According to 2016-2017 school enrollment data, 31.6% of K-5 students were English Learners (ELs) in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). Of the many languages spoken at home by students, the most popular languages other than English are Spanish (19.14%) and Cantonese (15.88%). To respond to their needs, SFUSD offers programming that…

Antony John Kunnan is a language assessment specialist. His research interests are fairness of tests and testing practice, assessment literacy, research methods and statistics, ethics and standards, and language assessment policy. His most recent publications include a four-volume edited collection of 140 chapters titled "The Companion to…

This study investigates learners' attitudes towards poetry in foreign language learning. 63 Engineering Students at Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch attended the study. The instrument used in the study was a questionnaire designed by the researchers for the purpose of this study. The questionnaire consisted of 12 questions…

As the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) is soon to become a reality for Southeast Asia, Thailand is literally at the center of this radical change in politics, culture, business opportunities, but most especially in education. Never before has another change in the region ever forecast such a major impact on the "Land of Smiles," but never…

Several, but not all, models of language control assume that highly proficient bilinguals implement little to no inhibition during bilingual language production. In the current study, we tested this assumption with a less equivocal marker of inhibition (i.e., n-2 language repetition costs) than previous language switching studies have. N-2…

The Southern Conference on Language Teaching (SCOLT), like many other language-related organizations, flourishes in the context of periodic educational agendas and reforms, in turn, influenced by economic, political, and social ideologies of the time, and it is therefore instructive to revisit briefly the educational landscape of the previous two…

This study investigated the effect of different modes of English captioning on EFL learners' general listening comprehension. To this end, forty-five intermediate-level learners were selected based on their scores on a standardized English proficiency test (PET) to carry out the study. Then, the selected participants were randomly assigned into…

Although it is commonly thought that people who are bilingual have an advantage in the labor market, studies on this topic have not borne out this perception.The literature, in fact, has found an earnings penalty is associated with bilingualism--people who are bilingual often make less than people who are monolingual in similar jobs. This report…

This study, using Horwitz's Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory and Oxford's Strategy Inventory for Language Learning, investigated learners' beliefs about language learning and their choice of strategy categories among 546 graduate students in China. The correlation between learners' beliefs and their strategy categories use was examined.…

In large-scale assessment studies, language minority students typically obtain lower test scores in mathematics than native speakers. Although this performance difference was related to the linguistic complexity of test items in some studies, other studies did not find linguistically demanding math items to be disproportionally more difficult for…

The present paper seeks to assess the opportunities for learner involvement and negotiation of meaning that teachers provide in the unfolding interaction in an EFL setting. Classroom data from a Chilean EFL setting were collected in order to assess how teachers deploy a number of interactional features when managing contingent learner turns. The…

This article examines the socially constructed nature of significant linguistic insecurity with regard to the English language in Korean society as informed by neoliberalism. It specifically explores how linguistic insecurity leads to the pursuit of linguistic perfectionism under the popular discourse of neoliberal personhood. Participants are…

This paper reports on a study examining the relationship between language learning and perceived language differences. Two groups of native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong, L1 Cantonese--L2 English (CE) and L1 Cantonese--L2 English--L3 French (CEF), were asked to complete two tasks: a placement test in English (as well as in French for the CEF…

This project investigated Vocabulary Learning Strategies (VLSs) English Language Learners used; and strategies they thought were effective to them in terms of language proficiency. Using an online survey, 121 participants responded to statements regarding their usage of VLSs. Participants have been divided into two groups: (1) learners with low…

Reading-to-write (RTW) tasks are becoming increasingly popular and have already been used in several high-stakes English proficiency exams, either replacing or complementing a prompt-based essay test. However, it is still not clear that what accounts for successful or unsuccessful performance on an integrated reading-writing task is owing to the…