Abstract:This study compared receptive English grammar skills of two groups of 7‐ and 9‐year‐old Danish children at the beginning of second language (L2) instruction in English, and two groups of Spanish/Catalan children of the same age after several years of instruction. The study examined the influence of two language‐related factors (receptive vocabulary skills, cognate linguistic distance) and two context‐related factors (amount of formal instruction, frequency of exposure to English outside school), additionally f… Show more
“…Researchers (e.g., Peters et al., ; Webb, ) have therefore advocated extramural activities as a way of enhancing learners’ vocabulary gains because of their potential for incidental learning. As argued in previous studies (Muñoz, Cadierno, & Casas, ; Sundqvist, ; Sundqvist & Wikström, ; Sylvén & Sundqvist, ), extramural English is related to incidental language learning because the activities that learners engage in do not explicitly focus on language learning. In this study, we adopted Hulstijn's () definition of incidental vocabulary learning, which views incidental learning as being the byproduct of reading or listening activities not explicitly focusing on vocabulary learning, such as playing computer games or watching TV.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 83%
“…Further, studies testing learners’ vocabulary size found that scores for cognates were higher than for non‐cognates (e.g., Cobb, ; Laufer & McLean, ). In these studies, the cognate facilitation effect was stronger in older learners, probably because the older learners’ larger vocabulary size in their L1 enabled them to recognize more cognates, resulting in higher cross‐linguistic awareness (Hipfner‐Boucher et al., ; Muñoz et al., ).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 97%
“…However, cognates do not need to be fully identical in form–meaning overlap (e.g., hotel , horizon , video in Dutch and English) in order for a cognate facilitation effect to occur. The cognate facilitation effect has also been attested with partial overlap between L2 and L1 words, as in huis – house (Muñoz et al., ; Peters & Webb, ). Given our study's focus on Dutch and English, two Germanic languages sharing many cognates, cognateness is one of the word‐related variables that we examined.…”
This study focused on the mechanisms underlying incidental second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition prior to formal instruction. We designed a cross‐sectional study to examine which learner‐related and word‐related variables affect young learners’ vocabulary knowledge at the level of meaning recognition and meaning recall. We collected data from 616 Flemish children between 10 and 12 years old by using a questionnaire about learners’ extramural English, an English vocabulary test, and a Dutch vocabulary test. The findings revealed that participating learners frequently engaged in activities involving English before receiving formal instruction and that their amount of extramural English increased with age. The results also showed the rate of vocabulary growth from exposure to extramural English for three contiguous age groups. Further, both word‐related and learner‐related variables predicted vocabulary knowledge. Cognateness was the most powerful predictor, followed by frequency and concreteness. We also found a positive relationship between extramural English and vocabulary knowledge.
Open Practices
This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All materials are publicly accessible via the IRIS Repository at https://www.iris-database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.
“…Researchers (e.g., Peters et al., ; Webb, ) have therefore advocated extramural activities as a way of enhancing learners’ vocabulary gains because of their potential for incidental learning. As argued in previous studies (Muñoz, Cadierno, & Casas, ; Sundqvist, ; Sundqvist & Wikström, ; Sylvén & Sundqvist, ), extramural English is related to incidental language learning because the activities that learners engage in do not explicitly focus on language learning. In this study, we adopted Hulstijn's () definition of incidental vocabulary learning, which views incidental learning as being the byproduct of reading or listening activities not explicitly focusing on vocabulary learning, such as playing computer games or watching TV.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 83%
“…Further, studies testing learners’ vocabulary size found that scores for cognates were higher than for non‐cognates (e.g., Cobb, ; Laufer & McLean, ). In these studies, the cognate facilitation effect was stronger in older learners, probably because the older learners’ larger vocabulary size in their L1 enabled them to recognize more cognates, resulting in higher cross‐linguistic awareness (Hipfner‐Boucher et al., ; Muñoz et al., ).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 97%
“…However, cognates do not need to be fully identical in form–meaning overlap (e.g., hotel , horizon , video in Dutch and English) in order for a cognate facilitation effect to occur. The cognate facilitation effect has also been attested with partial overlap between L2 and L1 words, as in huis – house (Muñoz et al., ; Peters & Webb, ). Given our study's focus on Dutch and English, two Germanic languages sharing many cognates, cognateness is one of the word‐related variables that we examined.…”
This study focused on the mechanisms underlying incidental second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition prior to formal instruction. We designed a cross‐sectional study to examine which learner‐related and word‐related variables affect young learners’ vocabulary knowledge at the level of meaning recognition and meaning recall. We collected data from 616 Flemish children between 10 and 12 years old by using a questionnaire about learners’ extramural English, an English vocabulary test, and a Dutch vocabulary test. The findings revealed that participating learners frequently engaged in activities involving English before receiving formal instruction and that their amount of extramural English increased with age. The results also showed the rate of vocabulary growth from exposure to extramural English for three contiguous age groups. Further, both word‐related and learner‐related variables predicted vocabulary knowledge. Cognateness was the most powerful predictor, followed by frequency and concreteness. We also found a positive relationship between extramural English and vocabulary knowledge.
