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46 results in Second Language Acquisition

Page 1 of 3

Speaking and Instructed Foreign Language Acquisition
  • Edited by Mirosław Pawlak, Ewa Waniek-Klimczak, Jan Majer
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
  • Developing the ability to speak in a foreign language is an arduous task. This is because it involves the mastery of different language subsystems, simultaneous focus on comprehension and production, and the impact of a range of social factors. This challenge is further compounded in situations in which learners have limited access to the target language. Thus, there is a need to explore issues related to teaching, learning and testing speaking with a view to translating the guidelines based on theoretical positions and research findings into feasible and context-specific pedagogical recommendations. This is the rationale behind this book, which considers speaking from leading theoretical perspectives, investigates individual variables which affect its development, and reports the results of studies focusing on different aspects of its instructed acquisition.

Neurolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives on SLA
  • Edited by Janusz Arabski, Adam Wojtaszek
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
  • Neurolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives on SLA is a collection of twelve chapters, reporting on research results and presenting theoretical insights into the processes of language acquisition. It is divided into two major sections: the first part demonstrates the ways in which the latest developments in non-invasive techniques of brain monitoring allow researchers to test hypothesis related to biological foundations of language acquisition, including also accounts of emotional factors, limbic communication and evidence from language disorders. The second part offers psycholinguistic modelling of a number of components of second language competence, such as the acquisition of reading and writing, handling of foreign language vocabulary and the nature of bi- and multilingualism. It is a valuable collection for active researchers in the field, as well as for postgraduate students in language acquisition, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.

Lexical Inferencing in a First and Second Language
  • Cross-linguistic Dimensions
  • Marjorie Bingham Wesche, T. Sima Paribakht
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
  • This book presents a comprehensive review of previous research on lexical inferencing, co-authored by Kirsten Haastrup, and a major new trilingual study of lexical inferencing by both first (L1) and second language (L2) readers. Research since the 1970s on this apparently universal cognitive process in L2 reading and vocabulary learning is surveyed, including the kinds of knowledge and textual cues L2 readers use when inferring unknown word meanings, factors influencing their success and knowledge retention, and relevant theory. A comparative study of L1 and L2 lexical inferencing by Persian and French and English speakers is then presented, focusing on evidence of L1 transfer in the L2 inferencing process, its success and readers’ gains in L2 word knowledge. Influences of the specific L1 are distinguished from those of native versus non-native proficiency, relative cultural familiarity of texts, readers’ L2 proficiency, text language features and other factors. The relative typological distance between readers’ L1 and L2 is reflected in systematic differences between L1 speakers of Persian and French in their L2 lexical inferencing. Implications are drawn for L2 instruction at advanced levels.

Dyslexia in the Foreign Language Classroom
  • Joanna Nijakowska
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
  • This book addresses specific learning difficulties in reading and spelling – developmental dyslexia. Set in the cross-linguistic context, it presents issues surrounding dyslexia from the perspective of a foreign language teacher. It is intended to serve as a reference book for those involved in foreign language teaching, including experienced in-service teachers and novice teachers, as well as teacher trainers and trainees. It offers an up-to-date and reader-friendly study of the mechanisms of dyslexia and an overview of the current research on the disorder, in theoretical and practical terms. Its aim is to help teachers tackle one of the many challenges they face in the modern classroom: the organization of an effective foreign language teaching process for students with dyslexia.

Linguistic Relativity in SLA
  • Thinking for Speaking
  • Edited by ZhaoHong Han, Teresa Cadierno
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
  • Crosslinguistic influence is an established area of second language research, and as such, it has been subject to extensive scrutiny. Although the field has come a long way in understanding its general character, many issues still remain a conundrum, for example, why does transfer appear selective, and why does transfer never seem to go away for certain linguistic elements? Unlike most existing studies, which have focused on transfer at the surface form level, the present volume examines the relationship between thought and language, in particular thought as shaped by first language development and use, and its interaction with second language use. The chapters in this collection conceptually explore and empirically investigate the relevance of Slobin’s Thinking-for-Speaking Hypothesis to adult second language acquisition, offering compelling and enlightening evidence of the fundamental nature of crosslinguistic influence in adult second language acquisition.

Strategic Language Learning
  • The Roles of Agency and Context
  • Xuesong (Andy) Gao
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
  • This monograph reports on a longitudinal inquiry into mainland Chinese undergraduates’ language learning experiences in an English medium university in a multilingual setting with a focus on their strategic language learning efforts. This book examines the issue as to what extent language learners’ strategic learning efforts depend on their ‘choice’, if ‘the element of choice’ is the defining characteristic of language learners’ strategic learning behaviour. The inquiry, using a qualitative and ethnographic research approach, reveals dynamic interaction between learners’ agency and contextual conditions underlying the participants’ strategic learning process. Such understanding informs pedagogical efforts to foster individual learners’ capacity for strategic learning and their capacities in opening up and sustaining a social learning space for exercising their strategic learning capacity or utilizing their strategic learning knowledge.

