Classroom enjoyment and anxiety among Saudi undergraduate EFL students: does gender matter?

The current study was motivated by recent interest in the effect of positive and negative emotions in the context of foreign language learning resulting from the rise of the positive psychology movement (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2016; MacIntyre & Mercer, 2014). It examines the construct of foreign language enjoyment (FLE) and its relationship with foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) among a group of 487 English as a foreign language (EFL) students (340 females, 147 males) enrolled in public universities in Saudi Arabia. A measure of FLE based on Likert scale ratings of ten items (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014), and a measure of FLCA based on eight items extracted from the FLCAS (Horwitz et al., 1986) were used. Male and female students had the same levels of FLE and FLCA. Correlation analysis showed that the relationship between students’ FLE and FLCA was significantly negative. Qualitative analysis of the participants’ learning experiences revealed the causes of FLCA and FLE among Saudi EFL learners.

“When being specific is not enough”: Discrepancies between L2 learners’ perception of definiteness and its linguistic definition

This paper explores the sources of difficulties that second language (L2) learners encounter when using English articles. Eighty-four Korean college students completed a forced-choice elicitation task before and after receiving instruction on article use and provided written accounts of article choices. The analysis of the task performance and written accounts indicated the participants’ noticeable tendency to prioritize specificity over definiteness, resulting in the overuse of the with specific indefinites. Not infrequently, the participants estimated a “nonspecificity hierarchy” for nonspecific definites, often leading to the infelicitous use of a(n). The overuse of the with modified noun phrases suggests that L2 learners attempt to construe semantic context (i.e., ±definite) on the basis of the syntactic structure. Furthermore, the participants’ correct use of a(n) for singular count indefinites sometimes stemmed from assuming the number of a target noun to be single rather than considering its multiple existence and, thus, its indefinite nature. These findings underline the necessity of teaching the specificity feature to indicate to learners that (1) English articles are prototypical realizations of encoding definiteness, which requires the mutual identifiability of a unique referent, and (2) specificity, which presupposes identifiability assumed by the writer/speaker alone, is not marked by articles in English.

Agreement morphology errors and null subjects in young (non-)CLIL learners

There is a wealth of studies on L2 English acquisition in CLIL contexts in Spain, but most have underexplored the potential impact of CLIL in the longer run on the morphosyntax of earlier starters from monolingual regions. This paper fills this gap by exploring agreement morphology errors and subject omission in the oral production of Primary Education English learners from the Spanish monolingual community of Cantabria. The sample investigated consists of the individual narration of a story by learners in two age-matched (11-12 year-olds) groups, one CLIL (n=28) and one non- CLIL (n=35). The results show no statistically significant differences between both groups for the provision of specific linguistic features at a younger age, though some evidence also points to a subtle effect of additional CLIL exposure. Both groups show moderately low rates of null subjects; they omit affixal morphology (*he eat ) significantly more frequently than suppletive inflection (*he _ eating) and they seldom produce commission errors (*they eats). Interestingly, non-CLIL learners show far greater rates of omission with auxiliary be than copula be and frequently use the placeholder is (*he is eat), which evinces an earlier stage of acquisition than that of CLIL learners.

Human evaluation of three machine translation systems: from quality to attitudes by professional translators

This article aims to compare three machine translation systems with a focus on human evaluation. The systems under analysis are a domain-adapted statistical machine translation system, a domain-adapted neural machine translation system and a generic machine translation system. The comparison is carried out on translation from Spanish into German with industrial documentation of machine tool components and processes. The focus is on the human evaluation of the machine translation output, specifically on: fluency, adequacy and ranking at the segment level; fluency, adequacy, need for post-editing, ease of post-editing, and mental effort required in post-editing at the document level; productivity (post-editing speed and post-editing effort) and attitudes. Emphasis is placed on human factors in the evaluation process.

