Incidental focus on form is one of several ways to direct language learners' attention to formal aspects of language within meaningful communicative contexts. Learners can benefit from focus on form, but the extent to which incidental focus on form, or any other type, is available to learners in advanced foreign language literature classes has not been widely researched. In a multiple case study approach, three university Spanish literature classes were studied over the course of a 15-week semester. Data were collected through class observations, instructor interviews, and instructor stimulated recalls. Using a modified version of Ellis's (2001) taxonomy of form-focused instruction, we found that recasts were the instructors' preferred form of feedback, with negotiation and explicit correction being extremely rare. Furthermore, preemptive focus on form was common, but almost exclusively limited to vocabulary. We discuss these findings with regard to two different points of view, the literature instructors' and the research on form-focused instruction. We then provide suggestions for increasing learners' opportunities for attention to form in literature courses while acknowledging the reality of the context. THE FIELD OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUIS-ITION (SLA) has placed much emphasis on the constructs of attention (e.g.

This article examines the acquisition of Spanish idioms in a classroom setting that was supplemented with explicit instruction over a 10-week period. The research design manipulated two variables: prior lexical knowledge and idiom organization. Sixty-five second language (L2) learners completed pre- and posttests that measured their ability to recognize and produce the target idioms, as well as a vocabulary test to control for lexical knowledge. Participants in the experimental groups received contextualized idiom presentation that encouraged noticing, retrieving, and generating (Nation, 2001). The results indicate significant treatment effects, although no significant advantage was found for the thematic grouping of idioms. The results also show a significant effect for prior lexical knowledge on one of the dependent variables. These findings are discussed in relation to prior studies of idiom learning from a cognitive linguistics perspective (Boers et al., 2007) as well as psycholinguistic studies that emphasize the salience of literal meanings (Cieślicka, 2006).

This article examines alternating verbs (such as quemar(se) "to burn") in second language (L2) Spanish by considering the learnability problem from a sequence learning perspective (N. Ellis, 1996, 2002). In Spanish, verbs of the alternating class are obligatorily marked with the clitic se in their intransitive form. Errors of omission among Englishspeaking learners, who transfer zero-derived morphology from their native language, have been previously documented (Montrul, 2000). This study also examines a different kind of error-overgeneralization of se to transitive event scenes-that is hypothesized to result from chunking se with particular lexical items. The results of a picture description task reveal that learners frequently make this type of overgeneralization error, but that they are able to recover from it at more advanced levels of proficiency. These findings suggest that the acquisition of L2 morphosyntax is shaped by learners' familiarity with individual lexical items and the sequences in which they tend to appear.

This multiple case study examines language-focused instruction in 3 university Spanish literature classes to examine the students' and instructors' perspectives on language learning in this context. The classes were studied for a semester through observations, instructor interviews and stimulated recalls, and student questionnaires. Among the findings were that although both the instructors and the students had concerns about students' language ability, the instructors had minimal language-related goals for their classes, and language issues were dealt with mostly incidentally. In addition, several themes emerged from both groups of participants: language learning as an incidental activity, problems with students' oral proficiency and the role of study abroad in improving it, the importance of vocabulary, and the difficulties of reading complex texts. Changes in instruction and curriculum are suggested to better meet the needs and goals of both the students and the instructors.

Null direct objects provide a favourable testing ground for grammatical and performance models of argument omission. This article examines both types of models in order to determine which gives a more plausible account of the second language data. The data were collected from second language (L2) learners of Spanish by means of four oral production tasks and a grammaticality judgement task. The results reveal that null objects in oral production are rare events limited to pragmatically appropriate contexts, that is, when the referent is easily recoverable from preceding discourse. The results of the grammaticality judgement task indicate that beginning level learners frequently accept sentences containing null objects with specific antecedents, while more proficient learners categorically reject such argument omissions. It is suggested that lower proficiency learners may rely primarily on semantic strategies in parsing and evaluating sentences, while advanced learners are more sensitive to syntactic violations. A performance account is ultimately adopted to explain the data given the lack of a clear null object stage in development, the presence of self-corrections, and the discourse-constrained nature of object omissions.

This article examines the impact of instruction on L2 learners' ability to recognize and produce differential object marking in Spanish as measured by three written tasks: a grammatical preference task, a cued sentence production task, and a discourse-length narrative task. These assessment measures are hypothesized to tap both implicit and explicit knowledge based on criteria proposed by Ellis (2005) and Ellis, Loewen, Elder, Erlam, Philp & Reinders (2009). English-speaking learners (n = 123) were randomly assigned to one of three instructional treatments: input flood, enhanced input flood, and explicit grammar. The results indicate a significant advantage for the explicit grammar group on the preference task and the cued sentence production task. The remaining two groups showed modest improvement after the treatment, but with no significant differences between them. These results confirm the advantage of explicit instruction vis-à-vis more implicit treatments, although this advantage seems to be limited to controlled assessment measures.

This article examines the role of input in two contrasting theories of language acquisition: nativist (UG) theory and the usage-based (emergentist) approach. Although extensive treatments of input are available for first language acquisition (cf. Gathercole & Hoff, 2007), such research rarely incorporates findings from second language acquisition. Accordingly, this paper examines a range of linguistic phenomena from both first and second language contexts (e.g., yes-no question formation, constraints on want-to contraction) in order to illustrate how each theory might explain their acquisition. The discussion of input presented here addresses various constructs, including the problem of the poverty of the stimulus, the lack of negative evidence, the role of indirect (missing) evidence, recovery from overgeneralization, and frequency effects. The article concludes with a reappraisal of the poverty of the stimulus problem in SLA from a usage-based perspective.

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