The current project longitudinally investigated the extent to which first-year Japanese university students developed their second language (L2) oral ability in relation to increased input in foreign language classrooms. Their spontaneous speech was elicited at the beginning, middle and end of one academic year, and then judged by linguistically…

We asked whether parental questionnaires on the heritage language proficiency of bilingual children might elucidate how proficient bilingual children are in their heritage language. We tested 20 UK-based Polish-English bilingual children between 4;5 and 5;9 years on Polish and English versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs). These…

The present study attempted to investigate the effects of audio input enhancement on EFL learners' retention of intensifiers. To this end, two research questions were formulated. In order to address these research questions, this study attempted to reject two null hypotheses. Pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design was employed to…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors that trigger language anxiety among Saudi learners in English as Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. The factor of anxiety is especially found among learners while developing proficiency in over all communication and speaking skills as felt by the EFL teachers. The study also seeks to answer…

Input enhancement's role to promote learners' awareness in L2 contexts has caused a tremendous amount of research. Conspicuously, by regarding all aspects of input enhancement, the study aimed to find out how differently many kinds of input enhancement factors such as bolding, underlining, and capitalizing impact on L2 learners' vocabulary…

This study examined how emergent bilingual children's English and Spanish proficiencies moderated the relationships between Spanish and English input at home (bilingual home language input [BHLI]) and children's oral language skills in each language. The sample comprised over 1,400 Spanish-dominant kindergartners in California and Texas. BHLI was…

This study examined the effect of the interaction approach on young EFL learners' lexical depth in a private language institute in Talesh, Iran. To achieve this, a Michigan test was administered to 40 EFL learners. Those language learners who met the selection criterion, i.e., performed one standard deviation above and below the mean on the test…

In this paper the incidental language acquisition of 11-year-old Flemish children (n = 30) who have not received any formal English instruction is investigated. The study looks into children's English proficiency and the learner characteristics that can be associated with it. In order to measure the children's English proficiency, a receptive…

The input factors that may cause variation in bilingual proficiency were investigated in 38 French-English bilinguals aged six to eight, of middle-to-high socio-economic status, attending an international state school in France. Data on children's current and cumulative language exposure and family background were collected through questionnaires…

Through an analysis of students' reactions to transcription exercises, this exploratory study examined some of the differences between two forms of written help enhancing listening passages--second language (L2) captions and transcripts. This primarily qualitative analysis highlighted the role that student proficiency levels may have played in…

Multiple-choice formats remain a popular design for assessing listening comprehension, yet no consensus has been reached on how multiple-choice formats should be employed. Some researchers argue that test takers must be provided with a preview of the items prior to the input (Buck, 1995; Sherman, 1997); others argue that a preview may decrease the…

Synchronous written chat and instant messaging are tools which have been used and explored in online language learning settings for at least two decades. Research literature has shown that such tools give second language (L2) learners opportunities for language learning, e.g. , the interaction in real time with peers and native speakers, the…

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…

The present study investigated the effect of input enhancement on the acquisition of English politeness strategies by intermediate EFL learners. Two groups of freshman English majors were randomly assigned to the experimental (enhanced input) group and the control (mere exposure) group. Initially, a TOEFL test and a discourse completion test (DCT)…

This experimental study examined how the reading and writing development of sixth-grade L2 students was affected by syntactic enhancement. Visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) technology, which visualizes syntactic structures, was used to convert a textbook to the one with syntactic enhancement. The sample (n = 282), which was drawn from a…