Extant research has primarily assessed the quality of the American school experience for immigrant students by focusing on performance-based outcomes (e.g., grade point average [GPA]). Unlike such research, the current study examines the impact of generational status and language proficiency on Latino and Asian students' (n = 2,261) attitudes…

A dual immersion program in Chinese and English at the 3e International School in Beijing is helping children become fluent in both languages, even though many students spoke neither language when they entered the school. Children enter the program as young as two years old. Studies indicate that bilingual children have higher levels of cognitive…

While knowledge of what constitutes fluent speech has developed over the past several decades, it is still unclear how language teachers can facilitate its acquisition by second language learners. Fluency is generally accepted as being a function of temporal variables of speech such as rate of speaking and the number of words or syllables uttered…

Most current idiom processing models acknowledge, after Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999) that deriving an idiomatic meaning entails suppression of contextually inappropriate, literal meanings of idiom constituent words. While embedding idioms in the rich disambiguating context can promote earlier suppression of incompatible literal meanings,…

Second language (L2) oral performance assessment always involves raters' subjective judgments and is thus subject to rater variability. The variability due to rater characteristics has important consequential impacts on decision-making processes, particularly in high-stakes testing situations (Bachman, Lynch, & Mason, 1995; A. Brown, 1995;…

This is an English communication instruction system designed to teach children basic, easy to remember conversation strategies without the use of a textbook or to serve as a supplement learning system to a textbook. This English communication training method provides learners with concrete language patterns, a broad spectrum of vocabulary and…

Previous studies have found that proficiency in a second language affects how the meanings of words are accessed. Support for this hypothesis is based on data from explicit memory tasks with bilingual participants who know two languages that are relatively similar phonologically and orthographically (e.g., Dutch-English, French-English). The…

In spite of the vast numbers of articles devoted to vocabulary acquisition in a foreign language, few studies address the contribution of lexical knowledge to spoken fluency. The present article begins with basic definitions of the temporal characteristics of oral fluency, summarizing L1 research over several decades, and then presents fluency…

A significant and growing English learner (EL) population attends public schools in the United States. Evidence suggests they are at a disadvantage when entering school and their achievement lags behind non-EL students. Some educators have promoted full-day kindergarten programs as especially helpful for EL students. We take advantage of the large…

The lack of consistency in how bilingual language dominance is assessed currently impedes cross-experiment comparisons (Grosjean, 1998). We present a paper-and-pencil dominance scale that can be used to quantify the language dominancy of bilingual participants. The scale targets three main criteria important in gauging dominance (Grosjean, 1998;…

Achieving native-like proficiency in a foreign language is a long-term process; therefore, designing and implementing a plan for long-term language achievement may help more learners achieve their long-term language goals of fluency as well as related career goals. This study presents recommendations that may be incorporated into the college…

Although a number of studies have reported on the positive effects of Internet chats in the second language classroom, to the best of my knowledge no studies to date have examined the effect of text-based chats on oral fluency development. This exploratory study addressed the above question by examining the oral fluency development of 34 English…

The study investigates whether the informal interactive written discourse in instant messaging (IM) is permeating the more formal writing of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) college students, and how students' identities are constructed in terms of English multiliteracies in Taiwan. The study is designed as a qualitative case study. The…

This article reports on an experimental study that investigated the effect of different conditions of listener backchannels on the fluency of L2 speakers. Participants were 14 non-advanced Japanese learners of English who each performed three oral tasks in three different backchannel conditions: (1) verbal/nonverbal (V/NV), (2) nonverbal-only…

Foreign accent and training in its reduction were studied. Many teachers and learners of a second language assume that fluency in speaking is the most important of the aspects of the delivery. However, pronunciation is another key aspect of delivery. For example, Koreans often do not produce English words with a final palatal and with a palatal+i…