Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and epilepsy represent a comorbidity that negatively influences the proper development of linguistic competencies, particularly in receptive language, in the pediatric population. This group displays impairments in the auditory comprehension of both simple and complex grammatical structures, significantly limiting…

This study investigates the relationship between identification with the local territory, language attitudes and language proficiency in young immigrants in Catalonia, a region in Spain. The aims of the study are to examine how identification with the local territory affects attitudes and proficiency in languages, and whether language attitudes…

A foundation of second language motivational theory has been that motivation contributes to explaining variance in language learning proficiency; however, empirical findings have been mixed. This article presents an innovative approach to exploring L2 proficiency and motivations of teenage English language learners in Madrid, Spain (N = 1773).…

The extent to which L2 television is viewed by foreign language learners will depend on the degree to which it is understood. The addition of captions has been shown to support comprehension (e.g., Birulés-Muntané & Soto-Faraco, 2016; Montero-Perez, Peters, & Desmet, 2014), especially when proficiency is low (e.g., Lavaur & Bairstow,…

The article presents the results of seventeen years (2001-2018) study of professors' familiarity with the "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment" (CEFR), including the related publications, and the academicians' ability to use the developed common reference levels of language proficiency,…

Metacognitive skills are important for text comprehension, especially at university where most learning processes are unsupervised, and students rely on self-control and regulation when reading for comprehension. In today's universities, English as L2 has become the vehicle language for teaching and learning. However, some studies have concluded…

Despite the extensive research on bilingual development, our understanding of how lexical competition unfolds in the bilingual mind remains limited. Previous studies have predominantly focused on crosslinguistic competition, neglecting the examination of the competition process within each language and the influence of diverse bilingual…

Based on the assumption that individual learner factors are context-dependent, this exploratory study examined whether differences in two learning environments (Denmark and Spain) have a differential influence on a set of learner factors that have together been previously identified as important in second language (L2) research, specifically,…

This article examines how technology-enhanced inquiry-based learning (IBL) affected students' language acquisition and the evolution of motivation in the subject of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Furthermore, this study presents a proposal for the collaboration of the subjects of Spanish and English, using translanguaging to establish…

Repeated viewing of the same video is a common strategy among autonomous language learners as well as a much used pedagogical strategy among foreign language (FL) teachers. Learners may watch the same video more than once, to increase global comprehension of the target language or to focus their attention on linguistic aspects, such as new…

Within higher education, it is often believed that the adoption of English-medium instruction (EMI) will provide domestic students with the language skills that will enable them to be more competitive in their future professional pursuits. However, research into language learning and EMI at the university level is very scarce. This study examined…

This study explores the effects of extensive audio-visual input with three captioning modes -- unenhanced captions, textually enhanced captions, and no captions -- on learning a variety of L2 grammatical constructions and examines the effects of three learnability factors: construction type, frequency, and recency. A total of 112 participants…

This study compares the language proficiency gains of two groups of students taking a business English course module in a bilingual university in Catalonia (Spain). Whereas one of these groups followed a 'translanguaging' or 'plurilingual' pedagogy, the other followed a strictly monolingual approach. Participants were 54 mostly Catalan/Spanish…

A considerable body of research within the interaction framework (Long, 1996) has centred on the language-related episodes (LREs) which occur when learners topicalize a specific linguistic item while they are engaged in meaning-focused tasks. Several studies have shown that the production of LREs may be influenced by the proficiency level of the…

This article addresses the benefits of audio-visual input for learning second language (L2) vocabulary and grammatical constructions. Specifically, it explores the role of frequency, the effects of subtitles and captions, and the mediating role of learner proficiency on language gains in two longitudinal studies. Study 1 targets vocabulary…