JUDGMENT SYNONYM SERIES

The place of grammar instruction has been a controversial topic among Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers and language teachers. Implications of the findings were discussed. Effects of FS instruction were maintained on delayed posttest. Results showed that both groups improved significantly in speed fluency from pretest to posttest and the FS group outperformed the comparison group in pruned speech rate, the global fluency measure.

JUDGMENT SYNONYM SERIES

L2 fluency was measured in terms of temporal qualities at three points and compared in a series of repeated measures ANCOVA analyses, with L1 fluency included as covariate. Target vocabulary in both groups were introduced through concordances and practiced in communicative oral production tasks in a freshmen EAP program. The comparison group, on the other hand, learned single academic vocabulary. For five weeks, the experimental group studied and practiced 80 formulaic sequences (FS) that frequently occur in spoken academic corpora. Two groups of freshmen students were assigned as the experimental group and the comparison group. In order to address this issue, the present investigation examined effects of explicit learning and practice of formulaic sequences on L2 utterance fluency with advanced EAP learners. The role of formulaic language in enhancing L2 oral performance is largely discussed in the literature however, there is a lack of instructional research. The findings highlight the importance of distinguishing subtypes of FSs and considering NNSs’ quality of understanding in discussions of the psychological reality of FSs. TAs also show that NNSs employed various strategies to compensate for limited idiom knowledge, causing comparable processing speed for idioms and nonidioms. Although we conclude that idioms and nonidioms have different mental statuses in NSs’ lexicons, it is inconclusive how they are represented by NNSs. TAs show NSs’ understanding of FSs has reached ceiling, but NNSs’ understanding was incomplete, with idioms being understood more poorly than nonidioms. Reaction times show that NSs processed idioms faster than nonidioms regardless of length, but NNSs processed 3-character FSs faster than 4-character FSs regardless of type. We address these issues by investigating Chinese NSs and NNSs processing of idioms and matched nonidiom FSs in phrase acceptability judgment tasks with and without think-alouds (TAs). Although researchers generally agree that native speakers (NSs) process formulaic sequences (FSs) holistically to some extent, findings about nonnative speakers (NNSs) are conflicting, potentially because not all FSs are psychologically equal or because in some studies NNSs may not have fully understood the FSs.

Judgment synonym