Lexical profiling has yielded fruitful results for language description and pedagogy (Liu, 2014), and particularly highlighted the significance of academic vocabulary for EFL learners in this process. This investigation, likewise, attempts to comparatively profile the vocabulary, more particularly the academic vocabulary, in the…

It is commonly believed that intensive English programs (IEP) are designed to immerse learners in an English-speaking environment to help them effectively develop their language skills. Therefore, despite countless studies on the importance of a learner's first language (L1) in second language learning, some IEPs enforce English-only policies that…

Learner motivation is considered as one of the important factors that help to understand learner performance. As motivation is affected by both individual and social factors, it is essential to explore the learner motivation before effective instrumental programs for learners studying in different social contexts are designed and implemented.…

Ease of access, production, and distribution have made online technologies popular in language revitalization. By incorporating multimodal resources, audio, video, and games, they attract indigenous communities undergoing language shift in hopes of its reversal. However, by merely expanding language revitalization to the web, many language…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise description of the European minority language, Scots, in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools, teachers,…

In this article, we take up and expand upon a number of issues of linguistic theory raised in Ursula Ritzau's recent article "Learner language and polylanguaging: how language students' ideologies relate to their written language use" published in the "Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism". The present critique is…

This article examines some of the challenges that the notion of a (monolingual) native speaker faces in a global context of increasing awareness that bilingualism and multilingualism are the norm rather than the exception. It also discusses the distinction between two child language acquisition environments, bilingual first language acquisition…

Synonymy is important but difficult for language learners to grasp. Using a forced-choice question instrument, along with corpus data as reference, this study examines the use of four sets of synonyms by intermediate/advanced Chinese EFL/ESL learners and native English speakers. The data analyses reveal several key findings, including a general…

Much has been written on the determinants that can expedite or hinder learners' willingness to communicate in second and foreign language contexts. Though the literature is abundant with studies on many of these variables, little if any can be found to have targeted EFL students of private institutes in Iran. An effort was made in this study to…

The article discusses the investment of L2 learners in the English language on Facebook that they portrayed through their Facebook activities. It studied four informants consisted of diploma students in a Malaysian university. The study consisted of 14 weeks of online observation and semi-structured interviews. Data were collected from online…

Can an early learned second language influence speech production after living many years in an exclusively monolingual environment? To address this issue, we investigated the consequences of discontinued early bilingualism in heritage speakers who moved abroad and switched language dominance from the second to the primary learned language. We used…

This study investigated the contexts for "optimal" use of first language (L1) in second language (L2) one-on-one speaking practice sessions in a study abroad program where English was the L1 and Arabic was the L2 of students, and the opposite applied to their speaking partners. Drawing on insights from sociocultural theory to investigate…

Following appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), which examines the linguistic resources through which texts/speakers express, negotiate, and naturalize particular intersubjective or ideological positions (White, 2015), this study addresses (1) the extent to which second language (L2) learners express their attitudes toward their own and the…

Research has consistently shown diversity of vocabulary to be an important indicator of second language (L2) writing development as well as L2 writing performance. These studies underscore the importance of vocabulary to L2 writing. However, they provide little to indicate what kind of vocabulary learners of English may need to know in order to…

This paper reports on the findings of a qualitative study which investigated a group of English as a second language (ESL) university students' perceptions of their global identities in intercultural English as a lingua franca (ELF) communication at an international university in Hong Kong. Drawing on data collected via in-depth interviews and…