One of the challenges in content-based instruction in second language classrooms is how to focus on form in a way that is both effective and appropriate. The use of collaborative tasks that push learners to consciously reflect on their own language use (i.e., produce ‘language-related episodes’) while conveying meaning has been proposed as one way to accomplish this goal. Studies investigating the use of collaborative tasks that encourage learners to produce language-related episodes (LREs) have been shown to affect positively L2 development. However, little is known about how the proficiency of each dyad member affects how and how much dyads produce LREs during collaborative tasks. Therefore, the study reported in this article investigated how grouping learners by their relative proficiency (high-high, high-low, or low-low) affected the amount, type (lexical or grammatical) and outcome (correct, unresolved, or incorrect) of LREs produced during a passage reconstruction task, completed by twenty-one pairs of adult L2 Spanish learners from a content-based course. The findings revealed that the proficiency of the dyad members affected how much the dyads focused on form, the types of forms they focused on as well as how successful they were at resolving the language problems they encountered.

This study examines how topic familiarity and working memory capacity affect beginning Spanish learners' reading comprehension and their processing of future tense morphology. Participants included 94 adult learners from an accelerated, beginning Spanish course. In addition to completing a computerized version of a reading span test as a measure of working memory capacity, all learners read texts about familiar or unfamiliar topics and completed recall protocols to measure passage comprehension. They also completed form recognition and tense identification tests to determine processing of future tense morphology. The results revealed consistent effects for topic familiarity on all tasks. Although differences in working memory capacity played some role in learners' comprehension and processing grammatical form, significant findings for working memory emerged depending on participants' previous knowledge about text topics.

Research in first language and second language (L2) comprehension has demonstrated that both learner and input variables contribute to the ease with which a message is understood. Questions remain, however, as to how these variables affect the way L2 learners process linguistic form during comprehension. This study examines how one learner variable (topic familiarity) and two input variables (mode and pausing) affect learners' comprehension and their processing of a new morphological form (the Spanish future tense) in the input. Two hundred sixty-six participants in an accelerated beginning Spanish course either read or listened to a short narrative in Spanish on either a familiar topic or an unfamiliar one. Additionally, half of the listening groups encountered 3-second pauses between each sentence. After listening to or reading the passages, the participants performed two comprehension tasks (recall protocol and multiple-choice test) and two form-assessment tasks (form-recognition task and tense identification/translation). The results revealed that, although all three variables affected learners' comprehension, only mode affected learners' processing future tense morphology. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference Form-Meaning Connections in Second Language Acquisition held in Chicago in February, 2002+ This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign+ I am extremely grateful to Bill VanPatten for his guidance during the entire process of the research project as well as to James

A continuing concern in second language acquisition (SLA) research is whether problems with inflectional morphology are representational or related somehow to performance. In this study, we examine 25 non-advanced learners of L2 Spanish and compare them with 18 native Spanish speakers on three grammatical structures: subject-verb inversion, adverb placement and person-number inflections on verbs. We use self-paced reading as a measure of underlying sensitivity to grammatical violations. Our results clearly show that the L2 learners pattern like the native speakers on the two syntactic structures; both groups demonstrate sensitivity to grammatical violations while reading sentences for meaning. For person-number on verbs, L2 learners did not show sensitivity to grammatical violations whereas the native speakers did. We argue that these results suggest a representational problem for morphology in our L2 population.

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