This study analysed the extent to which literate native speakers of a language with a phonemic alphabetic orthography rely on their first language (L1) orthography during second language (L2) speech production of a language that has a morphophonemic alphabetic orthography. The production of the English flapping rule by 15 adult native speakers of Spanish (NSS) was analysed. Flap production should not be problematic for NSS learning English as L2, since the flap [ ] exists in the Spanish phonemic inventory and it has similar acoustic, articluatory, and distributional properties in English and Spanish. However, this study hypothesizes that access to the flap is blocked by NSS participants’ lack of phonological awareness in English, which is brought about by the participants’ reliance on the Spanish orthographic system, since the graphs used to represent the English flap intervocalically have either different surface realizations in Spanish (such as <t> and <d>) or have no equivalents in the Spanish orthographic system (such as <tt> and <dd>). It was found that NSS relied on the Spanish orthographic system at a statistically significant level, despite both languages having alphabetic orthographies and sharing the same visual code. Less reliance on L1 orthography was observed in frequent L2 lexical items, demonstrating that negative effects of L1 orthography are inversely correlated to familiarity with L2 lexical items and that frequent lexical items promote L2 phonological awareness.

In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate‐high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds are more easily acquired. The parameter for (dis)similarity was set around the notion of structural position in combination with native language (L1) and L2 phonemic inventories. The results show that the subjects were consistently more successful in producing the phonemes with overlapping distributional patterns in L1 and L2 than phonemes whose distribution differed in L1 and L2 as well as novel L2 contrasts.

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Given the disparate views in L2 writing literature on what constitutes effective teacher feedback, this qualitative study approached this issue from the student's perspective. In order to examine what constitutes effective teacher feedback from the student's standpoint, fifty-four student responses to three drastically different feedback styles were analyzed.The results of this preliminary study are partially in line with Hyland (1998), since it was found that whether a particular style of feedback is regarded as effective or not depends on students' individual preferences, their individual differences in needs and student approaches to writing. Implications for teaching L2 writing are discussed.