Pauline Foster

• PhD Kings College London
• Professor (Full) at University College London

This paper reports a replication of part of Tavakoli and Foster’s (2008) investigation into the influence of narrative task design on L2 oral performance. The initial study found in part that narratives with both foreground and background information elicited significantly greater syntactic complexity than those with only foreground information. Th...

This article responds to calls for greater inclusivity in second language acquisition research and, more specifically, to calls to explore further the impact of first language literacy on second language oracy (e.g., Tarone et al., 2009). We conducted a partial replication of Foster and Skehan's (1996) influential study of task complexity, planning...

We are organising a 1-day colloquium where London Second Language Acquisition Research Forum (L-SLARF) members will share ongoing research projects with students, researchers & the general public. The event will take place face-to-face & online. The event is free and open to all. Saturday May 21st 10:00-17:00 Room B35, Birkbeck, University London...

We investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining the relationship between age of onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie implicit learning (phonological short‐term memory and implicit statistical learning), and performance on an auditory grammaticality judgme...

We investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining the relationship between age of onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesised to underlie implicit learning (phonological short-term memory and implicit statistical learning), and performance on an auditory grammatically judgeme...

This paper reviews how the construct of oral fluency in a second language (L2) has been defined and researched over the last twenty-five years. The emerging picture is somewhat kaleidoscopic, as domains of cognitive, social, individual and linguistic influences on L2 speech have been opened up for study. L2 fluency research presents a wealth of dir...

This article reports a study comparing first and second language fluency during narrative retelling tasks of varying degrees of tightness in structural organisation, exploring in particular a distinction between discourse-based and clause-based fluency. We argue that positive and negative influences on fluency are linked to the Conceptualiser and F...

As increasing numbers of research papers in applied linguistics, language learning, and assessment use discourse analysis techniques to assess accuracy in performance, it is timely to examine at a detailed level the wide variety of measures employed. Ideally, measures need to capture accuracy in as valid and reliable a way as possible, but this has...

The concept of focus on form has been influential in second language (L2) acquisition and pedagogy. One example of the implementation of focus on form is a post-task activity (e.g., anticipation of a public performance) that can selectively orient learners toward increased levels of accuracy. The present research proposes a new operationalization o...

It is well established that part of native speaker competence resides in knowledge of conventionalized word combinations, or nativelike selections (NLSs). This article reports an investigation into the receptive NLS knowledge of second language (L2) users of English in both the United Kingdom and Poland and the influence of a variety of independent...

It is well established that part of native speaker competence resides in knowledge of conventionalized word combinations, or nativelike selections (NLSs). This article reports an investigation into the receptive NLS knowledge of second language (L2) users of English in both the United Kingdom and Poland and the infl uence of a variety of independen...

Though the term “fluency” may apply equally to the language skills of reading, writing, or listening, it is most commonly applied to speaking.

College This is an earlier version of a chapter which originally appeared in: Skehan, P. & Foster, P. (2008). Complexity, accuracy, fluency and lexis in task-based performance: A meta-analysis of the Ealing research. Many studies of second language performance, usually from within a task-based framework, use complexity, accuracy, and fluency to cap...

This article argues that a native-speaker baseline is a neglected dimension of studies into second language (L2) performance. If we investigate how learners perform language tasks, we should distinguish what performance features are due to their processing an L2 and which are due to their performing a particular task. Having defined what we mean by...

There are many assumptions about task-based language learning (TBLL) for which empirical support would be illuminating. Some of these are researchable and others are not, and it is important to distinguish between the two. Robust investigations into learning are not easy to design and should not necessarily be regarded as the pathfinder for languag...

Part of a child’s task in becoming a competent language user is to gain control of a system of rules (i.e. a grammar) which has prodigious generative power, allowing the creation of a potentially infinite number of utterances, and conferring the ability to distinguish word combinations that are grammatical from those which are not. This generative...

This article presents a study examining how narrative structure and narrative complexity might influence the performance of second language learners. Forty learners of English in London and sixty learners in Teheran were asked to retell cartoon stories from picture prompts. Each performed two of four narrative tasks that had different degrees of na...

This paper investigates the value of language classroom negotiation of meaning from both cognitive and sociocultural perspectives. According to Long ( 1985 , 1996 ) comprehensible input gained through interactional adjustments such as negotiating meaning and modifying output is central to second language acquisition, and much research has been unde...

The last decade has seen a growing body of research investigating various aspects of L2 learners’ performance of tasks. This book focuses on one task implementation variable: planning. It considers theories of how opportunities to plan a task affect performance and tests claims derived from these theories in a series of empirical studies. The book...

This article explores the effects of inherent task structure and processing load on performance on a narrative retelling task. Task performance is analyzed in terms of competition among fluency, complexity, and accuracy. In a study based on 47 young adult low-intermediate subjects the fluency of performance was found to be strongly affected by degr...

The influence of cognitive processing on second language acquisition (SLA), and on the development of second language (SL) instruction, has always been a subject of major interest to both SLA researchers and those involved in SL pedagogy. Recent theoretical research into SLA and SL pedagogy has shown renewed interest in the role of cognitive variab...

The analysis of spoken language requires a principled way of dividing transcribed data into units in order to assess features such as accuracy and complexity. If such analyses are to be comparable across different studies, there must be agreement on the nature of the unit, and it must be possible to apply this unit reliably to a range of different...

The analysis of spoken language requires a principled way of dividing transcribed data into units in order to assess features such as accuracy and complexity. If such analyses are to be comparable across different studies, there must be agreement on the nature of the unit, and it must be possible to apply this unit reliably to a range of different...

Recent research (Crookes, 1989: Foster and Skehan, 1996) has focused on the role of planning when tasks are used within language instruction. These studies have indicated that pre-task planning can have beneficial effects upon the nature of task performance, consistently leading to greater fluency and complexity and, less dependably, greater accura...

Recent research (Crookes, 1989: Foster and Skehan, 1996) has focused on the role of planning when tasks are used within language instruction. These studies have indicated that pre-task planning can have beneficial effects upon the nature of task performance, consistently leading to greater fluency and complexity and, less dependably, greater accura...

It is widely argued that engaging in communicative language tasks helps a learner develop in an L2 in several ways. Tasks provide an opportunity not only to produce the target language, but also, through conversational adjustments, to manipulate and modify it. Checking and clarifying problem utterances ('negotiating for meaning') ensures that task...

This paper examines the effects of planning and post-task activity on task-based performance. It is motivated by the need, given recent claims that task-based instruction has desirable pedagogic qualities, to investigate the effects of choosing different types of tasks, as well as different task implementation conditions, on the fluency, accuracy a...

This study focuses on the impact of different variables on the nature of language performance in the context of task-based instruction. Characteristics of tasks are discussed, and then a framework is offered that can organize the nature of task-based instruction and relevant research. The framework is used to generate predictions regarding the effe...