This study assesses the impact of internal and external factors on very young EFL learners in an instructional setting. 71 child English learners in China (onset age: 2;0 -5;6) were involved: their receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary and receptive grammar were taken as outcome variables, and age of onset, short-term memory, nonverbal intelligence, English input quantity and quality, English use, and maternal English level were taken as predictive variables. Multiple regression analyses, verified by Bayes factor comparisons, revealed that the total amount of school input and home English media environment were significant predictors for all of three aspects of English proficiency, with each aspect having different additional significant predictors. Both internal factors (e.g., age of onset) and external factors (e.g., English input quantity) played an important role, but in contrast to similar studies (e.g., Paradis, 2011) focusing on a L2 naturalistic setting, external factors explained more variance of English proficiency measures.

This study examines the English vocabulary development of 43 very young child English as a foreign language (FL) learners (age 3.2-6.2) in China. They were tested twice for vocabulary breadth (reception and production) and semantic depth (paradigmatic and syntagmatic vocabulary knowledge). The development of the English vocabulary knowledge between these two measurements was predicted using a series of internal factors and external factors. An exploratory mixedeffects regression analysis revealed that English use, interacting with age of English onset, significantly predicted such growth. Older children benefitted more from practicing English to enhance their English vocabulary. The amount of English input at school was found to positively impact the development of English syntagmatic knowledge. Chinese paradigmatic knowledge significantly influenced the growth of English paradigmatic and syntagmatic knowledge. These findings indicate that at least at an early stage, external factors play an important role in child FL vocabulary development, particularly in children with a later age of English onset. Furthermore, the transfer of concepts from the first language to the second language (L2) might be more pronounced with respect to L2 semantic depth than L2 vocabulary breadth. This conceptual transfer is relevant to FL learners as young as three years of age.

Teachers’ language practice during shared book reading may significantly affect the rate and outcome of early language proficiency. The current study has focused on 37 kindergarten teachers and 440 4- to 5-year-old kindergartners during their shared book reading sessions in Singapore, exploring teachers’ variation in instructional strategies and linguistic features, and its relations with children’s language development and teacher’s background. Results demonstrated that teacher’s language strategies and linguistic features varied considerably. Instructional strategies with a medium level of cognitive load were found to be positively related to children’s growth in receptive vocabulary and word reading skills. Teacher’s lexical sophistication was found to be positively associated with children’s vocabulary size. Years of teaching experience was revealed to predict teacher’s variation in medium-level instructions.

It is assumed from a usage-based perspective that learner language constructions emerge from natural language use in social interaction through exemplar learning. In L1, young learners have been shown to develop their constructions from lexically specific, formulaic expressions into more productive, abstract schemas. A similar developmental path has been shown for L2 development, with some exceptions. The aim of the current study is to explore to what extent the default assumption holds for L2 learning. The development of two constructions was traced in four adults learning L2 Finnish. Free-response data, collected weekly over a period of 9 months, were used to investigate the productivity of the constructions. The results show that, contrary to the traditional assumption, L2 learners do not start off with only lexically specific expressions, but that both lexically specific and more productive constructions are used from the beginning. Our results therefore suggest that, for educated adult L2 learners, the schema formation can happen rather quickly and even without the repetition of a specific lexical sequence.

There remains considerable disagreement about which factors drive second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Age of onset (AO) appears to be a robust factor, lending support to theories of maturational constraints on L2 acquisition. The present study is an investigation of factors that influence grammatical and lexical complexity at the stage of L2 ultimate attainment. Grammatical and lexical complexity were assessed in 102 spontaneous oral interviews. Interviewees’ AOs ranged from 7 to 17 years old. Multifactorial analyses yielded consistently significant effects of gender and level of education for grammatical and lexical complexity. Additionally, native language use at work was a significant predictor for lexical complexity; conversely, AO did not emerge as a significant factor. We conclude that grammatical and lexical complexity at the stage of L2 ultimate attainment is the result of a complex interplay of variables that are general to language learning and performance rather than L2 specific. Open Practices This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All materials are publicly accessible in the IRIS digital repository at http://www.iris-database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The present study investigated which factors would best predict second-language (L2) fluency in a group of long-term L2 speakers of different English varieties with German as their first language. Design/methodology/approach: L2 fluency was conceptualized in terms of utterance fluency for which speed, breakdown and repair fluency were distinguished. Data and analysis: Multiple measures of utterance fluency were applied to four-minute speech fragments originating from 102 spontaneous oral interviews. Interviewees’ ages of onset ranged from 7 to 17, whereas their ages at interview ranged from 57 to 87. Multifactorial analyses yielded significant effects of age at interview. Findings/conclusions: Whereas the mean number of silent pauses and repairs increases, syllable duration decreases. This leaves room for interpretation as to why we find an aging effect. Overall, the evidence suggests that the usual, L2 acquisition-specific factors, such as age of onset or length of residence, are no longer at play to predict L2 fluency. Originality and significance/implications: To this point L2 fluency in very advanced, highly proficient L2 speakers has received little attention. The results point to the need for more research into highly proficient L2 users.

An increasing number of adults learn more than one foreign language simultaneously. While the cognitive benefits of using multiple languages from birth have been studied extensively, little is known about possible cognitive benefits of learning multiple languages simultaneously in adulthood. Among the cognitive abilities which play a role in language learning, language aptitude (LA) and working memory (WM) are argued to be crucial. Traditionally considered relatively stable, recently they are advocated to be changeable. For example, one could imagine that learning new sounds, words, and structures in a language might both enhance the ability to temporarily hold and manage information (WM) and improve the ease with which subsequent languages are learnt (LA). Therefore, this study investigates whether LA and WM change while learning languages, and whether language learning intensity, i.e. learning one versus two foreign languages simultaneously, modulates this effect. Participants consisted of first-year and second-year Chinese university students majoring in English or English & Japanese/Russian. Data were collected twice with an interval of one academic year. The results show that all learners improved in certain aspects of LA and WM, and that among the first-year students, the two-foreign-languages learners outperformed their counterparts in WM improvement. The implications are discussed.

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