Recent studies have uncovered substantial individual differences in first language (L1) language attainment across the lifespan and across multiple components of language. The existence of such variability raises the question of its role in second language (L2) learning. The existing body of research on L1-L2 relationships has primarily targeted…

This longitudinal study investigates whether the development in executive control and bilingual experience predicts change in language control in bilingual children. Children were tested twice over the course of 1 year, using the language-switching paradigm and the Simon task. The participants were Japanese-English bilingual "returnee"…

While the debate regarding bilingual benefits persists within the cognitive sciences, education research has documented various functions that heritage languages (HL) serve their speakers through bicultural adaptation. The present study adopted a mixed-methods approach to gauge HL proficiency and use, cultural participation and ethnic and…

The ethnic match between teachers and students is widely believed to be beneficial for the achievement of ethnic minority students, who often lag behind their ethnic majority peers. In a quasi-experimental vignette study, we investigated whether preservice teachers who shared the same ethnic background as the student in the vignette had different…

In parallel with the spread of English as an international language of communication, English Medium Instruction (EMI) has rapidly gained importance in Turkish tertiary education but also brought some controversy among students and academics. It is important to clarify the prevailing situation in order to enhance the quality of instruction.…

It cannot be overemphasised that French language is a foreign language in Nigeria and that its teaching and learning cannot take the same process as acquiring/learning the mother tongue or a second language. Foreign language learning requires some strategic applications in order to be able to interact with the native speakers in real life day to…

This is the first in a series of briefs the Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC) will release on long-term English learners (LTELs). The full study will examine LTELs in Texas, with particular focus on 10 Houston-area public school districts. Currently, there is no formal definition of LTEL in Texas. The purpose of this brief was to…

This paper presents Academic Language Proficiency and how to use general and content-specific vocabulary, specialized or complex grammatical structures-all for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge and skills. English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has emerged out of the broader field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). EAP teachers often…

The present study contributes to our understanding of the effects of age and type of linguistic input in the acquisition of Spanish as a second language in adulthood. I examine the Spanish syntax (word order) of three groups of speakers, monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico and two bilingual English-Spanish speakers born and raised in the…

Comprehending a mathematical modelling task is a central prerequisite for the following modelling process. In this study, we investigated the roles that the language proficiency of the students and the linguistic wording of the task play for the comprehension and the successful solving of mathematical modelling tasks. Five mathematical tasks with…

The present article is concerned with how Swedish students in the last year of comprehensive school make sense and use of educational assessments of their school performance. Based on interviews with 28 students in Year 9, "talk about assessments" is analysed using a discourse analytical approach inspired by Michel Foucault's theories.…

Linguistically and cognitively speaking, functional (extended) projections are more abstract and structurally more complicated than lexical projections. Acquiring functional projections could be problematic for second language learners and thus a crucial issue to be considered by language instructors and curriculum developers. The present study…

Acquisition of verbs and their syntactic and semantic properties can act as the core of any sentence across languages. EFL learners encounter learnability problems in the perception of English verbs' argument structures manifested by different verbs. The current study aimed at investigating and diagnosing the problems Iranian EFL learners face…

This study is designed to explore the role of second language (L2) English learners' working memory (WM), language proficiency, and age in the processing and comprehension of English anaphoric sentences. To this end, 40 EFL learners participated in the study. The proficiency levels of the participants varied from elementary to high-intermediate,…

This review summarizes features of professional development programs that aim to prepare in-service teachers to improve students' academic language proficiency when teaching subject areas. The 38 studies reviewed suggest that all of the profiled interventions were effective to some extent. The programs share many characteristics considered…