This special issue of the "Heritage Language Journal", guest edited by Silvina Montrul, unites four papers on different aspects of heritage Spanish speakers' linguistic abilities. In this commentary, we reexamine these important contributions with an eye toward implications for instruction and toward general trends for the field. In particular, we…

The moral conduct of organizations is ultimately dependent on the discrete actions of individuals. The authors address the scholarly and managerial imperative of how individuals combine various cognitions in their ethical decision making. The study extends the understanding of ethical decision making by exploring relationships among Theory of…

Purpose: This research investigated the expository language skills of young school-age children with the ultimate aim of obtaining normative data for clinical practice. Specifically, this study examined (a) the level of expository language performance of 6- and 7-year-old children with typical development and (b) age-related differences between…

Research pertaining to science museum exhibit design tends to be articulated at a level of generality that makes it difficult to apply in practice. To address this issue, the present study used a design-based research approach to understand the educational potential of a biology exhibit. The exhibit was considered an educational environment which…

The present study examined cross-linguistic relationships between phonological awareness in L1 (Hebrew) and L2 (English) among normal (N = 30) and reading disabled (N = 30) Hebrew native speaking college students. Further, it tested the effect of two factors: the lexical status of the stimulus word (real word vs. pseudoword) and the linguistic…

In this article, I discuss a case of pre-primary and primary school teacher education concerning place value in number representation. In primary school (in Italy, in grades 1 and 2), the topic is usually introduced by means of manipulatives (for instance, abaci and base ten blocks). But it is well known that no artefact is transparent for…

Early acquired words are processed faster than later acquired words in lexical and semantic tasks. Demonstrating such age of acquisition (AoA) effects beyond reasonable doubt, and then investigating those effects empirically, is complicated by the natural correlation between AoA and other word properties such as frequency and imageability. In an…

Granted the fact that different cultures have different speaking styles, knowledge of these styles can help people grasp the essence of social cultural knowledge to communicate with others more successfully. In this regard, the present paper aims at comparing the use of speech act of gratitude in Persian and Chinese EFL learners and English native…

Three-month-old Cameroonian Nso farmer and German middle-class infants were compared regarding learning and retention in a computerized mobile task. Infants achieving a preset learning criterion during reinforcement were tested for immediate and long-term retention measured in terms of an increased response rate after reinforcement and after a…

This study investigated whether eye-tracking technology could be employed as a measure of noticing of corrective feedback (in the form of explicit recasts) during NS-NNS task-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). Pairs of university-level learners of English (n = 18) engaged in a short chat interaction task with a native…

Teaching grammar is still a topic of heated debate in second/foreign language teaching. One major approach to teaching grammar holds that the learners should receive reactive focus on form in the context of communicative language teaching. The present study is an attempt to examine the effect of task repetition along with reactive focus on form on…

This study investigates the cross-cultural realization of request patterns. The goal of the study is to compare the realization of requests produced by adult American English speaking learners of Russian (NNS) to that of native speakers of Russian and native speakers of English to identify the similarities and differences between native and…

Since the mid-1990s, the link between recasts and L2 development has been extensively tested, and the results from those studies have largely demonstrated that recasts have a positive effect on L2 learning. With this firm support from previous empirical evidence, studies have begun to focus on how recasts assist learning and under what conditions…

The vital role of principalship in improving schools in general and enhancing student achievement in particular has been well documented. Given its importance, there is a need for tools to improve principalship, particularly ones emphasizing those dimensions associated with student achievement. Given the accountability movement, with its…

An important goal of history education is the development of a chronological frame of reference that can be used to interpret and date historical images and documents. Despite the importance of this contextualization goal, little is known about the knowledge and strategies that allow students to situate information historically. Two studies were…