Many metrics along K-12 education may serve as indicators of potential success, but they are not goals. Students must leave the public school system at least proficient enough to face the tasks ahead. At the moment when students depart the K-12 system to enter college or career, it matters neither how proficient they were years before, nor the…

This is the 2010-11 annual report on the academic progress of English language learners in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools. The purpose of the report is to: (1) Describe the demographic characteristics of students classified as English Language Learners (ELL) in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS); (2) Provide data regarding ELL…

Heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian in the United States form a very complex and diverse group of learners. Research in heritage linguistics has examined key parameters of the HSs' oral production. Important work has been done in heritage language (HL) pragmatics, morphology, and lexicon. However, very few studies have been conducted to…

Learner-centered methodology like peer review is problematic in the pluralism of the ESL classroom when teaching academic English composition. A distinct complication is the form writing instruction should take given the interaction and variations between ESL students' L1 background, experiences, schema, and the meaning of academic literacy in…

This is the third biennial report to Congress on the implementation of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act's" Title III State Formula Grant Program (also known as the English Language Acquisition State Grants Program). This report provides information regarding the U.S. Department of Education's efforts to hold states accountable…

The effectiveness of various strategies for educating the growing U.S. population of English language learners (ELLs) has attracted a great deal of controversy. Bilingual education theory posits that retention and continued development of native language (L1) skills facilitate academic achievement through two mediating mechanisms. First, L1…

In Canadian public primary schools, newcomer West African refugees like other ethnic immigrant students are a visible minority group, often referred as Linguistic and Culturally Different (LCD) students. In the province of British Columbia, newcomer immigrant students are subjected to a battery of tests, as soon as they enroll in the primary…

We report a small-scale study investigating the perceptions of postgraduate students who are non-native speakers of English and those of academic staff with regard to those students. Previous research has focused only on the former and identified a number of linguistic and cultural challenges these students face in adapting to Anglophone…

The paper will explore the challenges students from selected South East Asian countries (Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia) face while studying English in Australia before entering into Australian University courses. These students must contend not only with different styles of teaching and learning, but also with the challenge of adapting to a new…

This study examines the preferred vocabulary learning strategies of Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners. In order to identify the aforementioned group in terms of language proficiency, a TOEFL test was administered to a population of 146 undergraduate EFL students at the university of Vali-e-Asr in Rafsanjan, Iran. Those scoring above 480 were…

This dissertation investigates processing of English and Japanese relative clause (RC) sentences by native speakers and second/foreign language (L2) learners. Particularly, the relationship between the sentence processing and individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity was examined. The main question addressed in this study is whether…

Twenty-nine percent of 2010-2011 Austin Independent School District students were English language learners (ELLs). The majority of ELLs (62%) made progress in English proficiency and they showed overall improvement in most state academic test (TAKS) content areas for most grades.

The action research project entitled "Engaging pre-service TESOL teachers in authentic workplace learning" aimed to enhance the TESOL practicum experience of pre-service teachers in the Graduate Diploma of Education at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. Integrated into the relevant TESOL curriculum unit was the…

A promising source of insights into heritage language learning comes from the broader study of the role of input in language acquisition. We concentrate here on the possibility that qualitative differences in the proficiency of heritage and monolingual language learners can be traced to a qualitative difference in the input available to each…

This study used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999, to (a) estimate mathematics achievement trends through 5th grade in the population of students who are English-language proficient by the end of kindergarten, (b) compare trends across primary language groups within this English-language proficient…