This study investigated the extent to which explicit and implicit instruction improve L1-Arabic speakers’ articulation of English words whose cognates were acquired earlier in their L2 French. Sixty-eight secondary school students, explicit (n=35) and implicit (n=33), participated in a programme incorporating focus-on-pronunciation activities, comprising three 45-minute sessions. Their learning motivation was first rated using an adapted version of Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB). Their pronunciation improvement was assessed through an oral-reading task. Ten new words were included in the post-test to see if they would generalize the instructed knowledge analogically. Results indicated that both explicit and implicit instruction had a positive impact on the students’ pronunciation advancement. However, the explicit group outperformed the implicit group with both the targeted and untaught words. There was insignificant interaction effect between instructional method and students’ motivation level, with higher motivation uniformly enhancing the effect of instruction. Nevertheless, motivation played a more crucial role in the learnt knowledge transferability when instruction was of implicit.

This article compares recent topical and methodological trends in second language research published in two domestic (English Teaching and Modern English Education)and two international journals (Language Learning and The Modern Language Journal) from 2007 to 2012. The journals were selected in consideration of the extent to which the area of language teaching and learning is given prominence, impact factors at the time of data collection, and comparability in the total number of articles during the period. A total of 867 articles were analyzed by two raters cooperatively in terms of data collection/analysis methods, target language skills, and research themes. Results reveal that there has been a significant change in domestic research over the past six years when compared to surveys before 2007. Overall, with some emerging region-specific issues and orientations, researchers in Korea seem to have embraced a greater diversity of topics and methods that are comparable to the international trends.

This study explores cross-linguistic differences in online sentence production, working on the theory that the grammatical characteristics of a language customize the speakers’ usual manner of sentence construction and utterance. It is reasoned that a contrast between English and Korean syntax has a direct bearing on that process: The sentential subject is licensed by a tensed verb in English, while it is by an overt morpheme in Korean. This gives rise to a substantial difference in the speakers’ speech patterns: English speakers’ message formation and linguistic encoding center on a verb, while Korean speakers elect or utter a subject first and then draw a predicate. An experiment is conducted on the hypotheses that (a) English L1 speakers are disposed to make sentences based on verbal information, so they would choose a subject that is conceptually more intimate with a given verb; (b) In contrast, Korean L1 speakers’ sentence construction is topic-oriented, so they would first consider the contextual properties of each referent such as shared familiarity and previous topicality; (c) Korean speakers’ L1 patterns would be persistent in their L2 English processing. The results and some implications for English teaching are discussed.