Alex Housen

Investigations in instructed second language acquisition

This book gives an overview of current research on instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). Data-based studies included in this book deal with the acquisition of specific linguistic phenomena (e.g., verb and noun morphology, lexicon, clause structures) in a range of target languages (e.g., English, French, German, Russian) from a variety of instructional settings involving different instructional approaches (e.g., traditional foreign language classes, immersion classes, intensive ESL classes, content and language integrated language classes). Several of the chapters focus on the role of form-focused and meaning focused instruction in L2 learning, but other issues such as the role of crosslinguistic influence, awareness, implicit and explicit processing mechanisms, memory and the properties of classroom input are also discussed. Although the interest in instruction in this volume is acquisitional rather than pedagogical, and all the chapters address theoretical questions, several also suggest pedagogical implications for language educators. As such this volume will be a valuable resource for researchers in SLA, psycholinguistics, linguistics and language pedagogy.

Formulaic sequences and L2 oral proficiency: Does the type of target language influence the association?

Abstract This paper investigates the extent to which productive use of formulaic sequences by intermediate students of two typologically different languages, i.e., English and Spanish, is associated with their oral proficiency in these languages. Previous research (e.g., Boers et al., Language Teaching Research 10: 245–261, 2006) has shown that appropriate use of formulaic sequences helps learners of English come across as fluent and idiomatic speakers. The evidence from the present study, which was conducted with the participation of Dutch-speaking students of English and Spanish, confirms that finding, as oral proficiency assessments based on re-tell tasks correlated positively with the number of formulaic sequences the students used in these tasks. The correlations were strongest in the English language samples, however. It seems that the greater incidence of morphological-inflectional errors in our participants spoken Spanish dampens the contribution that using formulaic sequences tends to make to their oral proficiency (as perceived by our assessors). The findings are discussed with reference to typological differences between L1 and L2.

Investigating Lexical Proficiency Development Over Time – The case of Dutch-speaking learners of French in Brussels

This article aims (a) to explore the operationalisation and definition of lexical L2 proficiency and related constructs with a view to identifying a set of measures that can adequately capture the dynamics of lexical L2 proficiency development over time, and (b) to shed more light on the development of lexical proficiency in French Foreign Language classes. After a discussion of theoretical, terminological and methodological issues in L2 vocabulary research, we present a longitudinal quantitative study of the lexical development of Dutch-speaking adolescents learning FFL in Dutch-medium schools in Brussels over a three-year period and compare these learners lexical proficiency in French to native speaker benchmarks.

Conceptualizing and measuring the impact of contextual factors in instructed SLA – the role of language prominence

Abstract This paper reports on a study that investigates the impact of learning context on the L2 acquisition of English by German-speaking pupils. Learning context is operationalized in terms of the relative prominence of the L1 and the L2 within the learning context, which in turn reflects the functional roles and domains of use allocated to the L2 and L1. L2 learning outcomes are compared across four different authentic language-learning contexts which represent four distinct positions on the second language (SL) – foreign language (FL) context continuum. The results show that the learners in the learning context most close to the SL end of the continuum (with high L2 prominence and very low L1 prominence in the wider extra-curricular context) outperform the learners in the three other contexts on most aspects of L2 proficiency investigated. Comparisons between the learners in the three other contexts yield less straightforward observations, including better than anticipated results for the learners in the prototypical FL context.