The present study examines Iranian language learners' views on different types of oral corrective feedback and explores the relationship with learners' language proficiency. It then compares the learners' views with those of their teachers. The study is based on a 36-item questionnaire completed by 154 English as a foreign language…

This study investigates the combined effects of task-based careful online planning and the storyline structure of a task on second language performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency). Sixty intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups (n = 15). Participants were asked to perform two tasks with different degrees of storyline…

This article discusses issues related to oral assessment of school knowledge of L2-educated students. In particular, it examines benefits and disadvantages of students being tested in their L1 (their dominant language) and in their L2 (their language of instruction). The study draws on the data from 37 high school students studying in a content…

This study compared two groups of high school students in their learning of a third-year Mandarin level 3 class under two conditions: an intensive four-week (85.5 hours) summer program and a 22-week (88 hours) regular semester program. Students in both conditions had been classmates through four semesters of Mandarin instruction and had similar…

This article reports on an action research case study conducted at a university in Japan, which explored how student identity-development can be made visible in potentially assessable ways through materials design in intercultural communicative competence (ICC)-oriented foreign language education. It suggests that identity-development can be…

This article seeks to assess the impact of V-Pal (Virtual Partnerships for All Languages) on the student language learning experience within a conventional UK higher education (HE) curriculum. V-Pal is an innovative computer-mediated language scheme, based on a reciprocal, distance-learning language project, run by the University of Manchester in…

To date, research results suggest that task repetition positively affects oral task performance. However, researchers have not yet shown the extension of the benefits of repeating the same task to performance of a new task. This article first provides an overview of the currently available research findings on task repetition and then presents the…

This study aims to highlight aspects of difficulty encountered by Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners and to explore the factors underlying these aspects. Data were gathered through a Chinese Language Learning Difficulty Survey from 164 CFL learners, mostly in British higher education. The survey data provided useful exploratory findings.…

In the light of recommendations made by the Tomlinson and Dearing reports, this article explores the distinctive contribution that vocational language courses can make to the language learning experience of secondary-school pupils. It starts by presenting an overview of vocational options currently on offer to stem the disaffection with modern…

This paper describes a single-subject study of vocabulary acquisition. The subject, an L1 English speaker, was required to learn 300 vocabulary items in Arabic at a rate of 15 new words a day over a period of 20 days. The learning period was followed by immediate and delayed tests of receptive and productive knowledge of target items. The…

Vocabulary is one of the building blocks of language and is a necessary component of learners' development. This paper aims to describe the development of the L2 lexicon from the first year of learning French as a foreign language at school to the last year of undergraduate studies at university by setting out what learners know and how this…

The aim of this paper is to describe vocabulary use during semi-spontaneous oral production among instructed learners of French and Spanish at two different stages in the UK educational system: year 9 (near beginners) and year 13 (approximately low-intermediates). The paper mainly focuses on comparing lexical diversity (range or variety of…

This article reports research into the development of vocabulary in lower-intermediate level learners of French as a foreign language in Year 12 in 20 schools in the south of England. The focus of attention is the role of less common, or non-basic, vocabulary at a stage in students' learning when they have just moved to a much more advanced…

The present study sets out to examine the strategies used by Chinese learners in a predominantly naturalistic environment and how such learner strategy use relates to their proficiency in the second language. Data were collected from four Chinese research students in the UK using semi-structured interviews. Their proficiency in English was…

This article reports on a study which investigated the effects of correction of learners' grammatical errors on acquisition. Specifically, it compared the effects of timing of correction (immediate versus delayed correction) and manner of correction (explicit versus implicit correction). It also investigated the relative effects of correction of…