Discussions about social justice imply discussions about higher education. After all, a whole set of literature has illustrated how ethnic minority students face all types of difficulties to become successful at college level. In line with this literature, the present research offers a case study of one Flemish University nested in a growing…

We investigated how grapheme familiarity and grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) congruence affect adult learners' ability to make use of orthographic input (OI) during phono-lexical acquisition. Native English speakers, with no Russian experience (naïve) or learners of Russian, heard auditory forms, saw pictured meanings, and saw written input…

Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Teaching (CAPT) provides EFL teachers with more alternatives to help learners who have serious problems in learning pronunciation. CAPT also provides EFL learners with a private, stress-free environment where they can have access to an enormous amount of input and repetitive practice pronunciation at their own pace.…

Captioned video is widely used to enhance second language (L2) learners' exposure to oral input beyond the classroom setting, and captioning has been found to provide an instantaneous, useful visual aid for parsing and understanding L2 oral discourse. Nevertheless, a meta-analysis has shown that captioning exerts a selective effect on L2 learners…

English phrasal verbs (PVs) are ubiquitous and often polysemous. These lexical items are thus very important, but also challenging for ESL/EFL learners. Substantial research that can inform instructional approaches to PVs has already been conducted. One strand of this research has focused on identifying PVs that merit prioritization in learning.…

Federal law requires states and school districts to institute accountability systems that report disaggregated student data to ensure that all children make academic progress. However, one of the mandated categories for disaggregation -- English Learner (EL) -- is reported as a single group despite representing students who are beginning,…

This research aimed to determine the anxiety levels of students towards Bosnian, their native language, and Turkish, which is a foreign language. With this aim, two separate scales were used in the study to determine speech anxiety levels. The sample of the study is comprised of 49 female students. It is a qualitative research, and the data…

Writing in English with confidence is a matter of great concern for non-native speakers. Since writing fluently requires a multidimensional mastery of language skills, students always regard it as an open question. This paper investigates writing skills which seem to be the least favored and most problematic skills to acquire in a foreign language…

Despite its recognized importance for cultural transmission, little is known about the role imitation plays in language learning. Three experiments examine how rates of imitation vary as a function of qualitative differences in the way language is used in a small indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico and three Western comparison groups. Data from…

Three groups of native English speakers named words aloud in Spanish, their second language (L2). Intermediate proficiency learners in a classroom setting (Experiment 1) and in a domestic immersion program (Experiment 2) were compared to a group of highly proficient English-Spanish speakers. All three groups named cognate words more quickly and…

Few dictionary studies have examined the effectiveness of freely available online dictionaries (FAOD) offered by search engine companies. This experimental study examines the effectiveness of one FAOD, Naver.com, as an aid to vocabulary acquisition for a group of 87 intermediate-level Korean university students aged 19 to 28 (mean 21.9). The VKS…

The present study explores discourse and long-term effects of structured input (SI) and structured output when delivered in isolation or in combination on the acquisition of the English causative. Research investigating the effects of SI has indicated that it is the causative variable in the positive effects of processing instruction. To provide…

This paper analyses the language attitudes of autochthonous and immigrant families living in Catalonia towards Spanish and Catalan. The research is intended to assess the possible differences in the language attitudes of students and their parents towards the two languages spoken in Catalonia. The investigation takes a sample of 476 students and…

This paper explores how Chinese academics, working in the field of English as Foreign Language Education in universities in China, conceptualise research quality. The paper uses a phenomenological approach and four qualitative methods (survey, interview, focus groups and document analysis) to investigate what a sample of these scholars perceive as…

This study investigated the effects of temporal distribution of practice on the learning and retention of Mandarin tonal word production. Eighty native English-speaking adults with no prior knowledge of a tonal language participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions varying in intersession interval (ISI)…