The entrance exams to Japanese universities have long been criticised for creating negative "washback" on English education in high schools in Japan, as teachers have often focused their teaching efforts on teaching grammar to prepare students for these exams rather than helping students to develop competency in spoken English. Many…

Due to the spread of COVID-19, all face-to-face speaking courses were discontinued for a while, which inevitably impaired assessment results. E-portfolios are typically an appropriate evaluation technique for universities that implement fully synchronous online learning in pandemic situations. However, little is known about how this alternative…

Based on several regression specifications that control for a host of covariates, this article demonstrates that the quantity of undergraduate research experience was by far the most important determinant for increased graduation rates at a 100% Hispanic-serving institution. Our finding also shows a causal relationship confirmed by propensity…

Studies on the application of service-learning with an emphasis on heritage learners are still emerging. Using a critical service-learning approach, I describe how the integration of a service-learning project showed heritage learners of Spanish the need for people with their bilingual abilities. Specifically, I examine the impact of…

Knowing a word means knowing its pronunciation, spelling, concept area, and meaning layers. Vocabulary is never an area that can be learned completely by individuals; rather it is a field that expands and deepens throughout life. Vocabulary teaching requires much more than just looking up words in a dictionary or using them in a sentence.…

While much research has examined second language (L2) phonetic acquisition, less research has examined first language (L1) attrition in terms of the voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops. The current study examined L2 acquisition and L1 attrition in the VOT of word-initial voiceless stops among late English-Arabic and Arabic-English bilinguals…

Purpose: Systematic reviews of bilingual children's reading development are very limited, and none of which solely focus on predictors of reading difficulties among those with developmental language disorder (DLD). The present scoping review fills an important need by analyzing the recent research literature on the reading outcomes of bilingual…

The aim of this study is to analyze Italian Sign Language (LIS) linguistic skills in two groups of deaf signing children at different ages, and to compare their skills with those of a group of deaf signing adults. For this purpose, we developed a new Sentence Reproduction Task (SRT) for Italian Sign Language (LIS-SRT), which we administered to 33…

Purpose: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate many mechanisms of lexical acquisition that support language in typical development; however, 1 notable exception is the shape bias. The bases of these children's difficulties with the shape bias are not well understood, and the current study explored potential sources of individual…

This study compares the writing skills of students with different socioeconomic statuses, using the quantitative research method designs of "survey study" and "causal-comparative study". The study group included 67 Turkish teachers and a total of 120 eighth-grade students from four different middle schools in the province of…

Today, children of all ages experience rigorous career preparation as part of their education. School systems strive to implement mandated standards to help students excel in standardized testing and gain necessary skills for future job opportunities. In this worthwhile pursuit, many creative school programs such as art and music are deemed…

The focus of this research is to verify the influence of the age variable on fluent Turkish native speakers' production of the various types of speech disfluencies. To accomplish this, four groups of native speakers of Turkish between ages 4-8, 18-23, 33-50 years respectively and those over 50-years-old were constructed. A total of 84 participants…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to compare the outcomes of the manually coded Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis (NNLA) system, which was developed for characterizing agrammatic production patterns, and the automated Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN) system, which has recently been adopted to analyze speech samples of individuals…

Listening comprehension and word decoding are the two major determinants of the development of reading comprehension. The relative importance of different language skills for the development of listening and reading comprehension remains unclear. In this 5-year longitudinal study, starting at age 7.5 years (n = 198), it was found that the shared…

This paper argues that linguistic skills and awareness are essential requirements for professionals whose work centres on language as a product. Brought about by the commodification of language in developed economies, language work such as brand consulting, text design or online marketing requires linguistic knowledge and resources that many…