Teachers’ oral corrective feedback and learners’ uptake in high school CLIL and EFL classrooms

Oral corrective feedback (OCF) has been reported to be affected by several factors such as learners’ age, level of proficiency or the OCF types provided by the teacher. However, little research has been carried out on the variable learning context, even though OCF and uptake vary in rates and types in second language (SL) and foreign language (FL) settings. Moreover, OCF has been clearly under-researched in classrooms that follow a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach. As CLIL programs are being widely implemented mainly in European settings and differences in context characteristics suggest variations in OCF and learners’ uptake, the present study aimed to compare the recorded classroom interaction data (22 hours 43 minutes) from an intact class of learners (N=26) in their last year of secondary education (age 17-18), attending the lessons of an English as a FL (EFL) teacher and a Business Studies (CLIL) teacher. Findings show significant differences as to the proportion and OCF types used, as well as different learners’ behavior regarding the rates of uptake and repair and the uptake after the use of recasts. Pedagogical implications are offered as to how to maximize the potential benefits of OCF in FL classrooms.

The language in language and thinking

The relationship of language and thinking is starting to receive considerable attention in the field of SLA research under the name of Bilingual Cognition. This paper argues that it needs to be underpinned by a proper foundation in the language side of the relationship: it is dangerous to take language for granted. First it argues for researchers to clearly spell out what they mean by language, whether as the general property of human beings, in an abstract sense, as an external reality, as mental knowledge, as social community or as action, each of which has different implications for the relationship of language and cognition. Then it argues for the Language Commitment to an adequate theory and description of language as a basis for research, claiming that current emphasis is too much on isolate semantic categories rather than syntactic categories and on word-referent mapping rather than the full complexity of lexical meaning.

Bayesian vocabulary tests

This paper proposes a new way of looking at productive vocabulary in L1 and L2 speakers. An experiment was conducted where 160 participants provided six words for five different picture prompts they were presented with. Data from this minimal vocabulary test was analysed using Bayesian statistics in order to decide whether a set of responses were generated by an L1 speaker or by an L2 advanced learner. Results obtained provide some interesting insights into the viability of minimal vocabulary tests (small sets of words can carry large amounts of information on vocabulary use), as well as some indications of how Bayesian methods could help us explore productive vocabularies of L2 speakers at different proficiency levels.

Developing interactional repertoires in the classroom through dynamic strategic interactio scenarios

In this article, we report on the implementation of Dynamic Strategic Interaction Scenario tasks as one approach to developing L2 learners’ interactional repertoires. The tasks involve pre-task planning, a performance, and immediate feedback during a whole-class debriefing discussion. We focus specifically on the appropriation of turn allocation devices within a single class meeting in which three small groups performed the same scenario. We show how the first group’s performance prompted a focus on turn allocation during their debriefing, and how the subsequent groups were able to build on the feedback in their own performances. We discuss our findings and their implications for research and pedagogy along three dimensions: 1) the role of feedback as mediation in the debriefing discussions; 2) the contribution of task repetition from a group-as-collective perspective; and 3) the documentation of interactional repertoire development over time.

A study of L2 vocabulary acquisition under incidental and intentional conditions

Vocabulary development is indisputably a vital aspect of second language acquisition. In spite of the abundant attention it has garnered over the past few decades, it remains unclear how adult learners fare with intentional and incidental ways of learning. The current study investigated the effects of intentional learning (via studying a word list), incidental learning (via reading), and combined intentional-andincidental learning (via studying a word list followed by reading) conditions on 30 adult learners’ second language vocabulary acquisition. Vocabulary acquisition was measured in terms of percentage gains as well as changes in the depth of vocabulary knowledge. Results showed that while both the intentional and incidental modes of learning led to vocabulary gains, the combined intentional-and-incidental condition resulted in significantly greater gains than either the intentional-only or the incidentalonly condition. No significant differences were found between the incidental-only and intentional-only conditions.

On the translation of boundary-crossing events: Evidence from an experiment with German and Spanish translation students

This paper deals with the translation of motion events between typologically similar and different languages, a research field which has been generally approached from the Thinking-for-translating hypothesis. Here we present a student-based experiment focused on the translation of boundary-crossing events (specifically: ‘manner verb + into + a bounded space’) from English (a satellite-framed language) into German (a satellite-framed language) and Spanish (a verb-framed language). The aim is to investigate whether translation students interpret correctly and translate both the boundary-crossing and the Manner information. For this purpose, a group of German and Spanish translation students were asked to translate a series of excerpts from English narrative texts into their respective mother tongues. The results suggest that the way translation students deal with these phenomena is mainly influenced by the lexicalization patterns of their mother tongues, but the nature of the event itself and the context also seem to be key in some cases.