Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three…

When reading Chinese, skilled native readers regularly gain a preview benefit (PB) when the parafoveal word is orthographically or semantically related to the target word. Evidence shows that non-native, beginning Chinese readers can obtain an orthographic PB during Chinese reading, which indicates the parafoveal processing of low-level visual…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become widespread in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a growing body of literature has been produced in recent years. We surveyed 61 SLA papers that use ERPs to study L2 sentence processing in healthy late learners. Our main aim was to provide a critical summary of findings from the decade…

This study used an eye-tracking method to examine whether Chinese translation equivalents activated by English prime words can continue to activate their Chinese homophones. With 30 English prime words, and 60 Chinese target words as materials, the experiment used a Tobii eye-tracking device to collect data from 30 university students while…

Plagiarism in academic writing is known to be an issue of concern for educators, administrators, and students alike. Using self-reporting studies and plagiarism detection software, previous research has established that plagiarism in university-level academic writing is relatively common amongst the work of L1 and particularly L2 writers and that…

In a bilingual teacher preparation milieu fraught with high stakes and little time to develop biliteracies in humanizing ways, the researchers engaged in a comparative case study of two types of bilingual pre-service teachers, a heritage bilingual and an initially Spanish-dominant bilingual, to explore how they grew in their biliteracies after the…

Growing up in the digital era, young children are exposed to numerous educational applications and programs, some with well-designed curricula and others focused more on entertainment or game-like qualities. With the increasing popularity of mobile language-learning applications among young children, this dissertation raises a crucial question: do…

Teachers encountered difficulties implementing 90% of Target Language (TL) use and tried various strategies to promote it. This qualitative case study investigated secondary foreign language teachers' perceptions and experiences of following the district's recommendation to use 90% and above of TL in their classrooms in a school district in the…

The present study explores Moroccan science teachers' perceptions of teaching science subjects through foreign languages, mainly French, in Moroccan secondary schools. Seventeen science and technology teachers have been interviewed and data were analysed following the grounded theory methodology. The researcher constructs hypotheses based on data…

The present study investigates the time course of acoustic cue integration in the processing of the Korean three-way laryngeal stop contrast by native Korean listeners and English second language (L2) learners of Korean. As such, this study seeks to understand how native listeners and L2 learners weight and integrate fine-grained acoustic…

Skilled migration to Australia depends on a good command of English. Where skilled migrants lack English -- like the participants in this study -- yet fulfil the vocational-skill employment requirement, they are granted temporary visas and provisionally employed but expected to improve their English on the job. They are assumed by mainstream…

This study was conducted to examine the lexical bundles used by nonnative speakers of English and explore any potential L1 influence on L2 lexical bundle use. Following a corpus-based approach, the frequency and types of English four-word lexical bundles in the postgraduate academic writing of Turkish and American students were analyzed, and the…

Graded readers are a great asset to learners acquiring the vocabulary of another language. Homonyms, on the other hand, are a recognized source of trouble for students with that same goal. Publishers of graded readers control the presentation of old and new words, but does this control extend to homonyms? Are only the word forms controlled for--in…

We live undoubtedly in a digital era in which younger people have more technological knowledge and use technology more than older people who mostly must adapt their lives and practices, learning how, why, and when to use digital tools. In schools, this gap is visible if we compare the curricula for teaching the Portuguese mother tongue and…

Two major, inter-related issues are analysed in this paper -- mother tongue (MT) and early childhood care and education (ECCE). Evidence tells us that learning first in one's MT leads to better outcomes in the future -- for individuals, cultures, and nations. But MT is used rarely in ECCE programmes and the early grades of primary school so that…