Investigating Pragmatics in Foreign Language Learning, Teaching and Testing
  • Edited by Eva Alcón Soler, Alicia Martínez-Flor
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
  • The book focuses on investigating pragmatic learning, teaching and testing in foreign language contexts. The volume brings together research that investigates these three areas in different formal language learning settings. The number and variety of languages involved both as the first language (e.g. English, Finnish, Iranian, Spanish, Japanese) as well as the target foreign language (e.g. English, French, German, Indonesian, Korean, Spanish) makes the volume specially attractive for language educators in different sociocultural foreign language contexts. Additionally, the different approaches adopted by the researchers participating in this volume, such as information processing, sociocultural, language socialization, computer-mediated or conversation analysis should be of interest to graduate students and researchers working in the area of second language acquisition.

Foreign Language Input
  • Initial Processing
  • Rebekah Rast
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
  • Foreign Language Input: Initial Processing presents the most comprehensive study to date of the starting point of second language acquisition. Its focus is on the language input that learners receive and what they actually do with this input. The empirical study detailed in the book follows a methodology in which all of the language input provided to the learners from the moment of first exposure is controlled, recorded and transcribed. This input is then quantitatively compared to the learners’ performance on language tasks administered at various time intervals up to 8 hours after first exposure. This in-depth analysis of the input and the learners’ performance sheds light on questions still unanswered in second language acquisition literature, such as what knowledge is brought to the acquisition process and how learners use this knowledge to process new linguistic information.

The Strategy Factor in Successful Language Learning
  • The Tornado Effect
  • 2nd edition
  • Carol Griffiths
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    14 October 2026
  • This book addresses fundamental questions regarding the relationships between successful language learning and strategy use and development, according to learner, situational or target variables. It considers strategy effectiveness from an individual point of view and discusses pedagogical issues, especially relating to teacher perceptions and training, classroom and learner factors, methodology and content. This new edition has been reworked and revised to include an extensive review, analysis and re-interpretation of the existing literature and an update on the theoretical debate surrounding language learning strategies. The research methodology section has been considerably extended and detailed explanations are now given for how to analyse data from research studies. Rather than focusing on strategies divorced from the 'real world' of the classroom, this book explores the issues from the teaching/learning point of view and will be of interest to students, teachers, trainee teachers, teacher educators and researchers alike.

The Japanese Writing System
  • Challenges, Strategies and Self-regulation for Learning Kanji
  • Heath Rose
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    14 October 2026
  • This is the first book devoted to exploring issues of learning written Japanese, focusing on the challenges the writing system poses for the second language learner. It weaves together previous research on Japanese second language acquisition and kanji learning with original studies on self-regulation and kanji learning strategies. It provides the most comprehensive overview of the Japanese writing system and kanji learning to date; helps further our understanding of second language writing acquisition and offers new directions for research in the wider fields of language learning strategies, motivation and self-regulation. Each chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of the content of the chapter for the Japanese language learner, instructor and researcher. It will appeal to researchers of the teaching and learning of Japanese as a foreign/second language, the Japanese writing system and second language acquisition, as well as to instructors and learners of Japanese who are struggling with the teaching and learning of kanji.

Language Learning Strategies in Independent Settings
  • Edited by Stella Hurd, Tim Lewis
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    13 October 2026
  • Language learning strategies have been a topic of research for roughly three decades. Broadly speaking, that research has focused on classroom tuition, predominantly at secondary level. Increasingly, however, language learning occurs in independent settings, whether at distance, on Institution-Wide Language Programmes (IWLPs), or in virtual environments. Success in independent language learning is achieved by autonomous individuals with a capacity for self-regulation. Yet we still know relatively little about the specific means they use to learn effectively, whether in terms of the affective strategies they employ to sustain motivation, the metacognitive strategies required for planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning, or the specific cognitive strategies applied to difficult learning tasks. These are all discussed and evaluated in Language Learning Strategies in Independent Settings.

Learning Foreign Languages in Primary School
  • Research Insights
  • Edited by María del Pilar García Mayo
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    13 October 2026
  • This book presents research on the learning of foreign languages by children aged 6-12 years old in primary school settings. The collection provides a significant and important contribution to this often overlooked domain and aims to provide research-based evidence that might help to inform and develop pedagogical practice. Topics covered in the chapters include the influence of learner characteristics on word retrieval; explicit second language learning and language awareness; meaning construction; narrative oral development; conversational interaction and how it relates to individual variables; first language use; feedback on written production; intercultural awareness raising and feedback on diagnostic assessment. It will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, teachers and stakeholders who are interested in research on how children learn a second language at primary school.

