Background: IsiXhosa students enrolled for the BEd Foundation Phase qualification at a university in South Africa failed their first year in identified at-risk subjects, namely Mathematics in Education, Language in Education and Computer Literacy. The students stated the reasons for failure as not understanding the concepts and terms of the…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore Iranian IELTS candidates' strengths and weaknesses in IELTS Speaking Test in terms of IELTS's four speaking assessment criteria, namely Fluency and Coherence (FlC), Lexical Resource (LR), Grammar Range and Accuracy (GRA), and Pronunciation (Pro). It also aimed to examine the discourse features…

The issue of phrasal verb learning has caused much discussion and attracted vigorous investigation. Inspired by the theory of conceptual metaphor, a pedagogical experiment was conducted to investigate whether an approach focussing on sense extension of particle "out" in terms of conceptual metaphors can enhance the learning of phrasal…

Metalinguistic knowledge is regarded as an important factor in the development of writing. However, little attention has been paid to the metalinguistic knowledge of L2 writers in non-anglophone contexts. This study investigates L1-Turkish-speaking, first-year university students' metalinguistic knowledge of the lexical phrases they use in their…

The present study explores the incidental learning of formulaic sequences (FS) from audio-visual input and factors affecting the learning of FS. A pretest-posttest, within-participant design was adopted. English-as-a-foreign-language learners (L1 = Dutch; n = 42) watched a one-hour English-language documentary without subtitles. Learning gains…

This paper presents findings of a qualitative inquiry into international students' experiences and perceptions of their language use in an English-medium international university in multilingual Hong Kong, with particular attention to the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in relation to other languages. Based on data collected from in-depth…

Despite research evidence showing that home language maintenance is important both individually and societally, the task of managing and encouraging it has traditionally fallen to minority language communities and families, tending to lead to inter-generational language shift. Teachers' discourses about responsibilities for language maintenance,…

The internal/external (I/E) frame of reference entails high, positive association of mathematics and verbal achievements with matching academic self-concepts but negative or near-zero correlation with their nonmatching self-concepts. This study aimed to extend the traditional I/E model by contrasting the mathematics domain with two foreign…

This study examines the effects of an English vocabulary video on second language vocabulary learning by English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The conceptual framework is underpinned by Mayer's (2005) Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. The participants were 25 undergraduate students studying at a Thai university. To collect data,…

This study investigates the effect of grammar-focused hands-on in-class data-driven learning (DDL) with a heavily contextualized corpus on the frequency of written errors attributable to common interlingual interference issues in low-intermediate Turkish learners (n = 30) of English. Items representing the most common Turkish-to-English…

This article reports a study that aimed to find out whether F0 patterns of L2 English produced by Vietnamese speakers are different to those of native English speakers, whether the non-native F0 patterns are transferred from Vietnamese, and to what extent English and Vietnamese F0 profiles differ. Ten native/L1 Australian English speakers, 20…

We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

In response to the recent sharp increase of L2 students in Reykjavik schools, allocation criteria for special L2 services were adopted that were based on length of residence and on whether children's home language was tonal or not tonal. This study set out to evaluate the appropriateness of these criteria, and to replicate previous findings of a…

Various studies have shown that bilingual children score lower than their monolingual peers on standardized receptive vocabulary tests. This study investigates if this effect is moderated by language distance. Dutch receptive vocabulary was tested with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The impact of cross-language distance was examined…

English is often assumed to be the national language in the US and the global language in the world; yet such views fail to address the complex linguistic repertoires of people living in linguistically heterogeneous places even within the US. Spotlighting a southwestern US border town, we provide a critique of both nation-state-language ideology,…