This research focuses on speaking proficiency and successful second language speakers' traits using a survey and an interview. The participants in the study were in a short intensive course between four and six months, depending on the language they studied. The successful learner was defined as someone who received 1+ or above on the Interagency…

This study investigated the interactions between feedback type, proficiency, and the nature of the linguistic target in the learning of Chinese as a foreign language. Seventy-eight learners from two large US universities participated in the study. The participants were divided into two proficiency levels based on their performance on a…

This paper explores the role that culture plays in the classroom setting through Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions. Hofstede categorizes four dimensions of cultural differences, but this paper will focus on power distance, which Hofstede describes as the phenomenon in which less powerful members of a society accept inequality in power as a societal…

The topic of silence and "the Chinese learner" has been extensively studied often in relation to cross-cultural adjustment, intercultural issues, learning styles, language ability and differences of classroom expectations. These studies have often led to recommendations to understand silence and "the Chinese learner" in more…

The present meta-analysis examined the overall average correlation (weighted for sample size and corrected for measurement error) between passage-level second language (L2) reading comprehension and 10 key reading component variables investigated in the research domain. Four high-evidence correlates (with 18 or more accumulated effect sizes: L2…

This research focuses on speaking proficiency and successful second language speakers' traits using a survey and an interview. The participants in the study were in a short intensive course between four and six months, depending on the language they studied. The successful learner was defined as someone who received 1+ or above on the Interagency…

The objectives of this study are to describe 147 Thai elementary school teachers' English pronunciation competence and to identify a teacher variable that has an impact on their pronunciation. The instrument used to collect data consisted of two parts: a questionnaire to elicit Thai teachers' personal information (i.e., seven variables in all),…

Relations between bilingual children's patterns of conversational code-switching (responding to one language with another), the balance of their dual language input, and their expressive and receptive proficiency in two languages were examined in 115 2½-year-old simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S. Children were more likely to…

In the present study, we examined the relation of knowledge of semantic radicals to students' language proficiency and word reading for adult Chinese-as-a-foreign language students. Ninety-seven college students rated their proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing in Chinese, and were administered measures of receptive and…

This longitudinal study examined the role of oral proficiency on English reading comprehension, as measured with elicited narratives using a wordless picture book, "Frog Where are You?". The sample consisted 102 English language learners, including both Spanish and Cantonese speakers. Narrative samples were collected in the winter of…

Research on heritage language (HL) development and education has characterized the unique linguistic, sociocultural, and affective profiles of heritage-language (HL) students, yet foreign-language (FL) education has only begun to understand HL students in relation to non-heritage students (Carreira & Kagan, 2011; Felix, 2008). To deepen our…

This study investigates research writing anxiety and self-efficacy beliefs among English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) graduate students in engineering-related fields. The relationship between the two writing affective constructs was examined and students' perspectives on research writing anxiety were also explored. A total of 218 survey responses…

In order to develop a more scientific education system of Business English courses, this paper studies the case of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS, one of Chinese top-three foreign language universities) by questionnaires. The result shows that: 1) Most of the students hope that the school could add more business courses in the…

A yearlong classroom-based intervention was designed to explore the reading-writing connection in second-language literacy by examining whether the development of reading improves writing and vice versa. Middle school learners of English as a foreign language (N = 300) in South Korea were assigned to three treatments that involved extensive…

Vocabulary plays an important part in second language learning and there are many existing techniques to facilitate word acquisition. One of these methods is code-switching, or mixing the vocabulary of two languages in one sentence. In this paper the authors propose an experimental system for computer-assisted English vocabulary learning in…