Perceived Learning Difficulty and Actual Performance

The Modern Language Journal, 2019

We present a theoretical framework from cognitive psychology (desirable difficulty framework) and link it to the ideas of second language (L2) difficulty. We argue that practice condition, linguistic difficulty, and individual differences need to be taken into account for creating optimal, deliberate, and systematic L2 practice. The desirable difficulty framework may serve as a theoretical foundation to better understand the role of practice on L2 acquisition, as well as to gain insights into effective L2 teaching. Future directions for research are presented to further develop this emerging field of L2 practice.

This coda chapter offers unified theoretical accounts of the major findings of the empirical studies in this special issue of Optimizing Second Language Practice in the Classroom: Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology. We present a theoretical framework from cognitive psychology (desirable difficulty framework, Bjork & Schmidt, 1992) and link it to the ideas of second language (L2) difficulty (Housen & Simoens, 2016). We argue that practice condition, linguistic difficulty, and individual differences need to be taken into account for creating optimal, deliberate and systematic L2 practice. The desirable difficulty framework may serve as a theoretical foundation to better understand the role of practice on L2 acquisition, as well as to gain insights into effective L2 teaching. Future directions for research are presented to further develop this emerging field of L2 practice.

Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2014

Implicit and explicit knowledge as two important concepts have long been at the center of attention in second language research. In this paper, first of all some theoretical backgrounds about the nature of linguistic knowledge and implicit and explicit L2 knowledge, interface issue and its pedagogical implications, and operational definition of implicit and explicit L2 grammatical knowledge were presented. And then, previous studies about the two types of knowledge and L2 proficiency operationalized in different ways were discussed. The results showed that the relationship between explicit knowledge and L2 proficiency is still not clear and previous investigations have found mix results concerning this relationship. Therefore, future investigations are needed to better probe the relationship between explicit knowledge and L2 proficiency in second language learning.

2016

Implicit and explicit linguistic knowledge have long been at the centre of second language acquisition research, whereas language proficiency is often examined in language testing. Viewing language proficiency in terms of implicit and explicit linguistic knowledge would provide helpful insight to bridging the two fields. However, very few empirical studies have focused on the relationship between these two types of knowledge and general language proficiency except Elder and Ellis (2009). The results of Elder and Ellis (2009) indicated that language proficiency can be conceptualized as involving both types of knowledge with explicit knowledge of a second language (L2) being a stronger predictor of general L2 proficiency. Likewise, all four measures used in the current study to elicit English learners ’ implicit and explicit knowledge of English were found to correlate significantly with the English proficiency measure in a Chinese (as opposed to English as a second language) context....

Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2014

Although many theoretical issues revolving around implicit and explicit knowledge in second language (L2) acquisition hinge on the ability to measure these two types of knowledge, few empirical studies have attempted to do so. However, R. Ellis (2005) did develop a battery of tests intended to provide relatively separate measures. This study aims to validate the use of Ellis’s test battery in an English as a foreign language context and to investigate the extent of Chinese first-year university students’ implicit and explicit L2 knowledge. Test scores loaded on two factors, as in R. Ellis (2005), thus demonstrating construct validity for the tests as measures of implicit and explicit knowledge in a population of Chinese university-level learners of English in a Chinese (as opposed to English as a second language) context. These learners were found to have higher scores on measures of explicit knowledge than on those of implicit knowledge because of the instruction they had received ...

While ESL teachers cannot eliminate linguistic difficulties, with an awareness of the factors involved it is possible to minimise the confusion of their students. This article systematically analyses some important problem areas in language learning. It itemizes a range of syntactic and semantic phenomena, considering in each cas how the rule or pattern might pose a difficulty for some learners. This paper has been published for a number of years now, and the writer has become aware that many teachers themselves have found it a useful aid in preparing and presenting course material. Table of Contents: INTRODUCTION // orders of complexity // LEXICAL DIFFICULTY // Syllabic length:// Clusters // Irregular spelling // Irregular stress // Affixes // Multiple denotation // Range of connotation // Specialized application // Frequency of lexical items // Selectional restrictions // Subcategorical restrictions // MEASURES OF STRUCTURAL COMPLEXITY IN SENTENCES // Sentence length // Qualifying words // Adverbial and prepositional phrases // Conjunctive sentences // Equi-deletion // Deletion by convention // Permutation // Transposition // Embedding // Sentential complements // Topicalization // Presupposition // Tense // Aspect // Agreement (concord) rules // Anaphoric, cataphoric and exophoric references // DISCOURSE COHESION // CUEING // IDIOM // CONCEPTUAL DIFFICULTY // More accessible reference // Less accessible reference // Types of Inference // REFERENCES

2016

Wigglesworth, 2001). Different tasks demand the operation of different language skills from L2 learners; therefore, an inference of an examinee's L2 speaking ability drawn from his/her performance only on a single task may be entirely invalid or partially valid at best. Such possibility begs for more empirical research on the differential effects of tasks on examinee performance through cross-examinations of various task types. That is, more research effort is needed to better understand the systematic effects of differing tasks on examinees' speech performance. In addition, more research findings are required to promote further understanding of to what extent factors such as the task characteristics, examinees' perceptions of the tasks, or rater characteristics affect examinees' performances on the tasks (Brown, 2003). Among the factors mentioned above as known to affect examinee performance, the current study concerns examinees' perceptions of the tasks, i.e., if and to what extent their perceptions of the tasks are related to their performance. By employing three oral tasks-topic discussion, information gap, and semi-direct speaking, this study attempts to examine the extent to which examinees' perception concurs with their actual performance on the tasks, or vice versa. Correlations are examined between survey responses and the rating scores to see if there are any meaningful relationships between the perception and performance aspects.

