This paper reports the results of a cross-lingual study on the role of comprehension monitoring in L1 (English) and L2 (French) reading proficiency. Fifty-two undergraduate students from two FSL backgrounds, French immersion (FI) and core French (CF), were given reading comprehension tests as well a monitoring task in both languages. Results…

Two classes in Developmental Reading were trained in question-formulation and were then required to ask any number and type of questions based on four texts. Three inter-raters coded the questions for their content and form. The results of the study showed the dominance of recognition or retrieval questions, suggesting the students' proficiency in…

This commentary addresses the use of nativelikeness and non-nativelikeness in research relating to the age factor in L2A. I suggest that, in the context of the Critical Period Hypothesis as it applies to L2A, the criteria of nativelikeness and non-nativelikeness may be subject to abuse. I also argue that the use of the monolingual native standard…

One of the great puzzles of language acquisition has been described as poverty of the stimulus: how are complex aspects of language acquired when they appear to be rare or even non-occurring in the input that a learner receives and comprehends? This article presents an emergentist solution to one aspect of this puzzle (involving relative clauses)…

Articulation is one of the principal challenges of all foreign language programs. A key component of the articulation process is an assessment of student language abilities. On college and university campuses this process is usually conducted via a placement test. As developments in proficiency research have progressed, it is clear that programs…

This paper reviews the process a university foreign language department went through in developing a procedure to assess its curriculum using the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and, to a lesser extent, the National Standards, as guiding principles (National Standards, 1996). This procedure included a noncredit workshop that met only once to inform…

This study examines current patterns of oral communication strategy (OCS) use, to what degree these strategies can be explicitly taught, and the extent to which strategy use can lead to improvements in oral communication ability. In a 12-week English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course based on a communicative approach, 62 female learners were…

The study reported in this article is a part of a large-scale study investigating syntactic complexity in second language (L2) oral data in commonly taught foreign languages (English, German, Japanese, and Spanish; Ortega, Iwashita, Rabie, & Norris, in preparation). In this article, preliminary findings of the analysis of the Japanese data are…

In this study, the effects of second language (i.e., L2) proficiency and age of second language acquisition are assessed. Three types of bilinguals are compared: Early L2 learners, Late highly proficient L2 learners, and Late less proficient L2 learners. A lexical decision priming paradigm is used in which the critical trials consist of first…

This paper addresses the problem of placing and teaching heritage speakers of immigrant languages in college-level foreign language programmes, drawing conclusions from research on heritage speakers of Russian. For pedagogical purposes, heritage speakers cannot be viewed either as native speakers of the target language or as foreign language…

This study investigates advanced Japanese language learners' abilities to infer unknown "kanji" (Chinese character )words while reading authentic Japanese texts. Data obtained from 42 English L1 students indicate that, first, although they can guess the meanings of unknown "kanji" words in context, they frequently make erroneous guesses or fail to…

Teachers who are facing multiple languages and cultures in their classrooms for the first time may be fooled by the English Language Learner who has become proficient in English. That competence in social communication may disguise difficulty with understanding and generating academic language. Through two profiles of middle school students who…

Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, the authors focused on the relation between pre-school classroom experiences and the development of later comprehension skills in ethnic minority children whose first language is different from the language they learn in (pre-)school. In Study 1, the relation between pre-school playgroup…

The use of dictionaries in second language proficiency examinations has been the subject of controversy and debate for a good many years. Debate often focuses on how dictionary availability impacts on examination performance as measured, for example, by test scores or by the quality of test-taker responses. This article presents findings of an…

This paper presents a study that attributes verb serialization in the interlanguage of Vietnamese-speaking ESL learners to language transfer and, furthermore, puts forward the view that such transfer bears a resemblance to substrate influence in creoles with serial verb constructions (SVCs). In a task that elicited English causatives through…