There are many challenges to teaching and learning research methods in higher education. In this paper, we address these challenges by exploring the parallels between learning a new or foreign language and learning to speak "research." We propose that teaching beginning-level research methods is in many ways analogous to teaching students how to learn a new language. We highlight the similarities between foreign and research language learning by emphasizing the ways that teachers can enhance their students' research fluency and proficiency. Our recommendations for teaching research methods include learning the vocabulary, speaking with other language learners, communicating formally in the new language, evaluating research fluency and proficiency, and creating and maintaining a "learning a new language" theme. Informed by the pedagogical practices found in the field of foreign language teaching and learning, this paper provides a new approach to engaging students in research methods courses.

Previous studies in L1 research have claimed that native speakers are able to disambiguate scopally ambiguous sentences using prosodic cues. The present study seeks to investigate if the above claim is true in the case of learners of the Japanese language. We discovered that L2 Japanese learners had difficulty in mapping between scopally ambiguous interpretations and their appropriate prosodic patterns. We claim that these prosodic patterns were neither taught explicitly in class, nor are they available in the learners’ L1 knowledge base. Since they do not possess such knowledge in their long-term memory, the immediate cognitive context could not match with the incoming linguistic acoustic cues to give rise to salience. The present study suggests that L2 Japanese learners cannot learn accentual patterns implicitly, at least in a formal classroom set up, a conclusion corroborated by previous studies.

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