Research Findings: This study evaluated the impact of Chinese literacy interventions on Chinese language learning of South Asian children and their mothers in Hong Kong. A total of 44 children and eight of their mothers participated in Chinese literacy interventions that consisted of two approaches -- Copying and Morphological Awareness Training…

Learner corpus studies using syntactic complexity as a construct for characterizing learner proficiency have found that higher proficiency permits learners to produce more complex syntactic structures. However, the majority of previous studies have focused on writing, almost exclusively with adult second language (L2) learners. Given the…

In this article, we present a research study with a group of newcomer and refugee learners who have resettled in the Niagara region in Canada to create new lives. Over the course of four months, we came to know the stories of fifteen adult language learners, and we witnessed their steady induction, acceptance and enjoyment of multimodal…

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that…

To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…

The 2011 Census in England broke new ground, as a question about language had never previously been asked. After stakeholder consultations and a series of trials, the census authority decided on two questions based on earlier censuses in the USA: one about the respondent's "main language" and another about proficiency in English. This…

In many environments in which foreign languages (FL) are taught, the emergent bilingual status of FL learners is often overlooked. The dominant monolingual language pedagogies of conventional FL classrooms do not fundamentally recognise the natural interaction of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) in the learners' minds. Although the…

As humans, we all experience the fundamental need to belong. Often, this sense of belonging is inherited and nurtured by our families and their histories, the languages we speak and the cultures we adhere to; and it is in our experiences and engagement with these aspects of ourselves that our identities are formed, contested, negotiated and…

In this paper we propose a new methodology for teaching third person possessive pronouns in Russian and Polish ("???/??/??" Russian "jego, jej, ich" Polish) as opposed to the reflexive pronouns "????" (Russian) "swój" (Polish), which always pose significant problems for students learning these languages. In…

Despite many years and multiple plans by education policymakers and school administrators in the U.S. to achieve educational equity, there is still a wide disparity in the postsecondary education (PSE) rate between non-native English speakers and native English speakers. The current study investigated the extent to which parental involvement…

From Schieffelin's (1994) perspective on code-switching and language socialization, this study investigates how a Chinese child's code-switching between English and Chinese may have assisted his bilingual socialization in the United States, by focusing on the child's code-switching in diverse Chinese settings and with different interlocutors…

This article examines the multilingual repertoires of adult and adolescent Poles living in Norway. The study draws on language portraits and interviews conducted with 14 adults and 12 adolescents living in and around Oslo. The article first discusses multilingualism of the research participants through an analysis of the 26 portraits and then…

The real research is devoted to problems of an interlingual interference in the process of studying of Russian by students of the Hispanic countries. The relevance of the article is caused by the fact that at all variety of the scientific works devoted to the contrast description of various languages and the analysis of their interference, it is a…

This study examines the influence of language-internal (frequency and complexity of linguistic properties), language-external (percent French input, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender), and lexical factors (size of total and French vocabulary) on the phonological production abilities of monolingual and bilingual French-speaking children, aged…

Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of…