The Texas Education Code requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included in the report are…

Social inclusion typically refers to the integration of the disadvantaged into the mainstream society as a national agenda. However, social inclusion in a broader sense addresses aspirations to be included in a global imagined community as well as a local community of like-minded people. Drawing on a qualitative study of men and women learning…

Although word searching in children is very common, very little is known about how adults support children in the turns following the child's search behaviours, an important topic because of the social, educational, and clinical implications. This study characterizes, in detail, teachers' use of prompting, hinting, and supplying a model. From a…

The purpose of this investigation was to test the assumption of asymmetric mapping between words and concepts in bilingual memory as proposed by the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM, Kroll & Stewart, 1994). Twenty four Spanish-English bilinguals (experiment 1) and twenty English-Spanish bilinguals (experiment 2) were presented with pairs of words,…

Based on Robinson's (2001a,b, 2003) Cognition Hypothesis and Skehan's (1998) Limited Attentional Capacity Model, this study explored the effects of task complexity on the fluency and lexical complexity of 108 EFL students' argumentative writing. Task complexity was manipulated using three factors: (1) availability of planning time; (2) provision…

Tasks can vary in terms of difficulty and implementation conditions, and these in turn may affect the nature of the language produced by the learner. There have been a large number of studies which have investigated the effects of these task properties and implementation conditions on the language the learner produces. To date, results have been…

This nonexperimental study explored the predictive strength of English proficiency levels on academic achievement of middle school students in a sample of 17,470 native English-speaking (NES) students, 558 English language learners (current ELLs), and 500 redesignated fluent English proficient students (former ELLs). Results of multilevel analyses…

High-proficiency second language (L2) learners challenge much theory and methodology in contemporary sociolinguistic and L2 acquisition research, which suggests the need for honest interdisciplinarity when working in the interstices of style, stylization, and advanced acquisition processes. When to consider fluent and highly competent speakers of…

The purpose of the study reported in this article was twofold: First, to see whether guided careful online planning assists intermediate learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in accurate oral production of English articles ("an/a" and "the"); and, second, to see whether guided careful online planning has any effects…

In this dissertation I aim to advance political narrative theory by exploring the use of political narrative on Facebook and the possibility for Facebook to be used among Palestinian youth for political change. To examine the concepts of political narrative and political change, I developed a model for political change based on the changing…

It is a good practice to try to understand matters at hand by first stepping back and adopting an historical perspective, which I will begin this review by doing. Next, I will take up the challenges that each of the authors in the articles in this volume has presented for the study of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in second language…

Word-segmentation, that is, the extraction of words from fluent speech, is one of the first problems language learners have to master. It is generally believed that statistical processes, in particular those tracking "transitional probabilities" (TPs), are important to word-segmentation. However, there is evidence that word forms are stored in…

Lexical proficiency, as a cognitive construct, is poorly understood. However, lexical proficiency is an important element of language proficiency and fluency, especially for second language (L2) learners. Lexical proficiency is also an important attribute of L2 academic achievement. Generally speaking, lexical proficiency comprises breadth of…

This paper reports on a comparative study of pauses made by L2 learners and native speakers of English while narrating picture stories. The comparison is based on the number of pauses and total amount of silence in the middle and at the end of clauses in the performance of 40 native speakers and 40 L2 learners of English. The results of the…

An open-ended, written survey was administered to 146 university students who did not stutter to obtain their impressions of the effects of stuttering on the lives of people who stutter (PWS). Participants first wrote about the general effects of stuttering and then considered how their lives would be different if they stuttered. Both types of…