Journal of Second Language Studies - Online First

Corpus linguistic methods can now be easily employed in a wide range of studies within sub-disciplines of linguistics and well beyond. In a two-part paper, Gries ( 2022a , 2022b ) challenges some of the most widely used ‘association measures’ of what many might feel to be powerful aspects of text patterning: collocation and key words. While the additional association measure offers some new possibilities, this paper highlights the strong influence of another frequency parameter on odds ratio and Gries’s suggested association measure, and questions the applicability of his cautions for many different kinds of corpus research. Nevertheless, having been inspired to look at different aspects of association and dispersion more carefully, the author presents some new visualizations which were designed to communicate some of the important lessons to be learned from Gries’s papers, especially for learners and teachers using corpus tools in Second Language classrooms.

This study examined Chinese-as-a-second-language (L2 Chinese) learners’ speech production ability from a dual perspective: speech competence and speech performance. A total of 118 valid L2 Chinese learners finished two developed tests in this study, namely, the Chinese speech competence test and the Chinese speech performance test. The results suggested that L2 Chinese learners’ speech competence and speech performance, as a twofold rendering of their L2 speech production ability, not only showed a significant positive correlation with a large effect size (Pearson’s r = .598) but also significantly predicted each other with a large effect size (Cohen f2  = .555). However, such large effect sizes of the correlation and the prediction between speech competence and speech performance were not supported among the upper-intermediate L2 Chinese learners. This suggested that the development between speech competence and speech performance may be more unbalanced among the upper-intermediate L2 Chinese learners compared with their advanced counterparts. The study adds evidence to the call for a multidimensional evaluation of L2 speech production ability. It is hoped that the dual approach (i.e., speech competence and speech performance) proposed in the present study may contribute to a more comprehensive evaluation of learners’ L2 Chinese speech production ability. Consequently, classroom-based teaching can be tailored to facilitate a more balanced development of L2 Chinese learners’ speech competence and speech performance.

This article addresses the pitfalls of performance analysis in investigating cognitive processing during second language (L2) learning. The problems that we discuss in this paper are twofold: (1) Assuming psychological variables to be ontological entities without meeting the criteria for ontological reality and (2) Inappropriateness of assessing abilities based on learner’s speaking or writing performance to investigate cognitive processes. By addressing these problems, we argue that some latent variables postulated by observing L2 performance do not exist in reality and emphasize the difficulty of interpreting cognitive mechanisms through performance analysis. We also enumerate some problems that arise from the epistemological perspectives of previous research practice (e.g., the bifurcation of contradictory hypotheses and their indeterminacy). Finally, two alternative approaches treating L2 performance are proposed. The implications of this line of discussion for future research are also discussed.