In comparative studies focusing on context of learning, the main contexts under investigation have been study abroad (SA), at-home formal instruction (AH), and domestic immersion (IM). With the global status of English and its burgeoning popularity as a medium of instruction in countries where English only holds the status of a lingua franca, a…

Communicative self-confidence and motivation play a crucial role in learning any language, including English. The absence of these elements significantly impacts students' ability to express themselves naturally and fluently. In Spain, language immersion programs seek to promote the simultaneous learning of language skills in a communicative…

With biliteracy as the goal, dual-language immersion programs offer the potential to increase literacy skills across multiple learner demographic characteristics.

Level 2 Maori medium programmes with 51-80% Maori language instruction make an important contribution to developing Maori language skills and lifting Maori student achievement, yet these programmes are largely hidden from discussions about Maori education attainment. Offering lower levels of Maori immersion than kura kaupapa Maori and being…

Few studies have examined willingness to communicate (WtC) changes resulting from short-term intensive immersion programmes. This study investigated the antecedents to and changes in WtC during one such programme held at a Macau university. The programme required students to reside on campus and participate in extensive task-based communicative…

Throughout the past century, the effects of bilingualism on general cognition have been extensively explored. Studies evolved from a negative to a more positive perspective, but longitudinal assessments of effects of bilingualism are scarce. This study investigated the long-term effect of becoming a bilingual on the development of general…

The present mixed-methods study examined the role of learner appraisals of speech tasks in second language (L2) French fluency. Forty adult learners in a Canadian immersion program participated in the study that compared four sources of data: (1) objectively measured utterance fluency in participants' performances of three narrative tasks…

Grounded in the cross-linguistic influence(s) (CLI) literature, this study used objective measures to compare the use of English, lexical richness and syntactic complexity, and grammatical accuracy and fluency in the texts of three groups of Grade 6 French immersion students: Canadian-born anglophones (C-A), Canadian-born multilinguals (C-M), and…

While there exists a considerable body of literature on task-based difficulty and second language (L2) fluency in English as a second language (ESL), there has been little investigation with French learners. This mixed methods study examines learner appraisals of task difficulty and their relationship to automated utterance fluency measures in…

The present study revealed the dynamic process of speech development in a domestic immersion program by seven adult beginning learners of Japanese. The speech data were analyzed with fluency, accuracy, and complexity measurements at group, interindividual, and intraindividual levels. The results revealed the complex nature of language development…

The Texas Education Code (§ 29.051) requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This evaluation report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included…

While the research literature on second language (L2) fluency is replete with descriptions of fluency and its influence with regard to English as an additional language, little is known about what fluency features influence judgments of fluency in L2 French. This study reports the results of an investigation that analyzed the relationship between…

The Texas Education Code (§ 29.051) requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This evaluation report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included…

This article addresses the question of how far working memory may affect second language (L2) learners' improvement in spoken language during a period of immersion. Research is presented testing the hypothesis that individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity are associated with individual variation in improvements in oral production of…

The Texas Education Code (§ 29.051) requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This evaluation report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included…