Children who start formal education in a second language may experience slower vocabulary growth in that language and subsequently experience disadvantages in literacy acquisition. The current study asked whether lexical specificity training can stimulate bilingual children's phonological awareness, which is considered to be a precursor to…

This article examines the relative effects of two treatments--goal setting and visualization--on enhancing Willingness to Communicate (WTC) among a group of 373 Japanese university EFL learners. Although longitudinal studies in both EFL and ESL settings have been conducted to examine the developmental aspect of WTC, no solid results of enhancing…

While there exists a considerable body of literature on task-based difficulty and second language (L2) fluency in English as a second language (ESL), there has been little investigation with French learners. This mixed methods study examines learner appraisals of task difficulty and their relationship to automated utterance fluency measures in…

The population of English learners (ELs) is increasing dramatically and teachers need to learn how advocate for these often marginalized students. This study investigates various syllabi from English as a second language pre-service teacher course work that are aimed at preparing future teachers to advocate for ELs. The researchers employed…

In place of categorical hypotheses for rejection or acceptance of isolated or integrated form-focused instruction (FFI) in (quasi) experimental studies, this survey was intended to gauge the complementary versus competing nature of isolated and integrated FFI from learners' perspective. The impetus behind this study was the overwhelming lack of…

Drawing on second language (L2) motivation constructs modelled on Dörnyei's (2009) L2 Motivational Self System, this study explores the relationship between language testing experience and the motivation to learn English among young adolescents (aged 12-15) in South Korea. A 40-item questionnaire was administered to middle-school students (N =…

The aim of this study is to explore the current use of mobile phones in a foreign language teaching context where English is used as the medium of instruction by prospective teachers. To this end, it presents the views of prospective English teachers on utilizing the mobile phone as an instructional tool for foreign language learning purposes in…

This is one of several studies conducted by the Office of Shared Accountability that evaluated students identified as eligible for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) services in Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools (MCPS). This study has two major purposes: (1) to examine English proficiency levels and progress in English…

Much research has been done on blended learning and the design of tasks most appropriate for online environments and computer-mediated communication. Increasingly, language teachers and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) practitioners recognise the different nature of communications in online settings and in face-to-face settings; teachers do not…

With the advances in technology, wordlists retrieved from computer corpora have become increasingly popular in recent years. The lexical items in those wordlists are usually selected, according to a set of robust frequency and dispersion criteria, from large corpora of authentic and naturally occurring language. Corpus wordlists are of great value…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has become a part of contemporary Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems. ASR systems however are being criticized for their erroneous performance especially when utilized as a mean to develop skills in a Second Language (L2) where errors are not tolerated. Nevertheless, these errors can…

The present research examines whether adults who learn a second language (L2) mainly in a classroom setting can develop linguistic representations that are qualitatively similar to those of native speakers for linguistic content that is not explicitly taught in the classroom. It does so by focusing on the domains of speech processing and speech…

Factors, such as treatment complexity and duration, language proficiency, and educational context (EFL vs. ESL), can significantly influence language performance in experimental studies. The purpose of the present meta-analysis is to investigate the degree to which these causal factors influence linguistic improvement in studies of the English…

This paper reports on students' pair-work interactions to develop their speaking skills in an ELT classroom which consisted of international learners. A number of 16 learners of intermediate proficiency with IELTS score band 5.5 were observed. The teacher had paired those he considered among them to be the more competent ones (hereafter, stronger)…

This work explores the use of an adaptive mobile tool for language learning. A school-based deployment study showed that the tool supported learning. A second study is being conducted in informal learning environments. Current work focuses on building models that increase our understanding of the relationship between application usage and learning.