Learning Chinese characters is a difficult task for adult English native speakers due to the significant differences between the Chinese and English writing system. The visuospatial properties of Chinese characters have inspired the development of instructional methods using both verbal and visual information based on the Dual Coding Theory. This…

Communicating in a second language could be seen as a process requiring the deconstruction and reconstruction of cultural meanings. If this is the case, how do second language (L2) learners express cultural meanings of their first language (L1) expressions that do not have semantically equivalent L2 expressions? Twenty-nine Japanese students…

This study presents and analyzes the comprehension of relative clauses in child and adult speakers of Russian, comparing monolingual controls with Russian heritage speakers (HSs) who are English-dominant. Monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate full adultlike mastery of relative clauses. Adult HSs, however, are significantly different from…

This qualitative study describes and analyses young language learners' spontaneous comments while sharing picture books during EFL sessions. It also explores teachers' responses to learners' comments, and considers reasons teachers may choose to ignore children's talk in their first language (L1). Data were collected from young Hungarian learners…

This dissertation investigates second language (L2) development in the domains of morphosyntax and semantics. Specifically, it examines the acquisition of definiteness and specificity in Russian within the Feature Re-assembly framework (Lardiere, 2009), according to which the hardest L2 learning task is not to reset parameters but to reconfigure,…

Recent data indicate that many adolescent English language learners (ELLs) comprehend English texts at only a limited literal level. The purpose of this research synthesis was to systematically identify and describe the research related to the English reading comprehension of middle grades ELLs while also making practical connections to…

This article reports findings from 3 experiments examining whether 2nd language (L2) words are represented in episodic memory, as originally proposed by Jiang and Forster (2001). Experiment 1 was a direct replication of Jiang and Forster, testing highly proficient Chinese-English bilinguals. Masked translation priming was obtained in an episodic…

In the process of language learning, individuals must acquire different types of linguistic knowledge, such as the sounds of the language (phonemes), how these may be combined to form words (phonotactics), and morphological rules. Early and late bilinguals tend to perform like natives on second language phonological tasks that involve pre-lexical…

This thematic issue on education and the politics of becoming focuses on how a Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) plugs into practice in education. MLT does this by creating an assemblage between discourse, text, resonance and sensations. What does this produce? Becoming AND how one might live are the product of an assemblage (May, 2005; Semetsky,…

This article makes a case for studying the perceptions that young people have of the ways of speaking of both themselves and others on the supposition that constructions of ambient sociolinguistic variation have an impact on the language development and use of individual language users. Such a study is particularly relevant in multilingual…

Grammar instruction is at the center of the target language (TL) and code-switching debate. Discussion revolves around whether grammar should be taught in the TL or using the TL and the native language (L1). This study investigated the effects of French-only grammar instruction and French/English grammar instruction on elementary-level students'…

The purpose of this study was to utilize an invented rule with English language learners (ELLs) in a clinical setting to determine differences based on language and age of the children. The performance was correlated with teacher reports of strong and weak language learning. Using a within-participants design, ELLs of age three to five were taught…

This article reports on the results of a research study that investigated Cantonese English as a second language (ESL) learners' perception of English speech sounds, their perceived relations between "similar" English and Cantonese sounds, as well as the applicability of the claims of the Speech Learning Model (SLM) to second language…

This article offers a fine-grained investigation of how first-language (L1) phonetics involving English rhotics affect Spanish rhotic production by second-language (L2) learners. Specifically, this study investigates how different L1 English rhotic articulatory routines (retroflex-like and bunched-like) and the phonetic context that produces…

Among immigrant families, parents are important socialization agents in transmitting cultural practices to their children, including the use of the heritage language (HL). In the current study, we examined whether parents' cultural orientation facilitates children's (N = 79; M[subscript age] = 5.11 years; 57% boys; 50% enrolled in HL schools) HL…