l2 research has shown that instruction in l2 pragmatics is necessary. the current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on efl learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. it also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the l2 classroom. iranian undergraduate student...

although investigating the factors that influence test scores is important, a majority of stakeholders show a paucity of attention towards individual learner differences due to having large classes of l2 learners. this study sought to explore the possible effect of working memory and cognitive style on l2 learners’ metaphorical test performance. the study was conducted in 2 phases. the first ph...

In this work, we explore how learners can infer second-language noun meanings in the context of their native language. Motivated by an interest in building interactive tools for language learning, we collect data on three word-guessing tasks, analyze their difficulty, and explore the types of errors that novice learners make. We train a log-linear model for predicting our subjects’ guesses of w...

although the majority of linguists believing in chomskyan revolution have no doubt about the presence of ug in ll acquisition, its availability in l2 acquisition _in general, and in adult l2 acquisition in particular, is controversial. on the one hand, there are proponents of the access to ug in l2 acquisition, lidia white for example, says: therange of option available to the second language l...

In constructivist second language (L2) learning environments, particularly in relatively teacher-remote situations such as those involving Learning Management Systems (LMS), task performance freedom can be an obstacle to the achievement of specific educational objectives. This paper presents an example of task narrowing achieved by Cmap interface related task design. The relations represented b...

due to the growing emphasis of modern language pedagogy on meaningfulcommunication, l2 willingness to communicate (wtc) has recently become animportant concept in second language learning and communication. the presentstudy investigated the effects of individual differences on iranian efllearners' willingness to communicate. as many as 431 students who were learningenglish as a foreign language...

We present a new feedback strategy implemented in a natural-language-generation-based e-learning system for German as second language (L2). Although the system recognizes a large proportion of the grammar errors in learner-produced written sentences, its automatically generated feedback only addresses errors against rules that are relevant at the learner’s current L2 acquisition stage. This app...