This study investigated the contextual, social, language, and learning factors that influence the success of Latino preschoolers transitioning to kindergarten. Data were collected on 112 Latino children who completed a four-week preschool program focusing on English language and school readiness skills. Predictive analyses indicate that their…

In the following article the author presents a methodological framework for the teaching of intercomprehension. Competence in intercomprehension is seen as a realisation of the general human faculty for using and understanding language, which includes the ability to comprehend texts and utterances in "unfamiliar" languages. This competence can be…

In its position statement, the International Reading Association states that technology needs to be an integral part of literacy instruction. This article describes two ways of integrating technology into an EAP curriculum that focuses on building students' reading and writing skills. In essence, the goal of the article is to demonstrate that…

Twelve languages--including the two prestigious colonial languages, English and French, a French-based creole and "ancestral" languages, such as Hindi and Mandarin--are spoken on the multiethnic island Mauritius. Given the multilingual and multiethnic nature of the nation, linguistic practices are an important way for Mauritians to…

This study uses the foreign language classroom to examine students' beliefs about learning, perceptions of goal attainment, and motivation to continue language study. Survey and interview results indicated students' attributions for success and failure and their expectations for certain subjects' learnability played a role in the relationship…

Five experiments are reported in which the picture naming performance of bilingual speakers in a language-switching task was explored. In Experiment 1, Spanish learners of Catalan and Korean learners of Spanish were asked to perform a switching task between their first and dominant language (L1, Spanish or Korean) and their second language (L2,…

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as "evaluation," "stance" and "metadiscourse," have attracted increasing attention in the literature over the last 10 years and now form an important element of many ESP courses. A relatively overlooked interpersonal feature, however,…

It has been suggested that the ability to learn a foreign language is related to working memory. However, there is no clear evidence about which component of working memory may be involved. Two experiments investigated working memory problems in groups of seventh and eighth grade Italian children with difficulties in learning English as a second…

In the area of language teaching, a large number of learner corpora investigations have tended to rely on empirical data to identify common types of errors which illustrate inauthentic usages in a target language. One consequence of this kind of investigations is that such studies rarely, if ever, consider the inextricable link between language…

Japanese students often feel it difficult to acquire communicative skills in English at school. Although many of them appear to have positive, favorable attitudes towards learning English, their annual Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) total score means has been consistently low. The present paper discusses this paradox from two points…

Today, language-minority students comprise one of the fastest-growing segments of the total student population in America, a culturally and linguistically diverse group. A large number of bilingual students fall into the at-risk category because their cultural and linguistic backgrounds put them at a disadvantage in the American educational system…

This article presents the results of a qualitative research study conducted in one Texas urban middle school. One of the purposes of the study was to investigate the instructional methods used by regular classroom teachers to address the unique needs of ESL students recently main-streamed into these teachers' regular content classes. In this…

Alternative assessment procedures have made consistent inroads into second and foreign language assessment practices over the last decade. The original impetus for alternative assessment methods has been predicated more on the ideological appeal this approach offers than on firm empirical evidence that alternative assessment approaches actually…

The study investigated reading errors made by Ethiopian learners of Hebrew (n=34). These newcomers to Israel, unlike other groups such as the Russian Jews, typically have low literacy skills in their first language (Amharic). Their ability to read Hebrew, as judged on a reading comprehension test, was still poor after living in Israel for seven…

The present study examined factors that influence the process of learning to read in a second language. The Hebrew reading comprehension skills of 68 Russian-speaking children (mean age 7 years 6 months) were screened at the start of Grade 2. From this sample, 40 participants were selected: 20 successful learners and 20 unsuccessful learners.…