These technical appendices are for the report, "English as a Second Language at California's Community Colleges: An Early Examination of AB 705 Reforms." Assembly Bill 705 (AB 705 Irwin) sought to increase successful completion of transfer-level math and English courses by addressing systemic problems in traditional placement policies…

New Mexico's Every Student Succeeds Act state plan set the goal for all English learner students to attain English proficiency within five years. The Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest English Learners Research Partnership conducted this study to better understand progress toward English proficiency among American Indian English learner…

When recruiting respondents for cognitive interviews testing translated survey questionnaires, researchers often recommend interviewing monolingual non-English speakers because they are the likely users of the translations. However, these individuals are hard to recruit, and there is no standard definition of monolingual. Using cognitive interview…

This article explores language experiences of three Bangladeshi migrant workers with low English proficiency in Australia through narrative inquiry. The narrative of each participant presents insights into the ways in which these migrants navigated through their work and social life, and developed social and communicative strategies to survive in…

This article presents results of two off-line comprehension tasks investigating the acceptability of unconventional and conventional metonymy by native speakers of Korean and Spanish who speak English as a second language. We are interested in discovering whether learners differentiate between conventional and unconventional metonymy, and whether…

The purpose of the present study was to understand the reciprocal, bidirectional longitudinal relation between joint book reading and English receptive vocabulary. To address the research goals, a nationally representative sample of Head Start children, the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (2003 cohort), was used for analysis. The…

In the present study we aimed to investigate phonological substitution errors made by hearing second language (M2L2) learners of American Sign Language (ASL) during a sentence translation task. Learners saw sentences in ASL that were signed by either a native signer or a M2L2 learner. Learners were to simply translate the sentence from ASL to…

Facilitating productive discussions in the mathematics classroom is a challenge for many teachers. Discourse--student communication of mathematical ideas with teachers and peers--provides a platform on which students share their understanding, clarify misperceptions, and evaluate ideas. If students are unable to access and participate in…

Professional foreign language training is offered to cultivate the ability to master cross-cultural communication in the sphere of future professional activity. By means of intercultural competence of foreign language we are raising professional competence, too. In countries where English is the native language, it is taught to speakers of other…

This study examined the development of interactional competence (Hall, 1993; He & Young, 1998) by beginning learners of Spanish as indexed by their use of alignment moves. Discourse analysis techniques and quantitative data analysis were used to explore how 52 learners expressed alignment and changes in participation patterns in two sets of…

In 2008, the Ministry of Education of South Korea planned to develop a domestic, standardized language test called the National English Ability Test (NEAT) as part of sweeping reforms designed to democratize and improve the Korean education system. On many levels, NEAT was an innovative initiative. From a financial perspective, NEAT was designed…

The present paper focuses on the acquisition of hedging techniques by first-year undergraduate students at the University of Tokyo in Japan. One of the major difficulties faced by aspiring science writers lies in positioning their arguments in relation to the preexisting literature. This originates from the fact that writing in the field of…

The revised hierarchical model seems different from the distributed conceptual feature model in predicting how unbalanced bilinguals would be aware of semantic relations between words for taxonomic categories of basic level (exemplar words) and words for those of superordinate level (category names) in L2. We did a series of four experiments to…

This study provides a basis for understanding how long it typically takes English language learners (ELLs) in seven Washington school districts to achieve reclassification as former ELLs. Researchers looked at ELLs' grade level and English proficiency at school entry, as well as their gender, home language, race/ethnicity, special education…

When is the right moment to transition an English learner student from part-time participation in English language development classes into full-time participation in mainstream English-only classes? English learner students should be moved into full-time mainstream English-only classes when they are sufficiently fluent in English to be able to…