The role that vocabulary learning plays in second language acquisition has been receiving increased attention from both teachers and researchers. However, there is still much that is not known about the processes through which new words become functioning components of the mental lexicon. This study used a word association test (WAT) to investigate how new words are initially integrated into the lexicon immediately after being studied for the first time. This initial lexical organization of new words was compared with the existing lexical organization of well-known items. In addition, this study investigated how sentence writing, thought to encourage deeper levels of processing, affected how the new words were initially integrated into the lexicon. The participants in this study were 16 volunteers from an Intensive English Language Program. The participants first completed a vocabulary knowledge scale to assess if they knew the new vocabulary words. Then, the participants spent 20 minutes learning the words--either through writing sentences with the words or through choosing their own method of study. Immediately after the 20 minute learning period, the WAT was administered. The results of the WAT indicated that the new words were being organized into the lexicon through meaning-based connections just as the well-known words were. The majority of the meaning-based lexical organization was based on equivalent meaning connections such as synonymy or superordination. The sentence writing condition correlated with a decrease in meaning-based WAT associations for the new words, which indicated that sentence writing may have affected the lexical integration in unexpected ways. Finally, unanticipated WAT response patterns indicated that other contextual factors may have also influenced the responses.

Lexical bundles (fixed sequences of three to four words) have been described as building blocks of discourse, both written and spoken (Biber & Barbieri, 2007), and as a useful mechanical device for creating writing that is suited for its academic field (Hyland, 2008). Having noticed that the academic theses of my students at Longdong University in Qingyang, China seemed very different from professional writing in their fields, I created a thesis project that addressed the question of how professionals in their fields were using bundles and how the learners' use of these bundles in terms of frequency, structure, and function varied from the professionals' use. In order to answer this question, I compiled four corpora of writing in literature and applied linguistics, representing professional and learner writing in each field. I used concordancing software in order to identify four-word lexical bundles that occurred at least 20 times per 100,000 words and over a range of four texts. I then did a three-part analysis which looked at frequency, structure, and function of these bundles. The results of the study reveal that professionals in applied linguistics and literature use bundles with different frequency, display different choices of lexical items to fill structural bundles, and use functional bundles differently. These differences seem to reflect the rhetorical needs of each discipline. Further, the learners in each field displayed differences in their use of bundles as compared to the professionals' use. Learners in applied linguistics used more types and tokens of bundles overall, while learners in literature used fewer. Both groups of learners relied more on repetitive use of certain bundles than did the professionals. Implications of this study are discussed for teaching and curriculum development. The findings can be applied to teaching through creating awareness-raising and guided practice opportunities for the students to see how bundles are used in professional writing and to help them apply this understanding to their own writing.

The purpose of this study was to determine the difference in the short term and and long term second language (L2) gains of first year Spanish students exposed to the Audiolingual Method (ALM) and the Natural Approach. The experiment consisted of two randomly selected groups which were exposed to four presentations. Two of these presentations delivered content material following a Natural Approach lesson design while the other two delivered content material following an ALM lesson design in such a way that both groups were exposed to two ALM lessons and two Natural Approach lessons. All subjects were pre-tested prior to the delivery of these lessons and subsequently tested after the first lessons for short term L2 gains. They were then re-tested after several weeks to measure long term L2 gains. The number of subjects that participated in the experiment was 249 and included all enrolled first year Spanish students at Oregon State University for the 1992 fall term. The data were analyzed using the two-way analysis of variance. The results of the investigation indicated that teaching method was not a significant factor in students' short term and long term L2 aquisition gains. The study thus implies that neither the Natural Approach nor the ALM can be considered superior in terms of quantifiable student gains and retention. Recommendations for further study are presented.

