ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics - Online First

This study investigated variation in receptive L2 English vocabulary among Norwegian university students in relation to their field of study and exposure to English, both within and outside of formal education. A survey comprising the Vocabulary Levels Test ( Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham, 2001 ) and questions about sources of language acquisition was completed by 189 Norwegian university students. The results indicate that vocabulary knowledge varied between students whose courses required different amounts of English reading. Extramural exposure to English was found to be a stronger predictor of vocabulary scores than formal English education. Since vocabulary knowledge is an important predictor of reading comprehension, it is important to consider how much the observed variation in vocabulary knowledge might affect academic outcomes.

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.

Little is known about the effect of diverging pedagogies on the development of interactional oral skills in a foreign language. In a controlled study, we evaluated three newly developed instructional programmes that were situated in the same training context, but that differed in instructional focus and type of task. These were compared to the effects of business-as-usual instruction. Multilevel analysis revealed that all experimental groups outperformed the ‘business-as-usual’ control group on oral interaction skills (N = 199), with similar results for the programmes. Positive effects were found on interaction skills for trained contexts of use only. No transfer was found to tasks in other contexts of use. We conclude that receiving contextualised oral interaction instruction is beneficial to the development of pre-vocational learners’ interaction skills.

Previous research investigating L2 incidental vocabulary learning from video has primarily focused on short videos from genres that may be conducive to vocabulary learning. The research provides evidence that L2 incidental vocabulary learning can occur through video. However, it is uncertain whether viewing episodes of full-length television programs can contribute to incidental learning. This study investigated the effects of viewing 7+ hours of television on incidental vocabulary learning as well as the effects of the frequency and range. One-hundred and eighty-seven Japanese university students viewed ten 42-minute episodes of an American drama. Two vocabulary tests at differing sensitivities were used in a pre- and post-test design measuring receptive knowledge of the form-meaning connection of 60 word-families. The results indicated that (a) viewing television contributed to significant gains in vocabulary knowledge and (b) there was a positive relationship between frequency of occurrence and vocabulary learning. Pedagogical implications are discussed in detail.