Efforts to gather data of various sorts—demographics, language-learning history, contact with native speakers, use of the language in the field—as they relate to participants in SLA research studies are inherent to understanding more about language acquisition and use. Scholars frequently develop questionnaires of their own, which are rarely shared widely in the profession. Consequently, much time and effort is invested in reinventing the process of gathering the types of data that are commonly needed.This research was funded in part by a grant to Barbara F. Freed from the Council for International Educational Exchange (New York), in part by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Norman Segalowitz, and in part by a grant from the Dean's Office, Faculty of Arts and Science, at Concordia University to Segalowitz.

In the French primary schools of Quebec, increased popularity in experimental programs that provide young Francophone learners with intensive ESL instruction has been accompanied by increased variation in the way the instructional time is distributed. In a massed program, students complete the regular curriculum in French in 5 months and spend the remaining months learning English. In a distributed program, the intensive ESL instruction is spread across the full 10 months of the school year.Within the cognitive psychology and general education literature, there is substantial evidence in favour of distributed over massed practice. There has been less research in the language program evaluation literature contrasting the learning outcomes of students receiving similar amounts of L2 exposure in different distributions, but the findings suggest an advantage for massed learning. The present study compared the learning outcomes in two versions of the massed program and one version of the distributed program of students of the same age and L1, with similar amounts of prior exposure to English. Pretest and posttest measures from 700 students revealed superior outcomes for the massed learning conditions. The interpretation of the findings takes into account selection criteria, overall instructional time, and instructional practices in the different ESL programs.

This study evaluated whether age effects on second language (L2) speech learning derive from changes in how the native language (L1) and L2 sound systems interact. According to the "interaction hypothesis" (IH), the older the L2 learner, the less likely the learner is able to establish new vowel categories needed for accurate L2 vowel production and perception because, with age, L1 vowel categories become more likely to perceptually encompass neighboring L2 vowels. These IH predictions were evaluated in two experiments involving 64 native Korean-and English-speaking children and adults. Experiment 1 determined, as predicted, that the Korean children were less likely than the Korean adults to perceive L2 vowels as instances of a single L1 vowel category. Experiment 2 showed that the Korean children surpassed the Korean adults in production of certain vowels but equaled them in vowel perception. These findings, which partially support the IH, are discussed in relation to L2 speech learning.

In many second/foreign-language classrooms, students are expected to learn much or even most of their vocabulary without explicit instruction, simply through exposure to a rich variety of words in meaningful contexts. In fact, however, there are few studies which would allow us to estimate the number of words learners are typically exposed to in second/foreign-language classrooms. In this study, the vocabulary available in the speech of ten teachers in intensive communicative ESL classes for children in Quebec was analysed using specially designed computer programs. The words which occurred in classroom transcripts were classified according to their status as high-frequency or 'unusual' words, according to lists developed by Nation (1986). The working assumption was that a large number of unusual words would be indicative of a rich lexical environment, whereas the absence or extreme rarity of such words would indicate that the classroom vocabulary was poor. The number of unusual words was found to be quite low in short periods of classroom interaction. However, an interpretation of the findings suggest that the actual richness of the vocabulary available may be greater than it appears in terms of this measure.

In previous publications, the authors reported on the English skills of students who had learned ESL in an experimental comprehension-based program. The performance of grade 4 and 5 students with two or three years of reading and listening was compared to that of students with three years of audio-lingual instruction. On most measures, the students in the comprehension-based program performed as well as or better than the comparison group (Lightbown 1992a; Lightbown & Halter, 1989). In the present paper, the authors report on a follow-up study carried out when students were in grade 8. After six years of an essentially comprehension-based program in ESL, they performed as well as comparison groups of students on measures of comprehension and some measures of oral production but not on measures of written production. This paper includes a description of some particular gaps in the written language of students in the comprehension-based program, includes a follow-up study with secondary school students who had been involved in an experimental program for learning English as a second language (ESL) in primary school, and concludes with a discussion of the need for pedagogical guidance for the development of writing skills.

