An aim of research on bilingualism is to understand how the brain adapts to the use of more than one language. Although several important discoveries and insights about the consequences of bilingualism have been generated over the last several decades, concerns about replicability have narrowed the scope of inquiry and discussion to the…

This study revisited L2 morpheme development order among Korean young learners of English. Taking into account the spirit of the current English curriculum in South Korea, the current study examined L2 morpheme development from two different perspectives: accuracy and fluency aspects. In the field of second language development, many studies have…

The present study was focused on acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by second language (L2) learners and whether this acquisition was influenced by RC linguistic features, learners' Chinese proficiency levels, and their first language (L1). Data were gathered via a Chinese reading comprehension test, a grammaticality judgment task, a…

"Theorizing Eloquence as a Means-Driven Process of Recursive Invention" examines the rhetorical nature of eloquence and the value of reimagining the term in rhetorical theory. Historically, eloquence has been used as a mechanism of gatekeeping in the academy that prevents underrepresented individuals and perspectives to enter. I argue…

Individuals with lower proficiency in a second language tend to produce more disfluent speech patterns in the second language. Speech disfluencies refer to interruptions in the forward flow of speech and are distinct from the colloquial use of "fluency," to characterize knowledge of a language. Prior research indicates that some speech…

Practice is necessary for developing oral English proficiency, but many Chinese learners of English lack the self-confidence to practice oral English; furthermore, students' self-confidence deficiency is perpetuated by insufficient oral English proficiency. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to discover pedagogical practices that break…

It has long been recognized that collocations, or chunks of formulaic language, are essential and frequent in language (Henriksen, 2012; Sinclair, 2004). Therefore they are a crucial part of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Linguistic scholars Pawley y Syder (1983: 192) remark that "in order to know a language, the [second language] (L2)…

As a country founded by immigrants, the United States (U.S.) has a long history of multilingualism. Multilingualism is associated with better linguistic awareness (Aronin & Singleton 2012; Bialystok, 2002), cognitive advantages (Aronin & Singleton 2012), and social benefits (Baker, 2001). The need for and value of multilingualism in an…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

This dissertation examines individual, constricted agency in a multilingual environment within the context of a language discussion group and the form of social capital possessed by their Mexican Indigenous diasporic community living on the California Central Coast. The research is based on participant-observation ethnographic work with a language…

Despite the growing sophistication of digital technologies, it appears they are contributing to language extinction on a par with devastating losses in biodiversity. With language extinction comes loss of identity, inter-generational cohesion, culture, and a global wealth of knowledge to address future problems facing humanity. Linguists estimate…

This dissertation investigates L2 student language production, task-based instruction, and teachers' scaffolding strategies in two special EFL classes in a Vietnamese university. Two English teachers and 73 students were studied as they participated in a nationwide educational project known as the Advanced Curriculum (AC), an initiative launched…

There is a growing interest in the quandary of literacy and proficiency amongst K-12 students in the United States. Similarly, because of uncharted research about biliteracy amongst African-American students in urban schools and benefits of Spanish fluency, communicative gaps are increased and fluency is breached. If advantages are properly…

Given the impossibility of withholding language from children to assess sensitive period effects on syntactic acquisition, the study of second language learning has been seen as an alternate method that can be used to understand the natural time course of language acquisition. In order to do so, both the age at which immersion is begun and the…

It is well documented that ELLs face significant challenges as they develop literacy skills in their second language (NCES, 2007, 2011). This population is diverse and growing rapidly in Massachusetts and across the nation (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2013; NCELA, 2011; Orosco, De Schonewise, De Onis, Klingner,…