Listening has long been recognized as a challenging skill for teachers, students, and researchers working within the English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Moreover, up until the recent past, it was the least researched of the four language skills in second language acquisition studies. One of the issues…

The study of motivation in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) contexts has hitherto one-sidedly been concerned with motivation to learn the foreign language, without regard for CLIL's eponymous focus on the inextricable connection between language and content. To fill this gap, this article focusses on CLIL learners' motivation not…

Identifying specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual children represents a clinical challenge because of similarities in language behavior between child second language learners and monolinguals with SLI and because of the lack of standardized language tests on bilingual children. This study investigated the relevance of a LITMUS (Language…

Texts are routinely simplified to make them more comprehensible for second language learners. However, the effects of simplification upon the linguistic features of texts remain largely unexplored. Here we examine the effects of one type of text simplification: intuitive text simplification. We use the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, to examine…

This study investigated which level of graded reader was most appropriate for Chinese-speaking learners of various English abilities and whether there were significant differences in comprehension and vocabulary acquisition when different English proficiency (EP) groups read texts of varying difficulty levels. Eight-two senior high school students…

Purpose: This pilot study examined the extent and nature of associations in the linguistic complexity used by child and clinician within conversational interactions. Method: Correlation analyses focused on semantic and morphosyntactic language sample measures from an experienced speech-language clinician and 29 children with language impairment.…

This paper describes a framework for researching the Cognition Hypothesis which claims that pedagogic tasks be sequenced for learners on the basis of increases in their cognitive complexity. It distinguishes dimensions of complexity which increase the conceptual and linguistic demands tasks make on communication, so creating the conditions for L2…