Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: expresión oral

Resumen:

Many secondary school students' second language (L2) speaking skills suffer from deficiencies; the effects thereof are detrimental to their academic and career opportunities in a globalized world that highlights the importance of oral communication skills. Debate has been considered a potentially effective speaking pedagogical tool that can scaffold learning processes in ways that can lead to language development. This study investigates the effect of a debate intervention on English L2 speaking competence of Dutch secondary school students. Following a pretest–posttest control group design, we elicited speech samples from opinion tasks which we coded in terms of measures of speech quantity, fluency, complexity, accuracy and cohesion. Multilevel analysis results indicate that after the intervention, the intervention group produced...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: español como lengua de herencia

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This eye-tracking study examined how heritage speakers of Spanish process gender agreement morphology at a distance, focusing on the activation of the gender feature during sentence processing. Previous work is conceptually replicated and further extended by assessing (1) whether reduced sensitivity to gender agreement mismatches when another word intervenes between the head noun and its modifying adjective stems from weakened gender feature activation, (2) whether a gender-marked determiner enhances this activation, and (3) whether Age of Onset of Bilingualism (AOB) plays a role in this activation. Fifty-three English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish and a comparison group of 32 Spanish-dominant monolingually...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: enseñanza/aprendizaje de la gramática

Resumen:

Research has underscored the separate role of output to promote processing instruction (PI) effects in language learning. Yet, there is a need to scrutinize the interplay between structured output (SO) and unstructured output (USO) within PI to understand how innovative combinations may enhance ultimate educational attainment. The present quasi-experimental study investigated the possible effects of PI with/without SO and USO on learners' short-term and long-term automatic and non-automatic explicit knowledge of English passive structure. A homogeneous sample of 115 Intermediate learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in intact groups was selected and randomly assigned to four experimental groups (PI, PI+SO, PI+USO, and PI+SO+USO). We administered parallel timed and untimed grammaticality judgment tests (GJT) to measure...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: comunicación no verbal

Resumen:

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Los elementos con los que nos comunicamos son tanto verbales como no verbales. Por este motivo, a fin de potenciar la comunicación intercultural, la inclusión de la comunicación no verbal está ganando progresivamente presencia en la enseñanza de L2/LE. Sin embargo, muy pocos estudios presentan enfoques empíricos para comprender la adquisición de signos no verbales L2/FL en el aula. Este estudio analiza el papel de dos diferencias cognitivas individuales (estilos de aprendizaje e inteligencias múltiples) en el aprendizaje de tres tipos diferentes de emblemas (comunes, diferentes y únicos). Para ello, se llevó a cabo una intervención formada por un pretest, un periodo de instrucción y un...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: español como lengua de herencia

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This study investigates the cognitive processing of Spanish idioms from a pragmatic perspective, with the goal of examining the idiom superiority effect. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with 77 participants to assess how idiomaticity influences processing and whether heritage speakers align more with L1 or L2 patterns. Results show a processing advantage for idioms among L1 speakers, suggesting reduced cognitive load in later stages. Both heritage and L2 speakers showed longer reading times, but only L2 speakers benefited consistently from idiomaticity. Heritage speakers processed idioms more slowly, indicating difficulty with opacity despite early exposure. Findings support hybrid models of idiom...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: sintaxis

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La Jerarquía de Accesibilidad del Sintagma Nominal (JASN) establecida por Keenan y Comrie (1977) revela que las oraciones de relativo de sujeto (La señora que trabaja en la Unión Europea es especialista en periodismo político) resultan más fáciles para relativizar en comparación con las de objeto directo (El señor que acabamos de contratar cuenta con abundante competencia comunicativa). El presente artículo aspira a investigar, desde la perspectiva de la JASN y mediante las tareas de combinación de oraciones, si los aprendientes chinos de ELE prefieren producir las oraciones de relativo de sujeto (N=55). Los resultados indican que, con respecto a los aprendientes chinos de ELE, existe tal...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: enseñanza/aprendizaje de vocabulario

Resumen:

This study investigated the influence of practice distribution (i.e. spacing between practice sessions) on successful vocabulary learning by examining two different time distributions, i.e. 1-day spacing (1-DS) vs. 7-day spacing (7-DS) using a freely available computer-assisted language learning programme (Quizlet). The study achieved high ecological validity through a classroom-based study with low proficiency second language (L2) English language learners at an Omani college of technology. The sample consisted of 96 participants in control (n = 33), 1-DS (n = 34) and 7-DS (n = 29) groups. The control group was a test-only group with no explicit practice activities for the target words (34 nouns). Meanwhile, the 1-DS group (one day spacing between each practice session) and 7-DS group (seven day spacing between each practice session...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: español como lengua de herencia

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The present study analyzes individual differences in the facilitative processing of grammatical gender by heritage speakers of Spanish, asking whether these differences correlate with lexical proficiency. Results from an eye-tracking study in the Visual World Paradigm replicate prior findings that, as a group, heritage speakers of Spanish show facilitative processing of gender. Importantly, in a follow-up within-group analysis, we test whether three measures of lexical proficiency—oral picture-naming, verbal fluency, and LexTALE—predict individual performance. We find that lexical proficiency, as measured by LexTALE, predicts overall word recognition; however, we observe no effects of the other measures and no...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: factores afectivos

Resumen:

While researchers in the second language (L2) field often consider that L2 anxiety determines subsequent L2 achievement, an emerging line of research suggests that language skills better predict L2 anxiety. This viewpoint has yet to be experimentally evaluated, and thus it motivated the present study. Two groups of university language students enrolled in the Department of English as an L2 were followed over one semester at three time points while taking a general university course unrelated to language learning. The experimental group received extra instruction (course unrelated) designed to expand their L2 vocabulary knowledge, including strategies for learning and using new vocabulary in real-life contexts over the whole semester. A typical teaching method was delivered to the control group. The conditional dual-domain latent...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: futuro

Resumen:

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Este estudio investiga los efectos translingüísticos en la adquisición de las interpretaciones no cronológicas —en concreto, conjeturales y concesivas— del futuro simple y del futuro compuesto en español como segunda lengua (L2). En particular, se propone comparar el papel específico de la transferencia de la L1 en la adquisición del español L2 por parte de aprendices de L1 francés (n=33) y de L1 italiano (n=28), en dos niveles de competencia distintos (B2 y C1 del MCER), pero con experiencias de aprendizaje similares. El grupo de control estuvo formado por 36 hablantes nativos de español. Los resultados de dos tareas escritas de juicios de aceptabilidad muestran un claro efecto translingüístico en...

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