Morphosyntactic Issues in Second Language Acquisition
  • Edited by Danuta Gabryś-Barker
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    13 October 2026
  • The volume consists of articles on issues relating to the morphosyntactic development of foreign language learners from different L1 backgrounds, in many cases involving languages which are typologically distant from English, such has Polish, Greek and Turkish. It highlights areas which may be expected to be especially transfer-prone at both the interlingual and intralingual levels. The articles in the first part report empirical studies on word morphology and sentence patterns and also look at the interface of lexis and grammar in the discourse and syntactic processing of foreign language learners. The second part elaborates on pedagogical issues concerning the acquisition of difficult grammatical features such as the English article system or the ‘s’ ending in the third person singular. It also comments more generally on the way pedagogic grammar functions in the learning of the L2.

Grammar Acquisition and Processing Instruction
  • Secondary and Cumulative Effects
  • Alessandro Benati, James F. Lee
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    13 October 2026
  • Research on Processing Instruction has so far investigated the primary effects of Processing Instruction. In this book the results of a series of experimental studies investigating possible secondary and cumulative effects of Processing Instruction on the acquisition of French, Italian and English as a second language will be presented. The results of the three experiments have demonstrated that Processing Instruction not only provides learners the direct or primary benefit of learning to process and produce the morphological form on which they received instruction, but also a secondary benefit in that they transferred that training to processing and producing another morphological form on which they had received no instruction.

Understanding Second Language Process
  • Edited by ZhaoHong Han
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    13 October 2026
  • This book assembles 11 analytical and empirical studies on the process of second language acquisition, probing a wide array of issues, from transfer appropriate processing to L2 default processing strategies, among hearing or deaf learners of a variety of target languages including English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, Spanish, and American Sign Language. Although instruction per se is not the focus of this volume, the chapters are written with instructed learners in mind, and hence offer valuable insights for both second and foreign language researchers and practitioners.

Socializing Identities through Speech Style
  • Learners of Japanese as a Foreign Language
  • Haruko Minegishi Cook
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    10 October 2026
  • Drawing on the perspective of language socialization and a theory of indexicality, this book explores ways in which learners of Japanese as a foreign language and their Japanese host families socialize their identities through style shift between the masu and plain forms in a homestay context. Going beyond the usual assumption that the masu form is a polite speech marker, the book analyzes the masu form as an index of various social identities and activities. The book discusses both socialization through speech styles and socialization to use an appropriate speech style. Qualitative analysis of dinnertime conversations demonstrates how learners are implicitly and explicitly socialized into the norms of style shift in Japanese in interaction with their host family members.

Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar
  • Edited by Yan-kit Ingrid Leung
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    10 October 2026
  • Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar contains nine chapters on adult third language (L3) or multilingual acquisition from the Universal Grammar (UG) perspective. A variety of languages other than English are involved in the studies reported in the papers, including Cantonese Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Thai, with acquisition cases taking place in a number of different geographical locations, such as Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Norway, Taiwan, Thailand, the UK and the USA. This volume will appeal to those studying L3 acquisition from a variety of theoretical perspectives and should encourage scholarly exchange between the fields of bi-/multilingualism and SLA.

Language Learner Autonomy
  • Theory, Practice and Research
  • David Little, Leni Dam, Lienhard Legenhausen
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    10 October 2026
  • This is the first book on language learner autonomy to combine comprehensive accounts of classroom practice with empirical and case-study research and a wide-ranging engagement with applied linguistic and pedagogical theory. It provides a detailed description of an autonomy classroom in action, focusing on Danish mixed-ability learners of English at lower secondary level, and reports the findings of a longitudinal research project that explored the learning achievement over four years of one class in the same Danish school. It also presents two learner case studies to show that the autonomy classroom responds to the challenges of differentiation and inclusion, and two institutional case studies that illustrate the power of autonomous learning to support the social inclusion of adult refugees and the educational inclusion of immigrant children. The concluding chapter offers some reflections on teacher education for language learner autonomy. Each chapter ends with discussion points and suggestions for further reading.

Third or Additional Language Acquisition
  • Gessica De Angelis
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    10 October 2026
  • Third or Additional Language Acquisition examines research on the acquisition of languages beyond the L2 withing four main areas of inquiry: crosslinguistic influence, multilingual speech production models, the multilingual lexicon and the impact of bi/multilingualism on cognitive development. The book critically examines the evidence available keeping two main questions in mind. The first is whether multilinguals should be considered as learners and speakers in their own right and, consequently, whether the distinction between Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism, and Third or Additional Language Acquisition and Multilingualism is fully warranted. The second is how proficient in a non-native language learners are supposed to be before they can begin to be classified as multilingual learners in empirical research

Fossilization in Adult Second Language Acquisition
  • ZhaoHong Han
  • Published by:
    Multilingual Matters
    Published online:
    10 October 2026
  • This book is a systematic attempt to address the issue of fossilization in relation to a fundamental question in second language acquisition research, which is: why are learners, adults in particular, unable to develop the level of competence they have aspired to in spite of continuous and sustained exposure to the target language, adequate motivation to learn, and sufficient opportunity to practice?

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