This study is a qualitative examination of second language (L2) learning processes by four advanced learners of Japanese in the community of a summer intensive full-immersion program in the United States. Using L2 socialization theory as a theoretical framework, this study conceives of L2 learning as a process of social participation in a community of practice and examines L2 learning processes by four learners, focusing on the dynamic interplay between the affordances of the social community and the agency of the individual learners. The purpose of this study is twofold: (a) It investigates the ways in which the four learners exercise their agency to pursue their goals of learning Japanese and (b) it documents how the different ways in which the four learners exercise agency form different trajectories of learning and create different experiences of L2 socialization. This study has adopted an ethnographic case study approach to the investigation of research inquiries. Through the analyses of data obtained from multiple sources, including interviews with the four learners, observations of their engagement in the community of practice of the summer intensive full-immersion program, their audio-recorded conversations with other members of the community, and various artifacts, this study explores the role of L2 learner agency in the process of L2 socialization and describes in depth their experiences of learning Japanese from their emic perspectives. The case studies of the four learners have highlighted the different ways in which they engaged in the community of practice, understood their tasks of learning Japanese, interpreted the affordances of the social community, negotiated the meaning of their participations, defined and redefined their sense of self, and eventually achieved their L2 learning goals. The findings suggest that the richness and effectiveness of a social environment are not characterized by the physical and academic affordances of a social community alone; rather they are constructed in a dynamic relation between the affordance structure of a social community and the L2 learners' agency in the pursuit of the joint enterprise of making L2 learning happen. With regard to the role of L2 learner agency, the study has foregrounded the important role of the aspirations of the four L2 learners for personal transformation and negotiation of the meaning of self of the past, the present, and the future. The findings suggest that L2 learners' diverse and complex social and personal desires for learning an L2 may not be able to be explained using the notion of investment (Norton, 1995, 2000) alone. Since the SLA debate initiated by Firth and Wagner (1997, 2007), SLA research has begun to reconceptualize L2 learners as socially situated beings with diverse needs, wants, and identities. This study presents four portraits of L2 learners who engaged in the enterprise of learning Japanese, as a means of contributing to this reconceptualization, and explores for these four learners what it meant to learn Japanese in the summer of 2010.

This study explores the development of second language (L2) fluency during a semester abroad and its relationship to the development of grammar, vocabulary, and language processing speed. It also considers the influence of individual participants' first language (L1) and pre-study abroad (SA) L2 fluency on the development of fluency during study abroad. Additionally, the study examines issues in the measurement of fluency, focusing on questions related to measuring pauses in L2 speech. Thirty-nine undergraduate students (L1 English) studying in Buenos Aires, Argentina, completed a pretest consisting of speaking tasks in English and Spanish, Spanish grammar and vocabulary tests, a picture-naming task, and a measure of sentence processing speed. Approximately three months later, near the end of their time abroad, they completed a posttest consisting of the same tasks, with the exception of the speaking tasks in English. Participants also filled out a questionnaire every other week during the semester in which they estimated the amount of time that they had spent interacting with native speakers of Spanish. Results show that participants experienced significant gains on most measures of fluency during study abroad. This finding was especially true for participants who began their time abroad with low L2 fluency. Nevertheless, students who began the semester abroad with high L2 fluency still had significantly higher fluency at the end of the semester than students who began with low L2 fluency. Looking at the relationship between L2 fluency and L2 linguistic knowledge (vocabulary and grammar scores) and language processing speed (picture-naming and sentence-matching scores), the study found a moderate relationship between pretest measures of L2 fluency and pretest measures of linguistic knowledge and processing speed. However, the results show no relationship between pre-SA linguistic knowledge and processing speed and gains in L2 fluency, and little relationship between gains in linguistic knowledge and processing speed and gains in L2 fluency. The best predictor of gains in L2 fluency was pre-SA L2 fluency. These results suggest that although there is a relationship between L2 linguistic knowledge and L2 fluency, having more advanced L2 linguistic knowledge prior to study abroad does not necessarily give students an advantage in the area of fluency development during study abroad. Regarding the measurement of fluency, the data show that learners with low and high levels of lexical-grammatical competence significantly differed from one another on all measures of rates of pauses (short and long pauses, filled and unfilled pauses, and mid-clause and end-of-clause pauses) as well as in the percent of pauses occurring in the middle of a clause. However, they did not significantly differ from one another in the percent of filled pauses. The findings suggest that measuring all of these pauses may be useful in examining L2 fluency. However, there is perhaps little or nothing to be gained from counting filled and unfilled pauses separately, as speakers' tendency to use more of one or the other appears to be more closely related to personal speaking style than to L2 ability.

