Purpose: This article presents several potential concerns with the common usage of the term "fluency" in the study of "stuttering" and people who stutter (or, as many speakers now prefer, "stutterers"). Our goal is to bridge gaps between clinicians, researchers, and stutterers to foster a greater sense of…

English proficiency assessments have become a necessary metric for filtering and selecting prospective candidates for both academia and industry. With the rise in demand for such assessments, it has become increasingly necessary to have the automated human-interpretable results to prevent inconsistencies and ensure meaningful feedback to the…

Teacher cognition has attracted increased attention among second language (L2) researchers and practitioners, likely because of its potential consequences for classroom practices, such as teaching and assessment. Prior research has revealed links between teacher beliefs about pronunciation teaching and teachers' own experience (e.g. amount of…

One way to investigate learner writing is by analyzing the most frequently recurring sequences of words, that is, lexical bundles. This paper presents results for lexical bundles analyses of a Malaysian corpus (MCSAW) against its reference language variety, LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays). Key 4-word lexical bundles are firstly…

Collocations, no matter where to use them, are an important linguistic issue if it is native fluency that is longed for in academic writing. In line with that, the present study aimed at increasing the awareness towards the importance of collocations in order to have native fluency in academic writing; making some suggestions regarding involvement…

Though California's English Learner (EL) policies were developed in response to civil rights struggles for language access and equal educational opportunity, they are also conditioned by the history of U.S. settler and overseas conquest. This article presents a Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) of the California EL classification policies and…

To achieve a high level of language fluency, learners need to possess sufficient collocational competence. However, collocation is considered a problematic area for many EFL learners, partly because of its arbitrariness. To gain more insight into the problems involving learners' productive collocational skills, the current study examines lexical…

The purpose of this study was to examine how classroom language contexts characterized by peer language skills and proportions of dual language learners (DLL) influenced English language development for DLL and non-DLL children. Participants were 2,131 children from 135 classrooms across preschool through Grade 3. Children were classified into…

The development of academic English proficiency and the time it takes to reclassify to fluent English proficient status are key issues in English learner (EL) policy. This article develops a shared random effects model (SREM) to estimate English proficiency development and time to reclassification simultaneously, treating student-specific random…

Currently, a relatively large number of spoken and written conventionalized expressions have been collected, catalogued, and systematized. In language pedagogy, a clear implication is that teaching grammar and vocabulary is likely to be more complicated than working with syntactic rules and single-word items. Old and new insights associated with…

Research suggests that educators' use of resources influence the ground-level effects of policy. However, we know very little about educators' utilization of policy resources. This study employs a mixed-methods research design to provide empirical evidence of the policy resources available to education policy implementers and the ways in which…

Effectively educating the large English learner population requires policymakers to ensure developmentally appropriate settings and services throughout the time students are learning English, as well as during their transition to fluent English proficient status--a process termed "reclassification." Using longitudinal student-level data…

This study examines possible semantic interaction in fully fluent adult simultaneous and early second language (L2) bilinguals. Monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English (n = 144) were tested for their understanding of lexical categories that differed in their two languages. Simultaneous bilinguals came from homes in which Spanish…

When students labeled English Learners (ELs) are reclassified as Fluent English Proficient, changes often occur in services and settings (e.g., changes in teachers, peers, and ancillary services). Policymakers play an important role in the reclassification process because they establish test-based criteria that an EL must attain in order to become…

We investigated general vocabulary and academic vocabulary growth trajectories of adolescent language minority students using an individual growth modeling approach. Our analytical sample included 3161 sixth- to eighth-grade students from an urban school district in California. The language minority students in our sample were classified as…