Studies on aging and migration often note a 'language barrier' for older migrants when communicating in a (medical) second language (L2) context. Yet how a limited L2 proficiency impacts the aging process of migrant adults has, so far, not been systematically investigated. This question is important given that having a limited L2 proficiency may…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of pair interaction on the process and product of collaborative writing through analysing Language Related Episodes (LREs) and students' writing products. Four pairs (nine to 11 years old) represented four different patterns of interaction. The results show that the pattern of dyadic…

It has long been debated whether interpretation should be performed only from a foreign language to the mother tongue or whether it should be performed from the mother tongue to a foreign language. Those in favor of the foreign to native language direction posit that such directionality allows the interpreter to produce more natural target…

Although people may readily refer to Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. as Anglophone countries, recent demographic and sociolinguistic profiles of these countries indicate that they are actually both Anglophone and multilingual, and in some of their cities, even more multilingual than Anglophone. Recent research also indicates…

This article reports the results of the first longitudinal study that systematically investigates the acquisition of verb agreement by hearing learners of a sign language. During a 2-year period, 14 novel learners of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) with a spoken language background performed an elicitation task 15 times. Seven deaf native…

EFL university students in general and Iranian EFL university learners in particular, specifically in the commencement of their study at bachelor degree prefer to have their assigned English texts translated into mother tongue since they do not have a good command of the language. Machine translation (MT) has recently turned into a favorite tool…

As a World Language teacher, I often focus my efforts on students' language development. However, I have struggled to help students find relevance and meaning in the cultures of people from distant countries and communities. My Spanish classes were full of teenagers with different backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, and…

This study examines the effects of asymmetrical mappings of L2 sounds to L1 sounds on real-time processing of L2 phonology. L1-Korean participants completed a self-paced listening (SPL) task paired with a picture verification (PV) task, in which an English sentence was presented word by word along with a picture that matched or mismatched the…

Graphotactic as well as phonological factors influence native English speakers' decisions about consonant doubling in the spelling of nonwords, e.g., "zimen" versus "zimmen." This study examined the extent to which such influences apply to non-native speakers of English, who presumably have less knowledge of English…

Acknowledging the increased appreciation of the learner's L1 for L2 learning, this study reports on a criteria-based implementation of bilingual activities in a course of 26 young adult EFL learners at a Turkish university. To investigate potential effects of the bilingual practice on the learners' self-efficacy, a self-efficacy scale of English…

The main aim of this article is to evaluate the outcomes presented in the previous articles in relation to similar projects and studies conducted in monolingual contexts in other parts of Europe as well as Latin America, where bilingual education and CLIL are increasingly being embraced in the official curricula. The effects of CLIL on L1, L2 and…

Two experiments investigated whether exposure to Chinese characters and pinyin would facilitate oral vocabulary learning for Chinese as a first (L1) and second (L2) language learners. In Experiment 1, 48 second Chinese graders studied 15 made-up associations between spoken labels and pictures accompanied either by no orthography, by pinyin, or…

Historically, Spanish heritage language (SHL) scholarship has had connections to communities with established Spanish-speaking populations (Rivera-Mills, 2012). Regional SHL course offerings expanded in tandem with increases in Spanish-speaking populations, and little is known about students' experiences in these new and emerging SHL programs.…

Lexical items that are encountered more frequently and in varying contexts have important effects on second language (L2) development because frequent and contextually diverse words are learned faster and become more entrenched in a learner's lexicon (Ellis 2002a, b). Despite evidence that L2 learners are generally exposed to non-native input,…

Reading comprehension performance is predicted by decoding skill and linguistic comprehension (e.g., Hoover & Gough, 1990; Joshi & Aaron, 2012; Scarborough, 2001). However, the type of strategies that readers recruit to build a discourse should also contribute to success in first and second language reading comprehension. Sixty-six French…