Research has focused on how the effects of different types of feedback vary as a function of the complexity of the linguistic targets and on the learning of inflectional features. However, few studies have investigated the learning of rule-based verb constructions. Grounded in the interactionist approach and usage-based theory, this study investigated the effects of corrective feedback on the acquisition of rule-based verb constructions among English-speaking learners of Chinese. Specifically, this study examined the effects of input-providing feedback and output-prompting feedback on the learning of two verb constructions. Data were drawn from 18 learners of Chinese from second-year Chinese classes in an American university. The participants were divided into two groups and took a pretest, treatment, and two posttests. Learners also filled out a questionnaire about their perception and preference of feedback types. Contrary to previous research, results indicated that both recasts and metalinguistic clues had positive effects on learners' learning of the target constructions. Moreover, learners of different proficiency preferred different types of feedback. The study results provided a categorization of verb constructions into four classes based on the rules that govern their formations and constraints that work on the constructions and identified stages learners moved through when learning verb constructions. The researcher proposed an instructional model of rule-based verb constructions. The model will help instructors recognize the stage the learners' are in and provide insight into how to help learners move to a higher stage by providing instruction, corrective feedback, and practice activities.

The Spanish subjunctive has been the focus of much SLA research, largely because it poses difficulties for learners of Spanish whose L1 is English (e.g., Collentine, 1993; Stokes & Krashen, 1990; Terrell et al., 1987). Investigating the same feature in heritage learners of Spanish can provide more information about their linguistic development and also has the potential to inform our knowledge of the acquisition of the subjunctive in traditional FL learners. The present study investigates whether heritage learners recognize grammatical and ungrammatical modal choice in volitional constructions. These constructions have been selected because this use of the subjunctive does not vary by a speaker's dialect or by belief about the idea being expressed. Furthermore, given that theories of language attrition posit that the structures that are acquired earliest are the last to be lost (e.g., De Bot & Weltens, 1991) and that Spanish monolingual children acquire the subjunctive in volitional constructions first (Blake, 1980; 1983), heritage learners who have experienced some language attrition may still have knowledge of this feature. To investigate the effect that language attrition or incomplete acquisition may have on this knowledge, I also compared the SHL learners in the sample who were early bilinguals in English (those born in the United States or who immigrated before age 6) with those who were late bilingual (those who immigrated between ages 6 and 13). Students enrolled in Spanish for Heritage Learners (SHL) and Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL) courses at three universities in the Northeast completed grammaticality judgment (GJ) and editing tasks, which contained examples of correct and incorrect mood choices, as well as distracter items. The GJ task also required participants to explain their judgments. The results indicate that SHL learners outperform their SFL peers on recognizing correct mood selection. No significant differences were found between early and late bilinguals. SHL and SFL learners tended to correct utterances that they had rejected of judged neutrally but gave different types of reasons for accepting utterances. There were several similarities between early and late bilinguals in terms of their reasons for their judgments of utterances.

This dissertation investigates second language (L2) development in the domains of morphosyntax and semantics. Specifically, it examines the acquisition of definiteness and specificity in Russian within the Feature Re-assembly framework (Lardiere, 2009), according to which the hardest L2 learning task is not to reset parameters but to reconfigure, or remap features from the way they are assembled in the L1 into new formal configurations in the L2. Within the Feature Re-assembly approach, it has been argued that re-assembling features that are represented overtly in the L1 and mapping them onto those that are encoded covertly by context in the L2 will present a greater difficulty than re-assembling features in the opposite direction (Slabakova, 2009). This dissertation examines the acquisition of four linguistic properties (types of modifiers, word order, indefinite determiners and case marking) that encode definiteness and specificity overtly or covertly in L2 Russian by English and Korean speakers. The native languages of the learners were chosen specifically in order to test various overt-covert mappings. The data obtained from two experimental tasks (grammaticality and felicity judgments) completed by 56 Russian native speaker controls, 51 English- and 53 Korean-speaking learners support Slabakova's prediction that overt-to-covert realization of the feature is more challenging than covert-to-overt realization. In addition, the findings uncovered other important factors facilitating or impeding acquisition, such as the nature of the form-to-meaning mapping (one-to-one or one-to-many) and the availability of clear, unambiguous evidence for a certain mapping in the input available to learners. Results also reveal that the presence or absence of the L1 transfer depends on the overt/covert status of the feature in the L2. That is, when the feature is marked overtly in both the L1 and L2, L1 transfer has facilitative effect on the acquisition of the feature. On the contrary, when the feature is marked covertly in both the L1 and L2, L1 transfer has no or negative effects. These findings provide new insights into the effects of the native language on L2 learnability and enable us to come to a more precise and fine-grained understanding of grammatical meaning acquisition in the second language.

