Environmentally friendly occasions allow foreign language learners to further concentrate on realizing their extensive knowledge of the English language. Exercises and activities performed in foreign language classes have been criticized for a lack of authenticity, which prevents language learners from learning the real-life usage of language. In…

This book revolves around educating recently arrived immigrant youth in the United States who are emergent bilinguals. Drawing on a seven-year research collaboration with three ESL teachers in an urban secondary school in the United States, it addresses questions around taking a critical approach to language and literacy education, including what…

Research into the formulaic nature of language has grown in size and scale in the last 20 years or more, much of it based in corpus studies and involving the identification and categorisation of formulas. Research suggests that there are benefits for second and foreign language learners recognising formulaic sequences when listening and reading,…

Multiple regression is a family of statistics used to investigate the relationship between a set of predictors and a criterion (dependent) variable. This procedure is applicable in a variety of research contexts and data structures. Consequently, and similar to quantitative traditions in sister-disciplines such as education and psychology (see…

It has been known since at least the 1960s that small changes in pupil diameter in response to a mental task are indicative of processing effort associated with this task. More recently, with the advent of modern eye-trackers, which also measure the pupil diameter, pupillometry has been "rediscovered" by language researchers and the…

This paper reviews how the construct of oral fluency in a second language (L2) has been defined and researched over the last twenty-five years. The emerging picture is somewhat kaleidoscopic, as domains of cognitive, social, individual and linguistic influences on L2 speech have been opened up for study. L2 fluency research presents a wealth of…

Linguistic geniuses such as Heinrich Schliemann have long fascinated many with their exceptional capabilities to master multiple languages on top of their own mother tongues. These individuals are believed to be able to extract the probabilistic, abstract patterns underlying a target form's linguistic and frequency distribution in second language…

Studies of English academic writing have revealed a shift to a compressed style, with preferences for lexical and phrasal types of noun modifiers over clausal modifiers. However, condensed noun phrases may result in a loss of explicitness since they lack grammatical markers specifying the semantic relations between head nouns and modifiers. This…

Despite decades of controversy surrounding foreign language study, empirical research has emerged to substantiate the multiple benefits that language learning and bilingualism afford to both individuals and society. This study comprises a survey and analysis of empirical research on this topic published during the first two decades of the 21st…

In this article we introduce Positive Psychology (PP), a relatively new subfield of psychology, and outline its development since the year 2000. We describe ways in which PP represents an exciting addition to the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) literature and the ways it is already influencing trends in education generally, thus creating…

In the past decades, there has been a surge in interest in the study of language complexity in second language (L2) research. In this article we provide an overview of current theoretical and methodological practices in L2 complexity research, while simultaneously framing these within the broader scientific interest into the notion of complexity.…

In this article, we provide an overview of the last twenty years of research on Indigenous sign languages, deaf community sign languages, co-speech gesture, and multimodal communication in the Australian context. From a global perspective, research on sign languages and on the gestures that normally accompany speech has been used as the basis for…

We investigate whether second language (L2) learners of English rely on first language (L1) transfer and atomicity in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction by examining L1-French and L1-Chinese learners of English. Atomicity encodes whether a noun contains 'atoms' or minimal elements that retain the property of the noun. As a semantic…

This article is a response to commentaries on the article, "Microvariation in Multilingual Situations: The Importance of Property-by-Property Acquisition" (EJ1300541). This response is divided into sections focusing on the following issues: (1) full transfer and the notion of copying; (2) the definition of linguistic proximity; (3) some…

In this Forum article, we discuss issues emerging from utilizing two significant theoretical constructs, Funds of Knowledge and Cultural Capital, in the field of second/multilingual language studies. Some similar underlying characteristics yet opposite perspectives surrounding the concepts and theoretical applications have confused researchers and…