Foreword

We live in an era of constant change. Sometimes that change is moderate and steady, such as the growth of social media, online video, and smartphone apps over the past decade or so. At other times, the change is swift and dramatic, as we saw when much of the world suddenly had to shift from predominantly classroom teaching and learning, to predominantly online with the onset of COVID-19. This constant change is true of all fields, and language teaching is no exception. In order to keep up with this change, language teachers need to stay current with (1) developments in second language acquisition theory, research, and pedagogy, and (2) relevant technologies and applications for language learning both inside and outside the classroom. For language teacher educators, knowing how to stay up-to-date is even more important as they are responsible for preparing teacher candidates for a lifetime of teaching in an evolving and unpredictable future...

Opportunities for Engaging Young English Language Learners Through Technology Use

There are still many aspects of language learning that are not well explained, but second language acquisition theories provide evidence for under what conditions language is learned. Key among these conditions is the opportunities that students have for input, output, social interaction, and feedback. Teachers have control over the types of opportunities that language learners have in their classrooms, and it is important that these opportunities are engaging so that learners take advantage of them and therefore learn. Technology, used to support engaging language tasks, can help this to happen. This chapter addresses the links between second language acquisition theory and engaging opportunities for young learners in language classrooms, and it explores uses of technology that can support both.

A preposition is something you can end a sentence with: Learning English stranded prepositions through structural priming

This study investigated whether second language (L2) learners of English could learn to produce stranded prepositions through structural priming. Structural priming is the tendency for speakers to repeat the structure of previously experienced sentences, without intention or conscious awareness of such behaviour, and is thought to be associated with implicit learning of syntactic structure. The syntactic structure chosen for this study was the stranded preposition in English relative clauses, a structure which is known to be difficult for L2 learners to acquire, and which is often replaced by a related ungrammatical interlanguage variant: null preposition (null prep). It was hypothesized that, during and just after a structural priming treatment, learners would produce more sentences containing stranded prepositions and fewer null prep sentences than before the treatment. The results revealed that learners indeed produced more stranded prepositions during and after priming than before and we interpret this behaviour as a possible indication of implicit learning of an L2 structure. However, learners did not produce significantly fewer null preps during and after priming than before. We discuss the findings in terms of second language acquisition theory, interlanguage processes, and possible pedagogical implications.