L2 lexical studies have established that learners need to acquire knowledge of the first 3,000 most frequent words in order to enjoy 95% coverage of the vocabulary used in spontaneous speech (Nation 2006).  However, there has been little data available that reveal how many of these most frequent words can be recognized by university language majors, with Robles-García´s (2020a, 2020b) recent study being a welcome exception.  The present inquiry into L2 vocabulary gains employed the same word-recognition test developed by Robles-García (2020a) in order to characterize the vocabulary size enjoyed by upper-division Spanish majors, both non-native and bilingual native (i.e., heritage) speakers, enrolled in a California public university.  The results show that non-native Spanish majors in their third and fourth year of the major are still struggling to learn the first 3,000 most frequent Spanish words. In contrast, the heritage students demonstrated strong word recognition of almost all of the words in this basic inventory.  The curricular implications of these results are discussed with respect to both non-native and bilingual native Spanish majors and an argument is made for continued explicit vocabulary instruction throughout the upper-division program.

Learning Arabic, a category IV less commonly taught language, can be a daunting task even with the luxury of a five-day per week schedule, good teachers, office hours, and solid learning materials.  This study reports on the successes and challenges of teaching Arabic within a distance-learning environment.  With a grant from the Fund for Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE), the authors developed Arabic Without Walls (AWW) as a first-year online Arabic course supported by Web materials (e.g. text, graphics, sounds, short human-interest videos, and self-correcting Java-scripted exercises).  The AWW course was delivered in a Moodle wrapper with weekly chat (voice and text) sessions.  AWW was taught for two years at the University of California, Berkeley (2007--2009) under the direction of Sonia Shiri and then for two more years at the University of California, Irvine (2009--2011) by Maha Alsaffar.  The AWW course was designed to prepare students to seamlessly enter second-year Arabic with competence equal to that of those students studying Arabic in a face-to-face format.  The present study focuses on student outcomes and their reflections during and after this two-semester course.  Results showed that the main goals were achieved from both the teachers' and students' perspective.  In many cases, the small-group computer-mediated communication (CMC) sessions with sound and text gave students more personal attention than would have been possible in the classroom setting.  The overall student impression of this online learning experience suggests that AWW was a credible alternative for students who would otherwise had no access to Arabic instruction at their home institution or for those who had sought a more flexible learning environment due to their own schedules and life circumstances.

Keywords:  Online language learning, Arabic language, CMC chat

Text messaging is the most popular form of communication (Lionbridge, 2019; Ceci, 2022), and mobile phone ownership is high, especially among university students (Chen & Denoyelles, 2013). Research on mobile language learning is increasingly found on the forefront of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) (Loewen et al., 2019; Stockwell, 2022), and studies exploring the use of text messaging for language learning is no exception (Cavus & Ibrahim, 2009; Derakhshan & Kaivanpanah, 2011; Kennedy & Levy, 2008; Kim, 2011; Li & Cummins, 2019; Tabatabaei & Goojani, 2012). However, vocabulary studies for English as a Second Language (ESL) tend to dominate the literature (Burston & Arispe, 2022). As a communication platform, text messaging offers three intriguing characteristics for supporting the development of language learning skills. First, texting allows users to receive input, produce output, and engage in negotiation of meaning, which interactionist theorists say is essential for language acquisition (Blake & Guillén, 2019). Second, while users text back and forth, they work towards a shared communication goal, and engage in a collaborative, communicative activity, which is a necessary component for language learning in a socioconstructivist framework (Arnold & Ducate, 2019). Lastly, text messaging is a hybrid form of discourse in that it includes elements of both spoken and written discourse. This study reports on the impact of text messaging on second language (L2) oral fluency of non-native speakers of Spanish. We compare pre- and post-treatment speech samples of two groups of learners who carried out weekly communicative tasks either via WhatsApp (experimental group) or Zoom (control group). The results of the mixed methods study (n=20) suggest that text messaging as a modality for language learning may offer some of the same affordances that speaking face-to-face does, especially as it pertains to speech rate (a measurable variable of fluency). Although there were no statistically differences for the other assessment measures of fluency across the two groups (unique words, total words, pauses, fluency, or percentage of impediment caused by incomprehension), the qualitative measures highlighted more opportunities to practice the Spanish language outside of class, increased opportunities to engage in the language in a low-stress, low-stakes environment, and the partner connection and community building this type of learning supported. The data from this study also offers insight into best practices for task design in communicative language learning activities, particularly, in a mobile environment. Lastly, the data supports previous research that the technological modality needs to align with the learning task itself (Stockwell, 2022).