Research writing is an important part of doctoral study. Previous studies suggest that students who speak English as an additional language (EAL) may experience difficulties in writing a thesis in English. This study investigated the nature of the writing challenges experienced by EAL doctoral students. Drawing on data collected from individual…

Israel has two official languages: Hebrew and Arabic, and one semi-official language, English. Within this multilingual environment, the national English curriculum relates to all learners as one homogenous population. There are no specific directives regarding the linguistic needs of diverse language backgrounds. Studies of literacy acquisition…

This study offers evidence of the impact of language background on the performance of students enrolled in an accounting study unit. It aims to quantify the effects of language background on performance in essay questions, compared to calculation questions requiring an application of procedures. Marks were collected from 2850 students. The results…

Research attempting to understand the intermediate stages of first-language acquisition and disordered speech has led to the discovery of covert contrast. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable difference between phonemes that is produced by a language learner, but in a way that cannot be heard readily by a listener of the target language.…

Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of linguistic capital and Darvin and Norton's notion of investment, this study explores heritage language (HL) use among 1.5-generation Korean immigrants in the New Zealand workplace. The data were collected through interviews with heritage speakers of Korean working in diverse fields in Auckland. The majority of the…

A high-stakes Portfolio-Based Language Assessment (PBLA) protocol that was fully implemented in all Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) programs in 2019 requires instructors and students to set language-learning goals and complete, compile, and reflect on numerous authentic language tasks. Due to the language barriers incurred when…

This study investigates the effects of early second-language (L2) acquisition on introduction of characters in narrative discourse by comparing 5- and 7-year-old monolingual (first-language [L1] = Turkish) and bilingual (L1 = Turkish, L2 = English) children. Turkish does not have a grammaticalized article system like English which enables to…

In this study we investigated the potential for a shared-first-language (shared-L1) effect on second language (L2) listening test scores using differential item functioning (DIF) analyses. We did this in order to understand how accented speech may influence performance at the item level, while controlling for key variables including listening…

We identify contributions in this special issue in terms of two essential ways of threading systemic change for language equity in schools: theories/concepts from school governance down to classroom practice, and values/morals from practical realities in classrooms up. We characterize 'language equity' as a sense of belonging and meaningful…

Public education in the United States acts as a governmental tool of neoliberalism, through which state power and sovereignty are deployed and transformed in daily life. Here, I examine how the divergence of sovereignty is exerted over refugee students and their families in US public education. Drawing on 42 months of ethnographic data collected…

This study examined the sources of reading comprehension difficulties in English language learners (ELLs). The characteristics of ELL poor comprehenders were compared to their English as a first language (EL1) peers. Participants included 124 ELLs who spoke Chinese as an L1 and 79 EL1 students. Using a regression technique based on age, non-verbal…

Although national and EU policies and recommendations encourage varied language learning, English has ruled as the most studied foreign language, while other languages are decreasingly being studied in basic and upper secondary education in Finland. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of this development in practice.…

Numerous studies have supported the simple view of reading by showing the significant predictive roles of oral language comprehension ability and decoding skills in the reading comprehension of monolinguals and second language learners. However, little is known about its applicability to young foreign language learners who do not have much access…

Multilingual education is mandatory in early childhood education in several European countries. Scholars working in first, second and foreign language learning have shown the effectiveness of interaction-promoting and language-modelling strategies for language development. In addition, teachers in bilingual contexts have been translanguaging to…

When reading in a second language, a reader's first language may be involved. For word reading, the question is how and at what level: lexical, pre-lexical, or both. In three experiments, we employed an implicit reading task (color judgment) and an explicit reading task (word naming) to test whether a Chinese meaning equivalent character and its…