Open Practices
This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All materials are publicly accessible via the IRIS Repository at https://www.iris-database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.
“…Our study had a number of limitations. Research has shown that cognate linguistic distance has an impact on learners’ language proficiency (Lindgren & Muñoz, ; Muñoz, Cadierno, & Casas, ). Even though we controlled for cognates in the vocabulary test, the smaller cognate linguistic distance between Dutch and English than between Dutch and French might still have played a role.…”
This cross-sectional study investigated the impact of length of instruction, out-of-school exposure to foreign language input, and gender on learners' receptive vocabulary knowledge in two foreign languages: French (first foreign language) and English (second foreign language). The findings suggest that, although length of instruction correlated positively with vocabulary knowledge in English and French, the gains remained modest when out-of-school exposure to the foreign language input was limited. Despite fewer years of English instruction, participants' vocabulary knowledge in English was considerably larger than their French vocabulary knowledge, which can be explained by their large amounts of out-of-school exposure to English language input. Participants' online activities in particular had a positive effect on their vocabulary knowledge in English. Although gender influenced participants' engagement with online activities in English, gender did not have a direct effect on their vocabulary knowledge, as the structural equation modeling analysis showed.We would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers and Associate Editor Scott Crossley for their insightful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. We are also grateful to Britta Kestemont for her help in the data collection.
“…Like these ML learners, immersion learners typically begin young, and have many hours a week of communicative L2 exposure from native speakers (or highly proficient speakers) of the L2. However, like instructed-L2 learners, the exposure that immersion learners receive is largely limited to the classroom in communities where the L2 is a foreign (or minority) language, making them similar to the participants of studies of instructed-L2 classrooms (e.g., Butler & Le, 2018;Muñoz, Cadierno, & Casas, 2018;Sun, Steinkrauss, Tendeiro, & de Bot, 2016). Though immersion contexts are not likely to reach the same quantity of L2 exposure as ML contexts, learners in these programs can amass around 6,000 hr of L2 exposure by their middle-school years (Turnbull, Lapkin, Hart, & Swain, 1998), which far exceeds that of instructed-L2 contexts, for which L2 exposure is limited to only a few hours a week and where total classroom exposure may only be around 800 hr by the end of compulsory education, though this will vary widely by program (Muñoz, 2008).…”
Previous research has established that early second language (L2) learners in classroom immersion may not ultimately produce all L2 morphosyntactic features as first language (L1) speakers of the language do, whereas L2 comprehension outcomes are reported to be less divergent from those of L1 speakers. However, immersion learners’ L2 comprehension is typically assessed using tasks of holistic understanding, and therefore, little is known about fine-grained comprehension of specific morphosyntactic constructions. To address this, the present study examined online comprehension of English plural–singular marking by Mandarin-speaking, English-immersion learners in Taiwan. This semantically transparent feature differs from the L1 grammar and is a notable area of difficulty for Mandarin-speaking L2-English learners. The present study assesses middle school-aged immersion learners’ comprehension using a visual-world eye-tracking task combined with a picture decision task, comparing results to age-matched English-monolingual controls. After more than 8 years of L2 exposure, the immersion participants showed similarities and differences to monolinguals in plural–singular marking comprehension as measured by eye-tracking, and were less accurate in their interpretations on the picture decision task. This study shows that comprehension differences for a semantically transparent morphosyntactic construction can be apparent even after many years for learners who started immersion at an early age.
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