The research of the Research group “Foreign Language Acquisition and Education” focuses on the relative effectiveness of different types of foreign language instruction. Inspired by cognitive psychological instructional design theories, it aims to valide empirically theoretical instructional design principles.

Rather than at the level of “method”, the operationalization of instructional treatment is considered psycholinguistically in terms of input-processing enhancements that facilitate learners’ extracting forms and mapping them to meaning and function. The general issues are whether an explicit or implicit approach to instruction, focusing on form, forms and/or meaning, is best, and to what extent and in what ways learner attention should be directed to the elements of language involved in mapping under these different teaching conditions.

Our research focuses on instructional effects in relation to subject, language, learning and learning environmental variables, which we aim to tease systematically apart. The subject variables we are particularly interested in include age, working memory capacity, the ability to notice new elements in language input, the number of foreign languages a learner masters (bilingual, trilingual, quadrilingual), learner perceptions of the learning environment and language learning abilities (e.g., self-efficacy beliefs), which have been shown to be important moderating variables affecting the relationship between instruction and learning. Our research also addresses contextual and societal factors which may affect language acquisition and, in particular, teacher perceptions of the acquisition of intercultural competence in multilingual situations.

Our research takes place in ecologically valid settings and uses a diversity of quantitative and qualitative methods (e.g. corpus analysis, experimental research, think aloud procedures, tracking technology).

Integrating our results with those obtained by other research groups in the field of language acquisition in educational contexts, we develop computer-based learning tools, more traditional teaching materials and language tests, in co-operation with http://www.kulak.be/alt/nl/index.html, http://www.kuleuven.be/ilt/ and http://millennium.arts.kuleuven.be/steunpunt/.