The study reported here examines the English language knowledge and performance of bilingual school children of Middle School age in Britain, in particular their acquisition and use of vocabulary. One of the chief premises of the research is that pupils from bilingual minority ethnic backgrounds suffer a major disadvantage while learning from the National Curriculum because they lack the necessary richness of word knowledge, accompanied by the conceptual frameworks expected in learning subjects such as science and geography. Furthermore, it is believed that by raising awareness among teachers and by the adoption of appropriate methods of vocabulary teaching founded on research, the vocabulary learning of bilingual pupils can be greatly increased. The aim of the study is to identify, describe and evaluate methods of vocabulary instruction currently used and to provide recommendations for suitable methods to be introduced. By means of an action research methodology implemented in a middle school, and with the joint participation of some members of staff and some pupils, classroom data was collected over a two and a half year period from teachers of science, geography and English and their pupils, supplemented with semi-structured interviews with teachers and support staff and conversations with children. These data provided material for a detailed analysis of exactly how individual words develop from first introduction into the pupils’ active vocabulary.

Teaching and Learning Vocabulary

Bilingual language production: The neurocognition of language representation and control

Acknowledgements Introduction PART ONE - BACKGROUND Introduction 1. Second language acquisition research: an overview PART TWO - THE DESCRIPTION OF LEARNER LANGUAGE Introduction 2. Learner errors and error analysis 3. Developmental patterns: order and sequence in second language acquisition 4. Variability in learner language 5. Pragmatic aspects of learner language PART THREE - EXPLAINING SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: EXTERNAL FACTORS Introduction 6. Social factors and second language acquisition 7. Input and interaction and second language acquisition PART FOUR - EXPLAINING SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: INTERNAL FACTORS Introduction 8. Language transfer 9. Cognitive accounts of second language acquisition 10. Linguistic universals and second language acquisition PART FIVE - EXPLAINING INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Introduction 11. Individual learner differences 12. Learning strategies PART SIX - CLASSROOM SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Introduction 13. Classroom interaction and second language acquisition 14. Formal instruction and second language acquisition PART SEVEN - CONCLUSION Introduction 15. Data, theory, and applications in second language acquisition research Glossary Bibliography Author index Subject index

第二语言习得研究 = The study of second language acquisition

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (mature native speakers, child first language [L1] and adult second language [L2] learners) as well as different domains of language (morphology and syntax). This article presents an overview of the results from this project and of other previous studies, with the aim of explaining how grammatical processing in language learners differs from that of mature native speakers. For child L1 processing, we will argue for a continuity hypothesis claiming that the child's parsing mechanism is basically the same as that of mature speakers and does not change over time. Instead, empirical differences between child and mature speaker's processing can be explained by other factors such as the child's limited working memory capacity and by less efficient lexical retrieval. In nonnative (adult L2) language processing, some striking differences to native speakers were observed in the domain of sentence processing. Adult learners are guided by lexical–semantic cues during parsing in the same way as native speakers, but less so by syntactic information. We suggest that the observed L1/L2 differences can be explained by assuming that the syntactic representations adult L2 learners compute during comprehension are shallower and less detailed than those of native speakers.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/28EB9167780446B105527FA06D996119/S0142716406060024a.pdf/div-class-title-grammatical-processing-in-language-learners-div.pdf

Grammatical Processing in Language Learners.

This paper considers how implicit and explicit knowledge are dissociable but cooperative. It reviews various psychological and neurobiological processes by which explicit knowledge of form-meaning associations impacts upon implicit language learning. The interface is dynamic: It happens transiently during conscious processing, but the influence upon implicit cognition endures thereafter. The primary conscious involvement in SLA is the explicit learning involved in the initial registration of pattern recognizers for constructions that are then tuned and integrated into the system by implicit learning during subsequent input processing. Neural systems in the prefrontal cortex involved in working memory provide attentional selection, perceptual integration, and the unification of consciousness. Neural systems in the hippocampus then bind these disparate cortical representations into unitary episodic representations. These are the mechanisms by which Schmidt's (1990) noticing helps solve Quine's (1960) problem of referential indeterminacy. Explicit memories can also guide the conscious building of novel linguistic utterances through processes of analogy. Formulas, slot-and-frame patterns, drills, and declarative pedagogical grammar rules all contribute to the conscious creation of utterances whose subsequent usage promotes implicit learning and proceduralization. Flawed output can prompt focused feedback by way of recasts that present learners with psycholinguistic data ready for explicit analysis. Other processes of acquisition from output include differentiation, analysis, and preemption. These processes of conscious construction in working memory underpin relationships between individual differences in working memory capacities and language learning aptitude.Thanks to Rod Ellis for first suggesting that I try to write this and to the staff and students at Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics University of Auckland (2003), the TESOL Program Temple University Japan (2003), the Chester Language Development Reading Group, and the LOT winter school (2004) for helping me think it through. I am particularly grateful to Michel Paradis, Michael Swan, Karen Roehr, Anne Feryok, and Tamar Keren-Portnoy for pointing their giant biological cameras of consciousness at a prior draft, and for sharing their awareness with me in kindly and constructive fashion. I have learned a lot from it.

