Research on Spanish heritage language (SHL) education has grown exponentially in the last two decades. The most recent nationwide study on SHL programs in US postsecondary institutions was conducted a decade ago. To continue this line of research, the primary aim of this study is to provide an update about the current state of SHL course offerings…

This study examines the value undergraduate students (n = 4458) place on proficiency in languages other than English (LOTEs) in terms of their personal interests, major(s), and career plans. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses of large-scale survey data, the study further explores the reasons students outline for (not) enrolling in…

This article employs a language ideological framework to explore how particular language attitudes and beliefs shaped one group of U.S. students' choices to avoid producing a dialectal variant, Castilian Spanish [theta], in the context of an undergraduate Spanish pronunciation class. An analysis of ethnographic data points to the significance of…

This study investigated the following research question: What is the landscape of medical Spanish offerings in undergraduate, 4-year universities in US states with large Spanish-speaking populations? Forty-four percent of institutions responded to the survey, which explored institutional characteristics, medical Spanish programs and individual…

The study investigates whether and how mock interviews, an instructional component of business Chinese courses, prepare students for real interviews. The study included 11 American undergraduate students who participated in a 10-week summer study abroad program in China. Participants underwent two rounds of mock interviews with their instructors…

In this study, the effects of the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) on the teaching of orientation idioms was investigated. The study was designed as an action research project and was conducted with 45 B2 level students from 21 countries who were native speakers of 10 different languages. The students were learning Turkish to pursue the…

This study examined the receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical developmental patterns of the 3000 most frequent words among 953 university L2 learners of Spanish at different stages in their language studies, taking into consideration the effect of high school instruction on high-frequency vocabulary knowledge. Results confirm that even…

Rapid improvements in the capabilities of machine translation (MT) raise questions about possible increases in overreliance on MT among lower-proficiency or novice level language learners. This study investigated how such learners described their use of online MT for independent reading and writing tasks, and whether this included descriptions…

The first purpose of this empirical study was to assess and validate the Academic Writing Self-Efficacy Belief Questionnaire (AWSEBQ) framed by social cognitive theory. The second purpose was to evaluate the predictive effects of different aspects of self-efficacy beliefs on academic writing performance. Data were collected from 743 learners at a…

According to the functional model proposed by Sampasivam and Clément in 2014, the two determinants that build towards second language confidence (L2C) are "richness and self-involvement" of the contact experience. This study adds to previous research by investigating, for the first time, the role of interlocutor type in the context of…

Most students take language courses at university, but only a fraction go beyond the introductory and intermediate levels despite the fact that continued study is likely necessary to achieve full communicative competence in the target language. By shedding light on the motivational pathways that predict language learning effort, persistence, and…

This study investigates the extent to which variables related to self-regulated speaking motivation contributes to the prediction of foreign language speaking competence and explores whether there is a relationship between these two constructs. The data were collected from 84 Turkish university students using self-regulated motivation for…

Research on academic socialization has predominately focused on the L2 educational experiences of international students. While foreign language (FL) research has explored "multiliteracies" and "intercultural learning," literacy in a FL continues to be understood as the use of foreign words and grammar combined with culturally…

Recent years have seen a growing research interest in the notion of directed motivational currents (DMCs) that defines highly intense motivational surges oriented to a much-desired goal of personal significance. However, the learner characteristics that induce individual-level variability in DMCs have yet to be explored. In particular, the role of…

Given that most postsecondary institutions have recognized the need to prepare interculturally competent undergraduates, this study used the Intercultural Development Inventory to measure the extent to which one group of undergraduate learners demonstrated increased intercultural competence after taking a first-semester foreign language (FL)…