It has long been theorized that, after the so-called critical period has passed, acquiring language becomes a more difficult enterprise. While general differences between adult second language (L2) learners and normally developed child (L1) acquirers have been more or less empirically established, a strand of recent L2 accounts have focused on the specific locus of these differences. The main goal of this dissertation project is to test the predictions of one such account: Clahsen and Felser's Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH; Clahsen & Felser 2006a, 2006b). The SSH places emphasis on the empirical testing of native/non-native language processing asymmetries, which are argued to be due to less detailed L2 grammatical representations. This dissertation tests the predictions of the SSH using a long-distance dependency: Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in L2 Spanish. The study includes on-line and an off-line tasks, which were completed by a control group of native speakers of Spanish and an experimental group constituted by L2 learners of Spanish whose first language was English. In view of the well-known fact that L2 learning outcomes vary widely across individuals, a secondary goal of this dissertation project is to determine whether variability in individual learning abilities, such as inhibitory control and statistical learning predicts variability in L2 learning. Part of L2 learning involves detecting the probabilistic patterns of a language (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996), such that individuals who are better pattern learners may be better able to learn the structural regularities of the L2 input. Results were analyzed in order to determine whether the predictions of the SSH could account for the patterns present in the data. These results suggest that although the acquisition of long-distance dependencies is a protracted process, both intermediate and advanced L2 learners of Spanish could anticipate (predict) a syntactic element based in previously occurring cues. Thus, these results fail to support the predictions of the SSH. In terms of individual differences, overall, neither statistical learning nor inhibitory control appear to modulate the on-line processing of this particular long-distance dependency in Spanish.

This dissertation study was motivated by an interest in the process of acquisition of Russian vocabulary by a previously unstudied group of learners, American university students. The study identified the vocabulary learning strategies and beliefs about vocabulary learning of 97 university students beginning to study Russian. It also examined relationships between reported beliefs and strategies and their stability over the period of one semester of studying Russian. The data were collected with a self-report online questionnaire administered at the beginning and at the end of the Fall 2014 semester, as well as with interviews with the participants. Descriptive analysis of students’ beliefs indicated that the participants highly valued the role of vocabulary in studying a foreign language, understood the complexity of the process of vocabulary acquisition, and believed that words and phrases should be carefully studied and then practiced in context. The participants reported high motivation and high expectations of their success as learners of Russian. Descriptive analysis of vocabulary learning strategies demonstrated that besides active use of a dictionary, guessing, and note-taking strategies, virtually all participants reported frequent use of rehearsal strategies, especially repetition. These findings contradict the view that, in contrast to Asian learners of English, who are believed to value memorization and repetition, Western learners tend to downplay the role of repetition in the process of vocabulary learning. Analysis of the responses to open-ended questions and interview prompts confirmed that the participants frequently used repetition and rehearsal strategies and considered them most effective for establishing form–meaning connections for new words. The respondents also reported frequent use of contextual encoding, activation, and affective strategies. Comparison of the results of the two questionnaires revealed several vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies that underwent changes as a result of one semester of studying Russian. At the end of the semester students reported even more agreement with value of repetition, practice, good memory, and cultural knowledge for learning vocabulary. In contrast, they expressed significantly less agreement that it is easier to learn new words when they are presented in context. Besides, participants reported that while learning vocabulary they less frequently tried to recall sentences in which new words were used. Interviewed students explained this shift by noting the difficulty of Russian vocabulary and cognitive overload while trying to acquire new words in context. These findings once again argue against the claim that contextual acquisition of foreign language vocabulary is always effective in instructed foreign language learning. Using correlational and cluster analyses, the study identified multiple relationships between groups of vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies, as well as between individual beliefs and strategies. Motivational beliefs were correlated with most groups of vocabulary learning strategies, and memory strategies were correlated with most groups of beliefs.