were elicited from a cross-section of instructed adult L2 learners with L1 Spanish and L1 English. Although a clear production-intuition gap was found, supporting computational views, a strong regularity in the degree of variability across test conditions, L1s, and proficiency levels was also attested, supporting representational accounts. The findings suggest morphological development in L2 Italian is consistent with structure-building models that assume no L1 transfer of functional features. Imperative verb forms in L2 Italian are proposed as defaults equivalent to the bare verb forms of L2 English and non-finite defaults of L2 French and German.

As collocations are very numerous, at least a part of them has to be learned incidentally when acquiring a second language. There is now an increasing body of evidence showing that incidental learning of collocations seems to be possible. The present study sets out to investigate whether collocations can be learned incidentally if encountered in their nonadjacent form (with words intervening between collocates). It also looks at the role of prior vocabulary knowledge in incidental acquisition of adjacent and nonadjacent collocations. The results show that nonadjacent collocations can be learned equally well as adjacent ones, at least to the recognition level of knowledge. Also, larger prior vocabulary knowledge seems to lead to better chances of learning both adjacent and nonadjacent collocations incidentally.

This longitudinal study investigates an English-French-Turkish-speaking seven-years-old female child’s repertoire combining two Indo-European languages, English and French, and Turkish, which is an Altaic language. Language attrition has mostly focused on first language (L1) attrition, and to a lesser extent on second language (L2) attrition. Third language (L3) attrition, however, has been mostly overlooked, and more attention has gone to adult language attrition after migration or after institutional language learning. Most research has in addition focused on only a subset of target languages (TL). This paper therefore addresses the attrition of child L3 (Turkish) attrition ‘after remigration’. The findings show selective regression with structurally assigned morphology and confirm the findings of previous studies showing that the younger the informant, the more attrition is likely to occur.