For years, the teaching of content-based academic language to multilingual learners has focused on formulas, vocabulary lists, and sentence patterns--often sidelining students' linguistic and cultural strengths. Gisela Ernst-Slavit and Margo Gottlieb address these challenges by embracing academic "languaging," an active, collaborative…

The U.S. government encourages the study of critical languages spoken in geographic areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security and the global economy through a variety of discretionary grants and scholarship programs. U.S. students are traditionally underrepresented in the study of these languages; however, many of the nation's K-12…

The World Bank's focus on foundational skills requires that issues of language and Language of Instruction be brought to the forefront of education policy discussions. Poor Language of Instruction policies harm learning, access, equity, cost-effectiveness, and inclusion. Yet nearly 37% of students in low- and middle-income countries are taught in…

Elevated levels of anxiety have been associated with students' poor academic performance. Research on domain-specific anxiety patterns in reading has demonstrated that reading anxiety is associated with, yet distinctive from, general anxiety. Reading anxiety is an unpleasant emotional reaction experienced by students when reading; it is a specific…

The basic structure and rhetoric of national language policy in multilingual Singapore has remained essentially unchanged since independence with four official languages positioned within the national quadrilingual framework and used in all public spheres, and individual bilingualism encouraged in the private sphere. However, also since…

This article introduces this special issue by declaring that the studies contained here build on the idea that multilinguals, in the sense of learners or speakers that have more than two languages in their linguistic repertoire, are different from bilinguals and monolinguals in various ways. Several authors in the area of third language…

Purpose: We compared copula and auxiliary verb BE use by African American English-speaking children with and without a creole heritage, using Gullah/Geechee as the creole criterion, to determine if differences exist, the nature of the differences, and the impact of the differences on interpretations of ability. Method: Data came from 38 children,…

There have been many studies on first language interference towards learners' second or foreign language learning, but not many on the otherwise. This study investigates the effects of learning Japanese as a foreign language towards learners' first language use, Indonesian. The data for this qualitative study were obtained from five Japanese…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of mand, tact, and native-to-foreign (NFI) and foreign-to-native (FNI) intraverbal training on the acquisition of a foreign language. We used a multiple-baseline design across participants with an embedded adapted alternating treatments design to compare the effects of mand training, tact…

With biliteracy as the goal, dual-language immersion programs offer the potential to increase literacy skills across multiple learner demographic characteristics.

The moral foreign language effect has been investigated with increased interest with both evidence for as well as against it being demonstrated. In a recent publication, Bialek and Fugelsang (in press) critically evaluated our previous publication (Cavar and Tytus, 2017) aiming to establish boundaries of this effect. In the current reply, we…

This study examined whether vocabulary knowledge is sufficient for second language (L2) word-meaning inferencing. Specifically, it investigated the role of the learner's sensitivity to a word's morphological structure (referred to 'morphological awareness' or 'MA' hereafter) as additional support that enhances multi-character word-meaning…

The study aimed to investigate the influence of 24 Hong Kong learners' first and second languages (L1 and L2 -- Cantonese and English, respectively) on the acquisition of Mandarin as a third language (L3) and to discuss how multilingual learners acquire L3 pronunciation features. The most frequent phonological features in L2 English and L3…

The construct of language competence lies at the heart of language education, underpinning key processes such as language teaching and language assessment. Acknowledging its prominent position in the field of language education and seeking to illuminate its nature, this study attempted to trace the historical trajectory of the construct of…

Previous studies suggest that age of acquisition affects the outcomes of learning, especially at the morphosyntactic level. Unknown is how syntactic development is affected by increased cognitive maturity and delayed language onset. The current paper studied the early syntactic development of adolescent first language learners by examining word…