This quantitative study was designed to examine how the interplay of middle leadership and other contextual factors such as teachers' receptivity toward the reform and teacher professional development impacts on implementing system-wide English language curriculum reform. Through stratified random sampling, 352 English language teachers from 51…

In recent years, cultural instruction has been touted as a way to help foreign language programs boost student learning outcomes, enrollments, and many other measures of program strength. In order to investigate the relationship between cultural instruction and program strength in a university-level German program, students in first- and…

By tradition, L2 motivation research has a monolingual bias--the motivational systems of a learner's different languages conceptualized as separate entities rather than as cognitively interconnected. At a time when multilingualism has become a new world order (Douglas Fir Group, 2016) and where there is evidence of powerful identity experiences…

This study examines whether pronunciation instruction can improve listening comprehension in a second language. At the most basic level, listening comprehension involves the perception of individual sounds and sound contrasts, a process that is known to be related to production, or pronunciation, within the L2 phonological system. As improving…

Purpose: This study investigates young Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners' Chinese character reading performance and its relationship with their orthographic awareness. There is a pressing need to gain a better understanding of Hong Kong's ethnic minority students' CSL acquisition, so that more effective instruction can be provided.…

The current study, which is descriptive and correlational in design, intends to find out if, (a) Iranian university learners of English, Russian, and Arabic as foreign languages have the same patterns of reading strategy awareness and use (RSAU), and (b) their self-perceived reading ability correlates with their RSAU level. English, Russian, and…

The present study was designed to explore the situational variables and their interaction determining the willingness to communicate (WTC) in English (L2) of six postgraduate business students in a university classroom in Pakistan. While much research has been undertaken to examine trait-like psychological antecedents, only a few studies have…

Downward trends in Ontario's math achievement have raised concerns about the need for effective identification of students struggling to meet math achievement standards. This study identified latent profiles from math achievement patterns of students from Grades 3 to 6, examining how specific language and literacy characteristics predicted profile…

Research comparing the reading strategy use of native and second language (L2) readers has often relied on self-report measures and has, at times, been conducted without measures of reading proficiency. In the present study we used regression and Bayes' factors to explore how L2 reader status and reading proficiency relate to self-report reading…

This study investigates English language learner (ELL) perceptions of using a prototype virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) designed for teaching and learning writing structure. A mixed-methods approach was used, incorporating pre- and post-participation questionnaires, as well as semi-structured interviews. Participants consisted of 10…

The dynamics underlying willingness to communicate in a second or third language (L2 for short), operating in real time, are affected by a number of intra- and interpersonal processes. L2 communication is a remarkably fluid process, especially considering the wide range of skill levels observed among L2 learners and speakers. Learners often find…

This article describes the steps we went through in designing and validating an item bank to diagnose linguistic problems in the English academic writing of university students in Hong Kong. Test items adopt traditional item formats (e.g., MCQ, grammatical judgment tasks, and error correction) but are based on authentic language materials…

Low-proficient L2 readers, especially, struggle for literal understanding of the text and for appropriately using reading strategy (RS). We examined whether and how the development of L2- English reading comprehension skills is associated with the frequency and kinds of L2 RS use. Fifty Japanese learners of English completed a reading…

After graduation, many Saudi EFL graduates find themselves losing their oral communicative competence, which could be attributed to the period of their English non-use. To explore such a pressing issue, the following study investigates the effect of English non-use on a surveyed sample of Saudi EFL graduates, and how such disuse correlates with…

To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…