This study examines 75 Chinese EFL learners' test-taking strategies and their relationship with listening performance. It further looks into how students adjust their strategies under four different task conditions. The participants completed a three-phase (before/during/after) test-taking questionnaire and were given a listening test comprising…

Although the Japanese community in London is relatively small, its composition is stable and reflects several aspects of Japan's relationship with the international community. Yet there appears to have been no systematic research exploring patterns of bilingual behaviour in relation to social psychological processes amongst Japanese nationals in…

This article reports on two related studies carried out to link the State examination of Dutch as a second language to the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR). In the first study, key persons from institutions for higher education were asked to determine the minimally required language level of beginning students. In the…

This paper reports on the preliminary stages of a project designed to investigate communication problems in General Aviation and assess the utility of language technologies as a means of mitigation. The study presented in this paper is the first of a three-part study, in which we aim to investigate the extent to which the English language…

This article reports on a case study conducted in 2006-2007 which explores boys' motivation for choosing Chinese Second Language (CSL) as an elective in secondary school. The purpose of the study was to find out what factors encouraged or discouraged junior secondary school boys in their choice to continue CSL. 133 boys aged thirteen-fourteen…

Efforts to fund the teaching of critical languages, along with increasing enrollments in less commonly taught language (LCTL) classes, have evidenced a renewed interest in LCTL pedagogy. While much is known about enrollment trends, materials development, and professional training, far less research has compared LCTL and commonly taught language…

This study investigates students' attitudes toward native and nonnative speaking instructors of Spanish. A quantitative questionnaire was administered to 292 students enrolled in three different levels of undergraduate Spanish courses at a U.S. university. Participants were asked to rate Likert scale items related to native versus nonnative…

There is a shortage of teachers in Canada qualified to teach in French; some researchers have suggested that this shortage is due to attrition. This study examined the retention in Manitoba of new teachers qualified to teach in French. Participants were 130 graduates from the only French teacher education program in the province. Attrition was…

Since the publication in England of the National Languages Strategy, there has been much debate concerning the aims of primary modern foreign language (PMFL) teaching. This article presents research into the beliefs of tutors and pre-service teachers in training on Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) courses with a PMFL specialism in…

This study examines the nature of the involvement load (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) in second language (L2) lexical input processing through reading by considering the effects of the reader-based factors of L2 reading proficiency and background knowledge. The lexical input processing aspects investigated were lexical inferencing (search), attentional…

In 1996, we published an article that investigated the characteristics of basic language testing courses in terms of the instructors, course characteristics, and students. The present study is designed to describe the same characteristics of basic language testing courses in 2007 and to examine how such courses have changed since 1996. To those…

Foreign and second language (L2) educators in English-speaking countries are concerned that male students are losing interest in studying French. A large-scale study was conducted to investigate gender differences in L2 motivation and participation among Grade 9 core French students in Canada. A mixed methodology was employed to investigate gender…

In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate-high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds…

Native-like pronunciation is necessary for membership into some social groups and to be considered a legitimate speaker of a language. Language immersion education aims to develop bilingual individuals, able to participate in multiple global communities, and while the lexical, syntactic, and sociolinguistic development of immersion learners is…

This article examines variations in beliefs and practices between British English language teaching (ELT) specialists and their Chinese colleagues in a cross-cultural educational development project which used interviews and a questionnaire survey to gather the perceptions and retrospective experiences of Chinese tertiary teachers and expatriate…