Aptitude in adult SLA is claimed to correlate with learning, although the strength of correlation varies considerably (e.g., Skehan, 2012). One of the most studied and used components of aptitude is grammatical sensitivity (as measured by the MLAT). Grammatical sensitivity is assumed to measure an individual’s ability to see relationships among words, which in turn presumably underlies “grammar learning.” In a variety of empirical studies on classroom learners, grammatical sensitivity is indeed shown to correlate with rule learning (e.g., de Graff, 1998; Robinson, 1995; see also Sawyer & Ranta, 2001). But what if language learning is not characterized as rule learning? What if learning is characterized as the interaction of input with internal mechanisms (e.g., Universal Grammar), mediated by processing? In the present talk, I report the results of four studies in Spanish, Russian, French, and German in which we examined learners experiencing processing instruction with canonical and non-canonical word orders as these intersected with the First-noun Strategy. We used two measures (trials to criterion and posttest results). Unlike other research, we found no correlations between grammatical sensitivity and the two measures for any language for any structures. I will discuss these results in terms of how both language and language acquisition are conceptualized more generally in the literature on instructed SLA.

Bill VanPatten is Professor of Spanish and Second Language Studies as well as Director of Romance Language Instruction at Michigan State University. He has published extensively in the fields of second language acquisition and second language instruction. His research interests include second language input processing/sentence processing, the relationship between syntax and morphology, and instructed SLA.

The Fundamental Difference Hypothesis holds that L2 acquisition is fundamentally different from L1 acquisition, possibly because of Critical Period effects.  Emergentist accounts such as the Competition Model hold that language learning depends on general cognitive mechanisms that maintain through adulthood.  But emergentist accounts have problems explaining why L2 learning is often incomplete.  To account for these effects, the Competition Modelemphasizes the role of five risk factors: entrenchment, parasitism, misconnection, negative transfer, and isolation. These arise from neurological, cognitive, and social configurations that change with development.  Counterbalancing each of these risks are protective factors:  resonance, internalization, reconfiguration, positive transfer, and participation.  In order to achieve successful L2 acquisition, the learner must maximize use of each of these protective factors.  This talk will present evidence in support of this analysis. I will also describe how these principles are guiding construction of a computerized tutorial system that engages learners in real-life embedded interactions in the L2 environment.

Brian MacWhinney is Professor of Psychology, Computational Linguistics, and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He has developed a model of first and second language processing and acquisition based on competition between item-based patterns. In 1984, he and Catherine Snow co-founded the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) Project for the computational study of child language transcript data. He is now extending this system to six additional research areas in the form of the TalkBank Project. MacWhinney’s recent work includes studies of online learning of second language vocabulary and grammar, neural network modeling of lexical development, fMRI studies of children with focal brain lesions, and ERP studies of between-language competition. He is also exploring the role of grammatical constructions in the marking of perspective shifting and the construction of mental models in scientific reasoning.

This plenary describes a body of work exploring translation ambiguity, which occurs when a word in one language has more than one translation into another language. For example, the Spanish word "muñeca" translates to both "doll" and "wrist" in English. Our research demonstrates that such ambiguity leads to: (1) slower translation, (2) less accurate translation, and (3) less robust word learning. Furthermore, knowledge that a pair of words share a translation in a later-learned second language impacts the level of perceived relatedness between those words in a first language. For example, native English speakers who learn Spanish as a second language may consider the words "doll" and "wrist" to be more related than native English speakers who do not know Spanish. These findings will be discussed in terms of the ways that the relationship among word meanings across languages influences language learning, processing, and representation.

Natasha Tokowicz is currently Associate Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. She received a B.A. in psychology with a minor in Spanish from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1995. She then earned Master's (1997) and Doctoral degrees (2000) in cognitive psychology at Penn State University. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Pittsburgh prior to beginning her faculty position. Her research focuses on the cognitive processes related to adult second language learning and use. One line of this research focuses on translation ambiguity, which occurs when a word has multiple translations across languages. Another line of this research focuses on second language morpho-syntactic processing in relation to the similarities and differences between the native language and the second language. She uses event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in addition to behavioral measures, such as reaction time and accuracy, to examine these issues.

