This article discusses issues related to oral assessment of school knowledge of L2-educated students. In particular, it examines benefits and disadvantages of students being tested in their L1 (their dominant language) and in their L2 (their language of instruction). The study draws on the data from 37 high school students studying in a content…

Background: Young females have been found to out-perform males in terms of grades and university degrees in many studies. At the same time, young women seem to exhibit lower levels of well-being compared with men. Interestingly, little work has evaluated the interplay between educational success and well-being. However, antecedents and…

Immersion education in Finland is a one-way (monolingual) early total Swedish programme for Finnish-speaking students. This immersion provision is offered at kindergarten level (ages 3-5), at preschool (age 6) and at primary levels (grades 1-9). Here, a brief synthesis of Finnish research studies on the early years in Swedish immersion is first…

We investigate the current position of English in the language ecology of Swedish academia, with a special focus on the humanities. Semi-structured interviews with 15 informants from the fields of Anthropology, General Linguistics and History were carried out to explore how non-native speakers of English experience using academic English in their…

Content-based instruction (CBI) adopts a second language (L2) as the medium of instruction for some or all academic subjects to facilitate L2 learning. There seem however, no uniform policies concerning which academic subjects should be taught in L2, in case only some subjects are involved. Conventional wisdom tends to favour Humanities subjects…

University learning objectives and the curriculum have evolved to include more knowledge, skills and aptitudes related to the increasingly international nature of a broad range of professions and occupations. More broadly, graduates are expected to know more about the world outside their home country in order to be informed and responsible…

Background/Context: Relying largely on high school measures of home language use, the literature examining immigrant incorporation in schools provides contradictory evidence of home language effects on educational outcomes. More recent research has demonstrated that home language use is dynamic and thus it is important to examine the implications…

Purpose: This study had 4 primary purposes: (a) to describe the oral narrative performance of typically developing African American prekindergarten children with commonly used macro- and microstructure measures; (b) to examine the concurrent and (c) predictive relations between narrative performance, spoken dialect use, vocabulary, and story…

This paper analyzes the results of a corpus-based study on the usage of metadiscourse in argumentative writing by Malaysian college students. The aims of the study is to examine the frequency and distribution of metadiscourse used by the particular students in argumentative writing as well as to analyze the errors that made by the particular…

A central issue in language testing is the choice of norms, and the need to reconcile notions of "standard" English with local language norms and features. Data from studies of international intelligibility indicate that some features of "standard" language descriptions, based on native-speaker language use, are not essential…

Understanding the relationship between children's cultural and linguistic diversity and child, caregiver, and environmental characteristics is important to ensure appropriate educational expectations and provisions. As part of the Longitudinal Outcomes of Children with Hearing Impairment (LOCHI) study, children's caregivers and educators completed…

In Asia, we are witnessing an era where the pendulum of power is swaying towards the East with the rising economic strength of China and India. Singapore is at the "crossroads" between the East and West of these most populous nations on earth. Although Singapore may appear the most Westernised country in Asia, she is nevertheless a…

The aim of this study is to point out the relationship between foreign language learning motivation and sign language use among hearing impaired Hungarians. In the article we concentrate on two main issues: first, to what extent hearing impaired people are motivated to learn foreign languages in a European context; second, to what extent sign…

The effect of studying abroad on students' language production has been extensively researched. However, a question that has not been addressed is whether study abroad programs lasting six weeks or less offer sufficient time and contact for students to demonstrate measurable development in their command of the language. The current investigation…

This paper examines why Maori language needs to be taught accurately at the early stages of initial teacher education programmes and continue for the duration of a teacher education student's degree. If teacher education faculties are permitting their students to mispronounce Maori names or words, they are in fact doing a disservice, not only to…