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, 2012

A problem facing investigations of implicit and explicit learning is the lack of valid measures of second language implicit and explicit knowledge. This paper attempts to establish operational definitions of these two constructs and reports a psychometric study of a battery of tests designed to provide relatively independent measures of them. These tests were (a) an oral imitation test involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, (b) an oral narration test, (c) a timed grammaticality judgment test (GJT), (d) an untimed GJT with the same content, and (e) a metalinguistic knowledge test. Tests (a), (b), and (c) were designed as measures of implicit knowledge, and tests (d) and (e) were designed as measures of explicit knowledge. All of the tests examined 17 English grammatical structures. A principal component factor analysis produced two clear factors. This analysis showed that the scores from tests (a), (b), and (c) loaded on Factor 1, whereas the scores from ungrammatical sentences in test (d) and total scores from test (e) loaded on Factor 2. These two factors are interpreted as corresponding to implicit and explicit knowledge, respectively. A number of secondary analyses to support this interpretation of the construct validity of the tests are also reported.

Georgetown University-Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2018

Although cognitive psychology literature (e.g., Derakshan & Eysenck, 2009) has demonstrated the detrimental effects anxiety has on cognitive processes, this relationship has barely been investigated in the SLA field (e.g., MacIntyre & Gardner, 1994). In addition, the vast majority of SLA and TBLT research examining foreign language anxiety (FLA) have consistently focused on the negative outcomes of FLA, treating it as single powerful force to be simply eliminated, therefore, ignoring its facilitative role (e.g., Scovel, 1978), its dynamicity and fluctuation over time during learners’ task performance (e.g., Baralt & GurzynskiWeiss, 2011), and its three interconnected facets within the language learner—affective, cognitive, and behavioral (Zeidner & Matthews, 2011). Employing mixed-methods, this dissertation attempted to offer a more inclusive and complete understanding of the role of language anxiety in L2 oral tasks that vary in the cognitive demands imposed on the learner. Followi...

International Journal of English Linguistics

Empirical studies have provided evidence for the negative role of foreign language anxiety in language proficiency measured via final course grades, self-assessments, objective language tests, and GPAs. However, its role in language proficiency from the perspective of explicit and implicit L2 knowledge is under-investigated. The current study therefore investigates the relationship between foreign language anxiety and explicit and implicit L2 knowledge in an English as a foreign language context. Participants were 156 university-level non-English majors. The results of the t test and multiple regression analyses showed that foreign language anxiety has a negative role in implicit L2 knowledge and also can predict it, but it was not found to have a significantly negative role in explicit L2 knowledge. The nature of the tests and knowledge may account for the results.

Instructed Second Language Acquisition

This paper reports the results of a study on the effects of explicit instruction, which examined the L2 development of the German case system. The study investigated to what extent the effects of instruction, if any, depend on (i) the type of linguistic performance (knowledge vs. use) and (ii) the developmental readiness of the learners. The pretest-posttest study involved 18 first-year university students of German (L1 Dutch), who were administered a grammatical judgment task (which examined their knowledge of the case rule) and an oral production task (which examined their case use). The findings uncover differences between pretest and posttests, which shows that explicit instruction improves linguistic performance in general. Further analysis reveals that the effect does not depend on ‘type of performance’, but that it does depend on ‘developmental readiness’.

e-spacio.uned.es, 2017

This study examines the acquisition of L2 knowledge (Spanish determiners) by four groups of adolescents as (L2) Spanish learners, taking into consideration two types of instruction: implicit and explicit. Another purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effects of the type of instruction (implicit vs. explicit) on language transfer L1 English-L2 Spanish. The groups in this study were part of two different courses at a High School level in the United States during a winter trimester. Two groups were of higher proficiency and the other two, of lower proficiency. Groups with the same proficiency were instructed with both, implicit and explicit methods. We focus on contrasting the results of both proficiency groups and their specific methods of instruction. Forty-five adolescent (L2) learners of Spanish carried out six written tasks (Timed Grammaticality Judgment Test, Untimed Grammaticality Judgment Test, L2 Achievement task, Truth-Value Judgment Task, Picture-Sentence Matching Task and Sentence-Picture Acceptability Judgment Task) before and immediately after the implicit and explicit methods of instruction were complete. The research conducted in this thesis contains five questions, whose answers were addressed through the statistical analysis of the raw scores obtained in the different mentioned tasks. The research results show that the methods of instruction were significant taking into consideration the proficiency of the students. The higher proficiency group had higher scores than the lower proficiency group on all the measures of implicit and explicit knowledge, developing significantly more explicit knowledge representations of the forms tested than the lower proficiency group. In relation to transfer effects, results show that the explicit method can help the higher proficiency group to more resemble native speakers.