Triangulation, a term commonly used in qualitative research in particular, refers to the integration of different kinds and sources of information in investigations of a particular phenomenon, typically as part of the process of validation or establishing credibility in a study.It can also be used to provide richer, more nuanced, and more holistic understandings of the phenomenon than a single approach would yield. In SLA, triangulation often involves the incorporation of various types of observations of linguistic behavior as well as perspectives from both participants and researchers regarding processes of language learning and use.  But triangulation can go well beyond soliciting or sampling different types of data. Theoretical perspectives, insights from multiple researchers, and methods can be triangulated as well. In this presentation, I illustrate the principles and advantages of triangulation by describing a longitudinal, collaborative research project on Chinese language learning that involved theoretical, epistemological, and methodological triangulation to provide insights on the experiences, perspectives, and development of five anglophone longtime learners of Chinese as an additional language. The study examined linguistic, sociocultural, and meta-narrative aspects of Chinese language learning and the participants (Chinese learners) were also co-researchers and co-authors. I discuss some of the major findings in our study, the advantages of including multiple sources of information or approaches, and reflections on some of the challenges in doing so.

Patricia (Patsy) Duff is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia and Co-director of the Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education. She coordinates and teaches in the graduate programs in Teaching English as a Second Language and Modern Language Education. An applied linguist, Patsy’s main scholarly interests are related to language socialization across bilingual and multilingual settings;  qualitative research methods in applied linguistics (especially case study and ethnography and complementary approaches to classroom research); issues in the teaching and learning of English, Mandarin, and other international languages; the integration of second-language learners in high schools, universities, and society; multilingualism and work; and sociocultural, sociolinguistic, and sociopolitical aspects of language(s) in education. She has published many articles, chapters, and books and given numerous invited lectures internationally on these topics.

In this workshop, we’ll look at practical, hands-on ways that corpora can be used for teaching language. We’ll look in particular at the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which is freely available online (http://www.americancorpus.org). COCA is used on average by more than 70,000 teachers and learners each month, making it probably the most widely-used corpus for the teaching and learning of English. The workshop will consider how corpora allow users to do such things as:

• get information on word frequency, so that learners can focus on the most frequent words first
• find collocates (“nearby words”), which give learners great insight into the actual meaning and usage of words quickly and easily compare the collocates of related words (e.g. small/little, rob/steal, etc) to “tease apart” the differences between words
• compare genres (e.g. spoken and written, fiction and academic) to see whether particular words, phrases, and grammatical constructions are more appropriate in one type of English than another

This workshop focuses on discourse analysis using tools from Systemic Functional Linguistics to explore language use and language teaching. We will provide participants with an overview of functional view of language considering language use as a form of social practice. We will focus on three kinds of analyses that can be used to explore different meanings in texts (transitivity, appraisal and Theme/rheme). Participants will have hands-on experiences analyzing texts from classroom interaction, student’s writing and language textbooks. The goal of the workshop is to introduce participants to some of the ways in which discourse analysis can be used to enhance L2 research and practie.

The measurement of eye movements provides an on-line, unobtrusive, and ecologically valid method to study the perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, and motoric processes involved in reading (for a review, see Rayner, 1998, 2009), and language comprehension more generally. This workshop will include:

1. An introduction to eye tracking in reading including:

a. how eye-trackers measure and record eye movements;

b. various standard dependent measures obtained from eye movements and their interpretation;

c. various gaze-contingent paradigms (e.g., boundary technique) and how they are used to study reading;

d. basic phenomena related to the interpretation of eye-movement data during reading (e.g., perceptual span, mechanics of oculomotor programming, etc.).