scholarly journals Sixty years of second language aptitude research: A systematic quantitative literature review

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Chalmers ◽  
Susana A. Eisenchlas ◽  
Andrew Munro ◽  
Andrea C. Schalley
2013 ◽  
Vol 127 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaochen Hu ◽  
Hermann Ackermann ◽  
Jason A. Martin ◽  
Michael Erb ◽  
Susanne Winkler ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Anne-France Pinget

Abstract In Belgium, Dutch as spoken by Francophone learners is relatively frequent in political, commercial or educational contexts. While the characteristics of this second language (L2) variety have been studied extensively, there is to date no systematic report of how it is evaluated by either native speakers of Dutch or non-natives. Previous studies conducted in other language contexts have found that non-natives tend to be very critical towards L2 accents similar to their own. The main goal of the present study is to investigate the extent to which the listener’s first language (L1) impacts ratings of the fluency, accentedness and comprehensibility of L2 Dutch as spoken by Francophone learners and how it impacts the identification of the speakers’ L1. Specifically, we compared ratings by three groups of listeners: Francophone learners of Dutch, native speakers of Belgian Dutch and native speakers of Netherlandic Dutch. Moreover, the extent to which three additional cognitive and environmental factors influence L2 ratings is examined: listeners’ familiarity with the L2 variety, their language aptitude and language proficiency. The results show that the majority of native and non-native listeners recognized the speakers’ L1 (French). Non-native listeners perceived L2 speech as less fluent, less comprehensible and more accented than natives did, which corroborates the previously reported critical attitudes towards a shared L2 accent. Moreover, subtle differences in accent and fluency ratings were found between the Netherlandic Dutch and the Belgian Dutch listeners. No clear effects of other cognitive and environmental factors appeared in the ratings.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Xia Dai

The literature review shows that many previous studies have used Subjacency to test the availability of UniversalGrammar (UG) in second language acquisition. Schachter (1989) claimed that L2 learners do not have access to UGprinciples, while Hawkins and Chan (1997) suggested that L2 learners had partial availability of UG, for they foundthere was a strong difference between the elementary L2 learners and the advanced L2 learners in judging theungrammaticality of Subjacency violations; that is, the elementary L2 learners owned the highest accuracy. Underthe hypothesis of partially availability of UG in second language acquisition, L2 learners are only able to acquire theproperties instantiated in their L1s. Although they may accept violations of universal constraints, it is only at facevalue; rather the L2 learners develop different syntactic representations from the native speakers. This study has beenundertaken as a follow-up study of Hawkins and Chan (1997), and tested on L1 Mandarin speakers of L2 English injudging the grammaticality of their Subjacency violations. The results of the Grammaticality Judgement Test showthat the accuracy of Chinese speakers in judgement increased with English proficiency and that they rejectedresumptives inside islands as a repair. Contrary to the previous findings, this study provides evidence that UG isavailable in adult second language acquisition.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 34129
Author(s):  
Larissa Goulart

This literature review focuses on the use of formulaic language by English as a second language students (L2). Research on the field of phraseology has shown that mastery of formulas is central for fluency and linguistic competence (Ellis, 1996). Studies on the use of formulaic language by native speakers (Ellis et al., 2008) have shown that native speakers process these structures as a single word. Considering the use of formulaic language by L2 students, research has shown that this can be problematic to learners as they do not know the correct word association (Men, 2018). This paper presents a literature review on the studies of formulaic language, more specifically of collocations, used by L2 learners. The first part of this paper deals with the different definitions of collocations, while the second part focuses on studies on collocation use by L2 learners.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 907
Author(s):  
Yanmei Lu

Chinese resultative construction was the hotspot of grammar researches and also the difficult point of second language teaching and learning. From the aspects of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, this paper analyzed the ontology researches of Chinese resultative construction, reviewed the research results of second language learners’ acquisition of Chinese resultative construction and also provided some references and directions of related researches.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document