The purpose of this study was to examine the cumulative progress of English learner students in Nevada in English language proficiency (ELP) and in academic content knowledge in both reading and mathematics. This study identified students in grades kindergarten, 3, and 6 who were designated as English learner students in 2006/07 and examined their…

The purpose of this study was to examine the cumulative progress of English learner students in Utah in English language proficiency (ELP) and in academic content knowledge in both English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. This study identified students in grades kindergarten, 3, and 6 who were designated as English learner students in 2006/07…

Achieving academic success at the university level can be difficult for students, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or socio-economic status. However, these hurdles can be even more challenging for minority students, and particularly for groups like Latin@s, who are one of the fastest growing populations in the U.S. Given the rate of growth and…

The present study focuses on the influence of starting age and input on foreign language learning. In relation to starting age, the study investigates whether early starters in instructional settings achieve the same kind of long-term advantage as learners in naturalistic settings and it complements previous research by using data from oral…

The objective of this paper is to trace the actual demand on enrolments over time, as much as the history of wavering public and academic sentiment towards teaching and speaking Spanish in this country during the last century. Secondarily, we examine the question of the value of mother tongue fluency or the acquisition, mastery and usage of the…

Previous research has shown a link between speaking fluently and using multiword expressions. However, evidence on how to effectively teach multiword expressions is limited. This study investigates the effect of fluency-oriented classroom teaching on speaking fluency, with special attention to multiword expressions. In this quasi-experimental…

University students who enrol in foreign language (FL) programmes are motivated by various needs, but in particular the need to achieve communicative fluency, which generally requires interaction with others. This study therefore explores the notion of 'interactivity,' as conceptualised in second language learning theories and how it might be…

This article reports on an empirical study which attempted to explore the influence of repeating two different types of narrative tasks on complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in the oral production of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). For this purpose, the effects of four conditions (i.e. no task repetition with a loosely…

Previous task repetition studies have primarily focused on how task repetition characteristics affect the complexity, accuracy, and fluency in L2 oral production with little attention to L2 written production. The main purpose of the study reported in this paper was to examine the effects of task repetition versus procedural repetition on the…

This study investigates the effects of a short-term pedagogic intervention on development of second language (L2) fluency among learners studying English for academic purposes at a UK university. It also examines the interaction between development of fluency and complexity and accuracy. Through a pretest and posttest design, data were collected…

The present inquiry inspected the impact of metacognitive awareness on the fluency of 114 Iranian TEFL learners' task-based oral output. The participants in six intact classes were selected from a population of 120 English sophomores based on their scores on proficiency pre-test. The classes were randomly assigned as two tripartite groups of…

In the context of English as a global language in which the interaction is not only between native speakers and ESL speakers but also among non-native speakers themselves, there is a need to investigate how well L2 listeners can judge and successfully comprehend accented English produced by other L2 speakers; particularly, how the specific…

This study employed synthetic and meta-analytic techniques to review the literature on the Cognition Hypothesis, which predicts that increasing task complexity influences the quality of second language production. Based on 8 inclusion criteria, 17 published studies were synthesized according to key features. A subset of these studies (k = 9) was…

Among known communication systems, human language alone exhibits open-ended productivity of meaning. Interest in the psychological mechanisms supporting this ability, and their evolutionary origins, has resurged following the suggestion that the only uniquely human ability underlying language is a mechanism of recursion. This "Unique…

This study explores the influence of self-assessment of vocabulary competence on a group of students' oral fluency. Twenty-four young adult learners participated in a learning process that promoted their oral skills and vocabulary development. Self-assessment was mainly examined through the analysis of students' learning logs, field notes and…