Second language (L2) instruction programs often ask learners to repeat aloud words spoken by a native speaker. However, recent research on retrieval practice has suggested that imitating native pronunciation might be less effective than drill instruction, wherein the learner is required to produce the L2 words from memory (and given feedback). We contrasted the effectiveness of imitation and re...

Abstract Flow is an intrinsic motivational state associated with full task engagement, positive affect, and enhanced performance. While research has examined how different language tasks interact flow experiences, no study learner experiences in a wide range of using experience sampling method to determine universal basic features (e.g., modality, participant structure, information distribution...

The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on pragmatic comprehension speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well way learners different levels employ strategies when comprehending a task. Thirty-three high-proficiency forty-one low-proficiency Chinese English completed multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT). Of participants, six were selected from two groups pe...

In earlier work on second language acquisition by adults, Klein & Perdue (1997) have shown that L2-learners tend to create their own language system. They do this, not only by trying to follow the grammatical rules of the L2, but also by imposing on their new language system a number of constraints. If the learners do not violate these constraints, chances are that their utterances will be corr...

This paper describes WriteAhead, a resource-rich, Interactive Writing Environment that provides L2 learners with writing prompts, as well as ”get it right” advice, to helps them write fluently and accurately. The method involves automatically analyzing reference and learner corpora, extracting grammar patterns with example phrases, and computing dubious, overused patterns. At run-time, as the u...

This paper discusses a data-driven learning (DDL) tool, which consists of a learner corpus for L2 learners of German. The learner corpus, in addition to submissions from ongoing current users, has been constructed from millions of submissions from a variety of activity types of approximately 5000 learners who used the E-Tutor CALL system over a period of five years. By following a cyclical proc...

The automated scoring of second-language (L2) learner text along various writing dimensions is an increasingly active research area. In this paper, we focus on determining the topical relevance of an essay to the prompt that elicited it. Given the burden involved in manually assigning scores for use in training supervised prompt-relevance models, we develop unsupervised models and show that the...

Researchers working with learner corpora promise quantitative results that would be of greater practical value in areas such as CALL than those from small-scale and qualitative studies. However, learner corpus research has not yet had an impact on practices in teaching and assessment. Significant methodological issues need to be examined if results from learner corpus research are going to prov...