Because of their presumably familiar plot lines and character tropes, the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales are often included as one of the earliest literary selections in German language and culture curricula. However, for learners to engage more critically and interpretively with fairy-tale genres, it is exactly their assumed familiarity with the…

The use of video streaming services has exploded over the past several years. However, although the use of video is a well-studied topic in computer-assisted language learning literature, the use of video streaming for out-of-class, informal foreign language (FL) learning has received little attention. This study addresses this gap in the…

This study investigated the relative effects of four forms of task preparation on L2 speech production. One hundred forty-four Japanese speakers of English completed an oral opinion task after 10 minutes of preparation. The same task repetition condition involved four iterations of the same pedagogic task (same procedures, same content), the…

Despite the importance of academic writing skills in higher education, many Indonesian students encounter challenges that constrain their writing success. Earlier studies in the context have shown that many students have little control over the schematic structure of the argumentative text and their linguistics features. In the current paper, we…

Traditionally, students receiving assistance while taking a test is deemed cheating, a belief based on the premise that assessment needs to evaluate unassisted performance. However, to the proponents of Sociocultural Theory in general and Dynamic Assessment (DA) in particular, such guidance through interaction with the examiner during the…

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 aptitude-treatment interaction study investigated the extent to which explicit and implicit cognitive abilities are differentially related to learning outcomes under two corrective feedback conditions. One hundred and thirteen intermediate English learners of Spanish were randomly assigned to an implicit feedback (recast), explicit feedback…

Precise auditory perception at a subcortical level (neural representation and encoding of sound) has been suggested as a form of implicit L2 aptitude in naturalistic settings. Emerging evidence suggests that such implicit aptitude explains some variance in L2 speech perception and production among adult learners with different first language…

Research suggests that testing (or retrieval) has the potential to enhance second language (L2) vocabulary learning. Given the positive effects of testing, how L2 vocabulary learning from tests can be optimized is an important question. One way to increase the benefits of testing may be to use cumulative tests, where not only recently studied but…

This article explores Brazilian immigrant parents' perspectives about a newly established Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program in their community. The analysis of parental answers to a family engagement survey, using the framework of investment, reveals that the Brazilian parents in our sample assembled narratives of gratitude through overt statements…

This commentary discusses the issue of small samples in instructed second language acquisition research. We discuss the current state of affairs, and consider the disadvantages of small samples. We also explore other considerations regarding sample size, such as research ethics and ecological validity. We present a range of recommendations for…

This research aims to address the benefits of Bite-sized infographics in English narrative. In connection to this, narrative literature is a type of long-form content; therefore, bite-sized infographics are needed. It is effective in summarizing or outlining the plots using a variety of offered graphs. Learners who are having a hard time focusing…

Learning a new language is one of the privileges that a person can get when moving from one place to another and staying there for a longer time. In this paper, I will discuss my journey that resulted to gradual decline of my L1 (First language), Polillohing Tagalog, which is a variety of the Tagalog language, in the Philippines. The result of…

The Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) is a biennial survey required by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights since 1968. This survey collects data on key education and civil rights issues in our nation's public schools. Using CRDC data, this fact sheet explores and presents the following data for English learner (EL)…

The purpose of this study was to assess the use of an adapted picture description task described by Eisenberg and Guo to explore the morphosyntactic error patterns of English-Spanish preschool simultaneous bilingual learners. Language samples were collected from 28 bilingual preschool children aged 3 to 5 years. Language samples were elicited in…