The present paper synthesizes the international research literature on the educational achievement of immigrant and minority language students by articulating three propositions for which there is strong empirical evidence: (a) print access and literacy engagement play a key role in promoting reading comprehension; (b) the development of bilingual…

The goal of this study was to explore the contribution that a dynamic usage based (DUB) perspective can bring to the establishment of objective measures to assess L2 learners' written texts and at the same time to gain insight into the dynamic process of language development. Four hundred and thirty seven texts written by Dutch learners of English…

This study analyses the behavior and the preferences of the Greek learners of Turkish language, who use a particular e-learning website in parallel with their studies, namely: http://turkish.pgeorgalas.gr. The website offers free online material in Greek and English language for learning the Turkish language and grammar. The traffic of several…

This article draws on ethnographic data from a longitudinal study of newly-arrived immigrants of non English-speaking background in the Australian Adult Migrant English Program to investigate their opportunities for using English and the language learning strategies (LLS) they used to make the most of these opportunities. Analysis of their reports…

Assuring that English learners (ELs) receive the support services to which they are entitled requires accurately identifying students who are limited in their English proficiency. As a first step in the identification process, students' parents fill out a home language survey. If the survey indicates a language other than English is spoken in the…

The aim of the current study was to examine the effects of bilingualism on letter and category fluency tasks. Participants were 1,600 monolingual and bilingual children from three cities in Iran: Tehran (Persian monolinguals), Tabriz (Turkish-Persian bilinguals), and Sanandaj (Kurdish-Persian bilinguals). We separately presented nine Persian…

Following the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), which mandates standards-based accountability for the academic progress of all students, much attention has been given to integrating language and content instruction for English learners (ELs) in K-12 classrooms in the US. Although TESOL and other state-approved language proficiency standards…

One measure of the impact of a high-stakes test is the attitudes that test takers hold towards it. It has been suggested that positive attitudes produce beneficial effects while real or anticipated negative experiences can result in the development of attitudes that erode confidence and potentially impact negatively on performance. This study…

This study investigates the relationship between proficiency in English and language-related attitudes among Swedish professionals at the English-speaking AstraZeneca R&D site in Molndal, Sweden. AstraZeneca is the result of a merger between a Swedish and a British pharmaceutical company, and the aim of the study is to see to what extent their…

The current research investigated the acquisition of the copula "be" in Present Simple Tense (PST) in English by native speakers of Russian. The aim of the study was to determine whether or not Russian students with different levels of English proficiency would encounter any problems while using the copula "be" in PST in English. The study also…

Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate what linguistic variables best predict bilingual recognition of acoustically degraded sentences and how to identify bilingual individuals who might have more difficulty than their monolingual counterparts on such tasks. Method: Four hundred English speech-perception-in-noise (SPIN) sentences…

The present study investigated the impact of critical discourse analysis (CDA) on TEFL students' critical thinking (CT) ability in "Reading Journalistic Texts" classes. In so doing, the study utilized an experimental design with 24 participants in the control group and 29 participants in the experimental group. The results of a pretest indicated…

This paper reports an attempt to develop and validate a bilingual Persian version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST). Due to the particular educational system in Iran, there is a dire need for a test that can effectively estimate English learners' vocabulary sizes. Previous research (Nguyen and Nation, 2011) has indicated that bilingual versions of…

Native speakers show systematic variation in a range of linguistic domains as a function of a variety of sociolinguistic variables. This article addresses native language variation in the context of multicompetence, i.e. knowledge of two languages in one mind (Cook, 1991). Descriptions of motion were elicited from functionally monolingual and…

This study addresses research gaps in predicting second language (L2) writing proficiency using linguistic features. Key to this analysis is the inclusion of linguistic measures at the surface, textbase and situation model level that assess text cohesion and linguistic sophistication. The results of this study demonstrate that five variables…