Résumé : Cette recherche propose de tester l'intuition commune que les apprenants du français L2 dont la compétence langagière est considérée plus approfondie utilisent un vocabulaire plus riche lors de leurs interactions orales. Elle teste aussi la capacité de la méthode Profil de fréquence lexicale (PFL) à fournir une mesure objective du vocabulaire utilisé. Deux groupes étaient composés d'anglophones adultes apprenants du français L2 (N = 48) et fonctionnaires du gouvernement fédéral canadien ayant obtenu un certain niveau de compétence en français comme exigence partielle de leur poste. Les groupes ont été répartis selon leur niveau d'interaction orale obtenu dans leur test. Ces interactions étaient enregistrées et dactylographiées, et la méthode PFL utilisée pour la conversion quantitative des données afin de mener des tests statistiques. Ces tests ont démontré des différences statistiquement significatives entre les productions des deux groupes et par ce même fait ont confirmé notre intuition de différence lexicale.Abstract: This investigation tests the common intuition that a more fluent second language speaker uses richer vocabulary during oral interaction. It also assesses the capacity of a method called Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) to distinguish between levels of lexical richness in oral interaction. Two groups of adult Anglophones learning French as a second language (N = 48) were drawn from a pool of civil servants who had obtained a level of French language proficiency required for their positions with the federal government of Canada. The groups were formed based on scores they obtained in the oral interaction section of their proficiency test. These interactions were recorded and transcribed, and the LFP method was used to convert alphabetic into numeric data in order to conduct statistical tests. These showed a significant lexical difference between the productions of the two groups, hence confirming the intuition of lexical difference. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Cette recherche propose de tester l'intuition commune que les apprenants du français L2 dont la compétence langagière est considérée plus approfondie utilisent un vocabulaire plus riche lors de leurs interactions orales. Elle teste aussi la capacité de la méthode Profil de fréquence lexicale (PFL) à fournir une mesure objective du vocabulaire utilisé. Deux groupes étaient composés d'anglophones adultes apprenants du français L2 (N = 48) et fonctionnaires du gouvernement fédéral canadien ayant obtenu un certain niveau de compétence en français comme exigence partielle de leur poste. Les groupes ont été répartis selon leur niveau d'interaction orale obtenu dans leur test. Ces interactions étaient enregistrées et dactylographiées, et la méthode PFL utilisée pour la conversion quantitative des données afin de mener des tests statistiques. Ces tests ont démontré des différences statistiquement significatives entre les productions des deux groupes et par ce même fait ont confirmé notre intuition de différence lexicale. Abstract: This investigation tests the common intuition that a more fluent second language speaker uses richer vocabulary during oral interaction. It also assesses the capacity of a method called Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) to distinguish between levels of lexical richness in oral interaction. Two groups of adult Anglophones learning French as a second language (N = 48) were drawn from a pool of civil servants who had obtained a level of French language proficiency required for their positions with the federal government of Canada. The groups were formed based on scores they obtained in the oral interaction section of their proficiency test. These interactions were recorded and transcribed, and the LFP method was used to convert alphabetic into numeric data in order to conduct statistical tests. These showed a significant lexical difference between the productions of the two groups, hence confirming the intuition of lexical difference. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

We report the results of a 2-year longitudinal comparison of grade 3 and grade 4 English-as-a-second-language learners in an experimental, comprehension-based program and those in a regular (i.e., more typical) language learning program. The goal was to examine the extent to which sustained, long-term comprehension practice in both listening and reading—in the virtual absence of any speaking—can help develop learners’ second language (L2) pronunciation. We analyzed learners’ sentences from an elicited imitation task using several accuracy and fluency measures as well as listener ratings of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency. We found no differences between the two programs at the end of year 1. However, at the end of year 2, there were some differences—namely, in the listener ratings of fluency and comprehensibility—that favored learners in the regular program. These findings highlight the beneficial effects of comprehension practice for the development of L2 pronunciation but also point to some potential limits of this practice.