In today's globalised world, a single named language such as English, Norwegian or Spanish, no matter how 'big' it is, rarely satisfies all the needs of communication, cooperation, education or any other area of human life. Neither is the entire language repertoire plausible for everyday use, simply because it is impossible to use too many…

This study used Latent Growth Curve Modeling (LGCM) to examine the overtime patterns of the score and test-taking strategy changes in an international high-stakes standardized proficiency test. To this end, the test records of 178 Iranian IELTS repeaters were analyzed, using close- and open-ended questionnaires to measure test scores as a function…

This is a mixed-method research study of the language ideologies of 180 teacher candidates enrolled in the English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) teacher preparation program at a large public university in the United States. The theoretical perspectives of critical pedagogy and language ideology form the framework of this study. The data collection…

Instructed foreign language knowledge -- that is, language skills acquired exclusively in the classroom without the benefit of any significant immersion experience -- remains a vastly neglected area of studies on language learning in general and language attrition in particular. There is also little consideration of foreign language attrition and…

The language teaching landscape in Ireland has changed considerably over the last 30 years as a result of substantial and sustained inward migration into the country during this period. These social and demographic developments have added to the country's already bilingual context and created a much more varied multilingual landscape than had…

This dissertation explored the aspect of Indigeneity as a significant consideration in English Language Teaching (ELT); and thus makes a critical contribution to the literature in ELT/TESOL and applied linguistics. This body of knowledge benefits from privileging Indigenous ways and Indigenous knowledge in research practices, making explicit…

During the era of accountability in K-12 schools in the U.S., school leaders' and teachers' responsibilities concerning language proficiency assessments extend beyond test administration and determination of eligibility for services. State and federal accountability systems challenge educators and school leaders to use language assessment results…

To date, studies that investigate lexical overlap in signed languages have mainly considered the relationships between deaf community signed languages. The alternate sign languages of Indigenous Australia provide an opportunity to take another perspective -- they are perhaps amongst the oldest known sign languages in the world, their main users…

The current study investigates the expression of progressive and habitual aspect in second language Spanish, integrating theoretical insights from usage-based and concept-oriented approaches to second language acquisition, along with quantitative sociolinguistic methods. To address the full breadth of forms involved, the study examines variation…

"A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor" (2023) upgrades ED619049 (ERIC) and finishes its work. The dictionary identifies language used figuratively in everyday contemporary English--to include the language of "inclusion & exclusion" and "contempo-speak"--along with its…

This paper discusses the importance of definitions in the context of academic discussion, highlights the inconsistent terminology used to describe e-learning, and examines a range of different definitions of e-learning used by academic authors since 2011. Following an outline of the methodology, the paper identifies 15 unique definitions of…

The present study examined the cross-modal cueing effect of musical rhythmic beats on non-native speech rhythm production. Two groups of Chinese learners of French were cued respectively with rhythmic beats that either matched (matching group) or mismatched (mismatching group) the rhythm patterns of the target French sentences. The participants…

What is the nature of conceptual representations? Models of semantic memory often describe concepts as a distributed feature space. However, it remains unknown which subset of this feature space constitutes the invariant representation of a concept. In this dissertation, I investigate the nature of modality-independent representations and their…

Background and aims: Gender differences in the written language of autistic individuals are an overlooked but important area of research. We contend that the gender differences in spoken language of autistic individuals may extend to written language, mirroring the gender differences of writing in the general population and reflecting the shared…

The feature [+spread glottis] ([+s.g.]) denotes that a speech sound is produced with a wide glottal aperture with audible voiceless airflow. Icelandic is unusual in the degree to which [+spread glottis] is involved in the phonology: in /h/, pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops, voiceless fricatives and voiceless sonorants. The ubiquitousness of…