This narrative interview study of a Spanish learner documents and explains apparent contradictions in a student's story when reporting on why she continues to take Spanish even when she does not like it or perform well in foreign language courses. A dialectical approach to human activity based on sociocultural theory is used to make sense of her…

The need for some form of explicit grammar instruction is recognised in most current approaches to second language teaching. Since the usefulness of explicit instruction is at least to some extent dependent on the difficulty of the rules that are taught, an important question for teachers is whether their judgements of rule difficulty are…

Covert metalinguistic activity has received little attention in the field of second language (L2) education, even though the few studies that have examined this type of attention to language note that it plays a role in L2 learning and use. However, little is known about this phenomenon. The study reported in this article focuses on the knowledge…

In Taiwan, earlier English instruction has become prevalent in response to the trend of English as an international language. Current studies are interested in investigating the outcomes or developmental process of learning English from a linguistic perspective. However, this article aims to reveal children's subjective experiences of learning…

This paper reports on an instructed second language acquisition study that investigated the effects of explicit phonetic instruction on second language pronunciation by adopting two different outcome measurements (i.e. a rubric of accentedness as well as comprehensibility). Twenty native Japanese learners of English in ESL (English as a second…

As part of the attempts to revitalise Corsican, a regional language of France, and to reverse the language shift to French, language activists and academics have sought to apply the model of a polynomic language to what is considered as one language, but what is, in fact, a number of different Corsicans, each with varying levels of mutual…

The purpose of this study is to analyse the effect of metalinguistic instruction on students' metalinguistic knowledge on the one hand, and on students' performance in metalinguistic and oral production tasks on the other hand. Two groups of primary school students learning English as a foreign language were chosen. One of them (Rule group) was…

Within the Japanese English Language Teaching context and consistent with the dominant conversation role assigned to the native English speaker teacher, there exists a belief that the most effective manner in which to teach and promote multilingualism and intercultural understanding is through restricting students to monolingual practices and…

We examined the relationship between the quality of second language (L2) learners' language awareness (as shown through dialogue journal entries) and the quality of their L2 pronunciation (as assessed through listener-based ratings of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency). The participants were 10 students enrolled in a 13-week…

This article examines how majority-language teachers coping with additive education view their roles in a bilingual framework, how they perceive issues of culture and language in young bilingual children, and how they understand the term "bilingual education" in an L2 non-additive context. The study has been conducted in the context of…

This paper explores how "native" and "non-native" speaker identities are created in the discourse of television lifestyle, travel, and documentary genres where an English "native speaker" audience is assumed. It presents a coding system for analysing the representation of actors in television programmes and examines…

This study reports on findings of an investigation into Chinese students' attitudes towards varieties of English before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. One hundred and eight college students in mainland China evaluated six English speeches by two American English speakers, two British English speakers, and two Chinese English speakers for social…

Peer interaction may facilitate acquisition through fostering learner production, feedback, and noticing of form. This study examined learners' awareness of form during peer interaction in role-play and discussion tasks over a three-week period of a tertiary intermediate-level French class. The data for the study comprised transcribed recordings…

Grounded in sociocultural theory, this article outlines a small-scale study exploring metacognitive awareness of second language (L2) listening. In each of five lessons, six pairs of advanced-level, adult, Japanese, EFL learners participated in a sequence of tasks involving the explicit verbalisation of strategies as part of a pedagogical cycle…

In order to achieve full native-like competence in a second language, speakers must also acquire sociolinguistic awareness in that language. This paper reports the results of a study investigating the acquisition of sociolinguistic awareness among immigrant Polish adolescents learning English in the UK. This paper asks whether Polish-born…