/pdf/at-the-interface-dynamic-interactions-of-explicit-and-4qg2mcgi6s.pdf

At the interface: dynamic interactions of explicit and implicit language knowledge

Two experiments examined the learning of form-meaning connections under conditions where the relevant forms were noticed but the critical aspects of meaning were not. Miniature noun class systems were employed, and the participants were told that the choice of determiner in noun phrases depended on whether the object was “near” or “far” from the subject of the sentence. What they were not told was that the choice of determiner also depended on the animacy of the noun. Most participants remained unaware of this correlation during the training and test tasks; yet when faced with a choice between two determiners for a noun, they chose the one that was appropriate to the noun's animacy at significantly above-chance levels, even though that combination had never been encountered during training. This ability to generalize provided evidence of learning form-meaning connections without awareness. In both experiments, there was a correlation between generalization test performance and knowledge of languages that encode grammatical gender. This points to the importance of prior knowledge in implicit learning.Many thanks to Ronald Leow, Daphnee Simard, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0272263105050138

Learning without awareness

Two experiments examined the effect of single-modality (sound or text) and bimodal (sound and text) presentation on word learning, as measured by both improvements in spoken word recognition efficiency (long lag repetition priming) and recognition memory. Native and advanced nonnative speakers of English were tested. In Experiment 1 auditory lexical decisions on familiar words were equally primed by prior bimodal and sound-only presentation, whereas there were no priming effects for nonwords. Experiment 2 employed a rhyme judgment task using nonwords. Repetition priming of auditory rhyme judgment decisions was now obtained, and this was greater in the bimodal than the sound-only condition. In both experiments prior bimodal presentation improved recognition memory for spoken words and nonwords compared to single modality presentation. We conclude that simultaneous text presentation can aid novel word learning under certain conditions, as assessed by both explicit and implicit memory tests.

The effect of bimodal input on implicit and explicit memory: An investigation into the benefits of within-language subtitling

Three experiments investigated the relationship between memory for input and
 inductive learning of morphological rules relating to functional categories in a semiartificial form
 of Italian. A verbatim memory task was used as both the vehicle for presenting sentences and as a
 continuous measure of memory performance. Experiments 2 and 3 introduced increasingly
 explicit manipulations of attention to form compared to Experiment 1. In all experiments there
 were strong relationships between individual differences in memory for input as measured early
 in the experiment and eventual learning outcomes, and in Experiments 2 and 3 learning
 form-form (but not form-function) rules was related to vocabulary learning efficiency (taken as a
 measure of phonological long-term memory ability). These relationships along with the lack of
 an effect of feedback in Experiment 3 suggest that subjects tended to adopt a data-driven, as
 opposed to conceptually driven, mode of learning. However, the fact that the introduction of
 highlighting and vocabulary pretraining in Experiment 2 had a large impact on learning without
 improving early memory is taken to suggest that knowledge of distributional rules does not
 simply emerge out of memory encodings of the relevant forms but depends upon the appropriate
 allocation of attention over relationships between input elements at the time of encoding.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0272263199001011

Memory, Attention, and Inductive Learning

The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com Copyright Wiley [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

Phonological memory and rule learning

Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an artificial language under incidental learning conditions and then tested by means of grammaticality judgments and subjective measures of awareness. The results indicate that incidental exposure to second language syntax can result in unconscious knowledge, which suggests that at least some of the learning in this experiment was implicit. At the same time, however, it was also found that conscious (but unverbalizable) knowledge was clearly linked to improved performance in the grammaticality judgment task.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0142716411000580

John N. Williams

Papers

Learning without awareness

The effect of bimodal input on implicit and explicit memory: An investigation into the benefits of within-language subtitling

Memory, Attention, and Inductive Learning

Phonological memory and rule learning

Implicit and Explicit Knowledge in Second Language Acquisition.