Situated within the framework of the systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994) and language-based theory of learning (Halliday, 1993), this article examines a shift toward a more objectified and "scientific" representation of reality in texts written by foreign language (FL) learners at various levels of acquisition. It argues that…

This paper provides an analysis of language shift from African languages to English (and Afrikaans) in South Africa, using home language data from the South African population census (1996 and 2001). Although census data have been criticised for its "essentialist" construction of language, they nevertheless provide sociolinguists with a…

Latinas in the United States are at a disproportionate risk for STDs and sexual risk behaviors. Among Latinas, acculturation has been found to be one of the most important predictors of these behaviors. Therefore, this study examined the longitudinal association between Latina adolescents' level of acculturation and multiple sexual risk outcomes,…

From the point of view on postcolonial theories, this paper explores English language's influence on normal Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese, and concludes the advantage and disadvantage of this phenomenon.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the first language (L1) vocabulary knowledge in a large-scale sample (n = 70) of second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants in Israel. The interest in this research population follows from the unique demographic, sociocultural, linguistic, and psychological distinctiveness of RJ immigration in Israel.…

This contribution assesses in quantitative terms frequent collocates and major senses of "between" and "through" in the corpus of Cameroonian English (CCE), the corpus of East-African (Kenya and Tanzania) English which is part of the International Corpus of English (ICE) project (ICE-EA), and the London Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus…

This study examines factors correlated with the use of "nous" and "on" by university students formerly enrolled in French immersion programs. Their variant frequency and stylistic appropriateness are compared to those of (1) former core French university students; (2) French as a second language (FSL) speakers in a francophone environment; and (3)…

Currently, public schools in the U.S. are experiencing dramatic increases in the number of English learner (EL) students they serve. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES, 2006), between 1979 and 2004, the overall number of school children in U.S. public schools increased 18 percent. While the nation has a long history…

This study examined writers' use of their first language (L1) while writing in their second language (L2). Twenty students each wrote four short argumentative essays in their L1 (Dutch) and four in their L2 (English) under think-aloud conditions. We analysed whether L1 use varied between writers and tasks, and whether it was related to general…

Although much research has now accumulated on the dominance of English in world science, attention to the specific reality of Southern European countries has been comparatively scarce. This paper intends to partly redress this imbalance by reporting on survey data gathered at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Data were collected by…

Lexical phrases are both numerous and functionally important in written texts. Despite this, L2 learners often find their use problematic, typically overusing a limited number of well-known phrases, while at the same time lacking a diverse enough phrasal repertoire to employ lexical phrases in a native-like manner. While a number of studies have…

The present study was conducted to investigate the existence of any possible relationship between the use of language learning strategies and multiple intelligences' scores of foreign language learners of English. Ninety subjects participated in the study. To measure the participants' multiple intelligence scores, MIDAS, a commercially designed…

Change of first language (L1) status from the most stable language to a less accessible language over the life-span of a bilingual individual is termed "language attrition". Such a shift in ease of L1 access has been reported to affect the lexicon (Pelc, 2001) more than other aspects of language. However, whether L1 attrition is affected by…

The problem: Many previous studies have pointed out that EFL learners tend to face communication breakdowns with native speakers because their traditional classroom and textbooks are not able to provide learners with sufficient pragmatically appropriate input (Bardovi-Harlig, 1996; Rose, 1994, 1997). On the contrary, they are exposed to rich input…

While language aptitude has been investigated actively within second language research, there is a current dearth of research on the effects of aptitude in cases of attrition. The aim of the present investigation was to explore the role of language aptitude for L1 proficiency in speakers who experienced a break with their L1 setting prior to…