This paper presents insights from two interview studies with the aim of shedding light on the learning potential of studying abroad in an area where English is used as a lingua franca. The majority of previous research on study abroad focuses on students' experiences of studying abroad in target-language regions, for example learners of English…

The purpose of this qualitative, interpretive study was to investigate general education K-12 teachers' perceptions of instructional practices and professional development for teaching Spanish as a first language English Language Learners. Specifically, I investigated the instructional practices and professional development experiences of K-12…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

Translanguaging has now become central to a sociolinguistics that foregrounds globalization and mobility as key concepts for grasping human beings' capacity to engage with and draw on both multiple linguistic -- including named languages -- and semiotic resources dynamically and in combination for the purpose of meaning-making (García, Ofelia…

Background: Previous studies show that students improve communication skills throughout post-secondary study proportionately to first-year ability, yet important questions remain. How does post-secondary affect the development of reading comprehension and related skills? How does this development vary between L1 and L2 speakers, and how much…

The conclusions on prosodic pitch features in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have primarily been derived from studies in non-tonal language speakers. This cross-linguistic study evaluated the performance of imitating Cantonese lexical tones and their non-linguistic (nonspeech) counterparts by Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children with and…

The Hindi consonant inventory, which includes the cross-linguistically rare retroflex place of articulation and four-way laryngeal contrasts, is known to pose difficulties for native English speakers. Hindi language textbooks address this challenge, in part, by providing various articulatory and acoustic descriptions of Hindi consonants, typically…

In midst of the modernization, xenoglossophobia might affect the local's pride, identity, and living capital. This study aimed to describe Javanese people's pride of their local language along with the related aspects contributing to how they lived. This study used the ethnographic method of research upon the Javanese community in a rural area…

Reading is a very complex task in which readers obtain information to promote reading from not only the fixated word located in the foveal area but also non-fixated words located in the parafoveal area. We aimed to investigate the second language (L2) parafoveal orthographic (letter identity and letter position) processing mechanism adopting the…

This study investigated the correlation and predictive capacity of verbal working memory (VWM) to the reading comprehension of children in their first language (L1) and second language (L2). The term verbal working memory refers to a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold and manipulate verbal and auditory information temporarily.…

The objective of this study was to validate a bilingual Spanish-English version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) considering its potential use as a discriminator between learners in terms of language competence. This version was designed based on the two forms available on one of the creators' websites as well as considering practices recommended…

In this article, we address the issue of reliability of quantitative data on multilingualism of the past obtained as recall data. More specifically, we investigate whether the interviewees' assessments of the language repertoires of their late relatives (indirect data) provide results that are quantitatively similar to those obtained from the…

Students who attend alternative high schools are considered at risk of not graduating. To graduate from high school, students need to obtain the appropriate number of credits. In this study, factors related to the attainment of credit by students in an alternative school during 2015-2019 were examined. Five factors had an effect on the number of…

Teacher talk has been found to significantly affect children's early language development during shared book reading; however, the mechanism of such influence remains unclear. The current study has zoomed in on vocabulary development in Mandarin as a heritage language (HL) in Singapore kindergartens, 1) exploring the linguistic features (i.e.…

This study examined how discriminability and prototypicality of nonnative phones modulate the amplitude of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential. We hypothesized that if a frequently occurring (standard) stimulus is not prototypical to a listener, a weaker predictive memory trace will be formed and a smaller MMN will be…