There is a general recognition that learning of foreign languages is in decline in Australia. This paper uses the social constructivist theory as a conceptual framework to report on a project where university language students supported their high school peers in the learning of their specialist language in New South Wales, Australia. The project…

This article draws on research with a group of refugee women who attend English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classes at a community center in London. It considers the role education can play in their social integration processes, employing an approach that has been developed from feminist notions of empowerment and social practice…

Britain's already poor record for language learning might be exacerbated by the Global English phenomenon, in that utilitarian reasons for learning languages other than English are increasingly undermined (Lanvers, 2014; Lo Bianco, 2014). This article offers a state-of-the-art review of UK research on second language (L2) learning motivation and…

This study uses a mixed-effects model to examine the acquisition of targetlike patterns of phonological variation by 17 English-speaking learners of French during study abroad in France. Naturalistic speech data provide evidence for the incipient acquisition of a phonological variable showing sociostylistic variation in native speaker speech: the…

In this study we examined language learners' attentional processing of a target syntactic construction in written L2 input in different input conditions, the change in learners' knowledge of the targeted construction in these conditions, and the relationship between the change in knowledge and attentional processing. One hundred L2 learners of…

Contemporary foreign-language education focuses on the development of multicultural language personality of the university graduate, who has necessary competencies to implement in professional activities. One of such competences is professionally-oriented foreign language communicative competence that is responsible for the capability of a future…

This longitudinal study examined the contribution of morphological awareness to English as a Second Language (ESL) reading comprehension. Young Chinese-speaking ESL learners completed twice with a one-year interval the same set of tasks that measured derivational awareness, vocabulary breadth, fluency of reading derived words, and passage…

This paper investigates the use of lexical bundles in Chinese students' academic writing across different levels of studies at an English medium university. Frequency-based bundles were retrieved from a corpus of student academic texts written at four points of time between Year 1 and Year 4, and the structures and functions of the bundles were…

In this article, we describe and evaluate an innovative pedagogical task designed to raise awareness of Global Englishes and to challenge standard language ideology in an English language classroom. The task encouraged the learning and debate of the controversial Speak Good English Movement, which campaigns for Singaporeans to use a…

The relationship between language learners' L1 and L2 writing productions has attracted the attention of researchers since Kaplan (1966). Along this research line, the present study aimed to explore the reverse transfer of rhetorical patterns from English (L2) to Persian (L1) in the argumentative essays of EFL students in Iran. Sixty MA university…

According to recent modifications in Turkish educational system, English language teaching starts in the second grade. Young learners studying in this grade were in the focus in this study. This paper reported on the findings of a mixed method study conducted in three different primary schools in the west of Turkey. The main aim was to represent…

This study aims at determining the relationship between language labs and the effective ways of mastering better performance of English language. The study raised two questions. They are "Is language laboratory useful in teaching English to Saudi students?" And "How do language labs help in improving students' performance?"…

We study the learnability problem concerning the dative alternations in English (Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989). We consider how first language learners productively apply the double-object and to-dative constructions ("give the book to library"/"give the library the book"), while excluding negative exceptions ("donate the…

This study explores the extent to which topic and background knowledge of topic affect spoken performance in a high-stakes speaking test. It is argued that evidence of a substantial influence may introduce construct-irrelevant variance and undermine test fairness. Data were collected from 81 non-native speakers of English who performed on 10…

Background: In spite of considerable advancements in our understanding of the different factors involved in achieving vocabulary-learning success, the overall pattern and interrelationships of critical factors involved in L2 vocabulary learning--particularly, the mechanisms through which learners regulate their motivation and learning…