This study explores the impact of textual input enhancement on the noticing and intake of English vowels by Arabic L2 learners of English. Arabic L1 speakers are known to experience "vowel blindness," commonly defined as a difficulty in the textual decoding and encoding of English vowels due to an insufficient decoding of the word form.…

Over the past few decades, there has been considerable effort to find the mechanisms through which adult listeners can accommodate the rampant phonetic variation in natural speech. My dissertation concerns one source of variability: phonetic variation in speech produced by individuals with foreign accents. Mounting evidence shows that listeners…

Watching foreign language programmes and films with captions (same-language subtitles intended for the deaf and hard-of-hearing) has been shown to assist learners in phonetic retuning, vocabulary acquisition and listening comprehension [e.g. Mitterer and McQueen, 2009. Foreign subtitles help but native-language subtitles harm foreign speech…

As universities in the Anglophone world attend to operating on a global stage, linguistic diversity in the sector has intensified. Historically, higher education has adopted language-as-problem orientations to managing linguistic diversity, viewing multilingual repertoires largely as an obstacle. An emerging body of work informed by…

Learners are increasingly accessing free online and open resources, tools, and spaces where they can develop their language skills beyond the classroom, alone, or in collaboration with others, and often whilst engaging in purposeful and enjoyable activities. Teachers need to find ways to explore and connect these activities productively with the…

Reading process has always been one of the most significant and debatable topics in the area of learning and teaching languages. Reading process in mother tongue (L1) and in a foreign language (L2), the association of these processes, variables affecting reading and the qualities of good and poor readers in L1 and L2 have been investigated…

This study investigates differences in the language and discourse characteristics of course blogs and traditional academic submissions produced in English by native (L1) and advanced second language (L2) writers. One hundred and fifty-two texts generated by 38 graduate students within the context of the same Master's level course were analysed…

In this study, we explored how major theoretical principles and concepts in the mediation strategies of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory are realized in an Arabic-Hebrew preschool in Israel. The aim of this study was to examine how teachers encourage children to use their second language (L2) during teacher-child conversations. In particular, as a…

The popularity of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) continues to spread in education systems around the world. However, and despite the large number of studies recently published, we know little about how CLIL teachers and management teams feel regarding CLIL. In this paper, we analyse two contentious matters that require further…

The study explores the effects of teacher support and student cohesiveness on foreign language (FL) learning outcomes and compares their effect with that of FL anxiety. One hundred and forty-six first-year Chinese undergraduates of Japanese, who were also learning English, participated in two surveys that were administered over a 2-month interval.…

Vygotsky's writings on Sociocultural Theory (SCT) of mind, his concept of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and its related metaphor, scaffolding, serve as the theoretical basis for the study of peer collaboration. This paper aimed at examining the effects of peer-scaffolding on EFL writing ability and finding out how revising techniques are…

Recent years have witnessed a strong and increasing interest in the incidental learning of second language grammar. While much of this research has focused on the acquisition of second language word order or noun-determiner systems, relatively fewer studies have examined the learning of second language morphology. Results of studies that have…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss issues of contemporary language conflict in educational contexts. Design/methodology/approach: This is a conceptual paper which examines current educational practices and policies through the lens of linguistic hegemony. Findings: The authors identify three primary areas in which linguistic hegemony…

This study investigated the role of parental support and selected family variables in the first (L1) and second language (L2) vocabulary development of Japanese heritage language (JHL) high school students in the United States. Eighty-two JHL students ages 15-18 from eight hoshuukoo (i.e., supplementary academic schools for Japanese-speaking…

This article reports an investigative study on the target language use in and outside business English classrooms for non-English major undergraduates in a Chinese university context. The aims of the study are to identify the actual situation of target language use in business English teaching and to suggest ways for improvements. The study uses…