ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics - Online First

This article reports a study investigating the role of inhibitory control in the acquisition of Spanish noun-adjective gender agreement under different feedback timing conditions. Forty-three Spanish learners completed a communicative task through synchronous computer-mediated communication. The immediate group received reformulations immediately after their errors, whereas the delayed group received reformulations at the end of the task. The control group did not receive any feedback. Learners’ knowledge of the target form was assessed using oral production and grammaticality judgment tests at three different times: once before the treatment, once immediately after the treatment, and once ten days after the treatment. Inhibitory control was measured with the Flanker test. Results did not show a statistically significant interaction between inhibitory control and feedback timing group on either outcome measure even though the correlations between learners’ gains and inhibitory control were different across groups.

This paper reports the results of a meta-analysis of 39 published studies conducted during the last decade (from 2006 to 2016) on the effects of instruction and corrective feedback on learning second language (L2) pragmatics. The study meta-analyzed the effects of instruction in terms of several moderator variables including mode of instruction, type of instruction, outcome measures, length of instruction, language proficiency, and durability of the instructional effects. It was found that (a) computer-assisted instruction generated larger effects than face-to-face instruction, (b) instruction was generally more effective for L2 pragmatic comprehension than production, (c) instruction produced larger effects when tested by selected response outcome measures although different patterns were observed across explicit-implicit categories, (d) longer treatments generated a larger effect size than shorter treatments, (e) studies conducted with intermediate level learners produced larger effect sizes than beginner or advanced level learners, and (f) the observed effects of instruction were maintained.

This article provides a longitudinal study of L2 learners of German who used a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) system that formed part of their regular classroom instruction. The 42 learners were enrolled in four consecutive university language courses at a beginner and intermediate level. The study compares two different feedback types, metalinguistic feedback and repetition, which were provided for the same exercise type over the course of four semesters. The exercise type required learners to build sentences from a set of predefined, uninflected words. While the grammatical focus of the exercises changed over time, many of the same grammatical constructions were present in all four courses. The study discusses the changes in learner performance and error correction behavior as students became more proficient in their knowledge of the L2 grammar and were exposed to the technology-mediated feedback that remained consistent throughout system use over the four language courses.

Producing a meaningful written discourse in a foreign language requires a high cognitive effort of EFL learners. They face challenges caused by L2 word or grammar-related difficulties, and also by the L2 genre and genre conventions that may be quite different from what they experienced in their L1. The present study focusses on the support offered to Vietnamese L2 writers to overcome these hindrances. An intensive four-week writing intervention was designed and tested to examine whether encouraging genre awareness via a short session of sample text analysis could empower students to conduct effective brainstorming for argumentative writing. In a pre-test post-test control group design with switching replications, with 66 EFL intermediate undergraduate participants, the study obtained four indicators of L2 argumentative writing quality: idea generation, productivity, global text quality and self-efficacy. The results showed that participants integrated the sample text analysis into the idea generation stage. They created significantly longer self-expressive free writing texts, perceived the generated ideas as more useful, and used more of these ideas in their argumentative texts composition, compared to students from the control condition (with teacher instruction only). No treatment effects were found for productivity, global quality of final text, and self-efficacy. Students in both control and treatment conditions generally showed a significant improvement on these variables.

The current study investigated the differential effect of two types of oral feedback – graduated oral corrective feedback (GOCF) in accordance with sociocultural theory (SCT) and supplemented direct oral corrective feedback (SDOCF) in accordance with cognitive-interactionist theory (CIT) – on Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners’ written errors. The study used a pretest-treatment-immediate posttest-delayed posttest design with three groups. Two types of tests were employed to measure the learners’ explicit and implicit knowledge of English articles. The results of the repeated measures mixed-design ANOVAs and post-hoc analyses demonstrated that while both types of feedback significantly improved both types of knowledge in the immediate posttest, a clear advantage was found for the GOCF in the long term. The findings indicate that oral feedback, especially the GOCF within SCT, could be an effective means of addressing learners’ written errors and improving their implicit knowledge.

This article reports on a classroom intervention where L2 learners were prompted to look for multiword expressions in texts. The participants were two intact classes of Vietnamese learners of English as a foreign language. Over a period of eight weeks, the experimental group (n = 26) looked for expressions in texts, while the comparison group (n = 28) used the same texts for content-related activities. In pairs, students in the experimental group consulted online dictionaries and an online corpus to help them determine which word strings in the texts were common expressions. The students’ worksheets and audio-recorded interactions suggest they were by and large successful at this, but also reveal the students found it hard to identify the boundaries of expressions and occasionally failed to find the dictionary (sub-)entries that matched them. The two groups’ ability to recall the expressions was gauged by comparing their scores on a pre-test and a post-test administered one week after the last class and again five months later. The learning gains were greater in the experimental group, although the difference fell short of significance in the delayed post-test. Students in the experimental group whose proficiency in English was relatively high tended to benefit the most.

Research on collaborative work has explored the benefits of task repetition (TR) for L2 development. TR has been claimed to improve L2 complexity, accuracy and fluency, provide opportunities for feedback, and increase learners’ engagement in their L2, as reported in studies that have explored patterns of interaction. Research on this topic, particularly that undertaken with EFL children as participants, has gained attention in recent years. However, there is a dearth of literature regarding the impact of TR on the patterns of interaction and on the opportunities to receive feedback for child ESL learners. The aim of the present study is to address this gap examining the interactions of 28 young ESL learners who completed the same spot-the-difference task twice within a 3-month time frame. The findings showed that the majority of pairs represented patterns of interaction with low levels of mutuality (i.e. engagement) and upon TR these patterns barely varied. However, regardless of learners’ patterns of interaction, these ESL learners provided feedback and negotiated during task-based interaction, especially the collaborative pairs.

In incidental learning, open class vocabulary items with high or relatively high objective frequency in input are comparatively likely to be acquired. However, many single words and most multiword expressions (MWEs) occur infrequently in authentic input. It has therefore been argued that learners of school age or older can benefit from episodes of instructed or self-managed deliberate (or intentional) L2 vocabulary learning, especially when L2 is learned in an EFL environment and most especially when productive knowledge is the goal. A relevant question is whether the objective frequency of vocabulary items is an important factor in production-oriented deliberate L2 vocabulary learning. We report three small-scale interim meta-analyses addressing this question with regard to two-word English Adj-Noun and Noun-Noun expressions. The data derive from 8 original studies involving 406 learners and 139 different MWEs. Our results suggest that objective frequency has a weak, possibly negative effect in the deliberate learning of MWE forms.