This study examined the academic persistence of 10 undergraduate Hispanic nontraditional students enrolled at a public and a private not for profit Hispanic Serving Institution in the southeastern region of the United States, each in their last year of a bachelor degree program. Using a phenomenological research design and an ecological and…

In our study we investigated second and foreign language (L2) sentence readability, an area little explored so far in the case of several languages, including Swedish. The outcome of our research consists of two methods for sentence selection from native language corpora based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML)…

This study investigated the change of listeners' responses of Japanese learners of English over a semester of presentation training sessions. We were also concerned with the relationship between speaking ability and perceived use of listeners' responses. In this paper, the listeners' responses we focused on were: acknowledging signals, repetition…

This paper investigates the effect of multiple cultures and languages on the bilingual utterances of Libyan children who live in the United States and who have acquired English after they arrived there at ages from 3 to 5. Data analysis is based on the Markedness Model (Myers-Scotton, 1993) in order to determine which language is the unmarked code…

Since the 1980s' decoupling of the formal study of second language acquisition from pedagogical concerns, the social relevance of such research has been of little concern. Early studies, in the 1970s, of uninstructed adult learners' acquisition of morphosyntax pointed to social implications: these working class immigrants had varying levels of…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of cognitive-linguistic variables and language experience on behavioral and kinematic measures of nonword learning in young adults. Group 1 consisted of thirteen participants who spoke American English as the first and only language. Group 2 consisted of seven participants with varying…

This paper considers the issue raised in 2008 by Gillian Brown in her article "Selective listening" regarding whether nouns are "privileged" in memory over verbs during listening tasks, and whether attention to nouns, at least in the early stages of L2 learning, is a desirable strategy to be taught to learners, as Brown…

The present study aimed at investigating the effect of dynamic assessment on EFL learners' reading comprehension in different proficiency levels. 197 Iranian university students participated in six groups of this study. The design of the research was quasi-experimental. The results of MANOVA test revealed that while dynamic assessment had…

This study uses eye-tracking to examine the processing of case-marking information in ambiguous subject- and object-first wh-questions in German. The position of the lexical verb was also manipulated via verb tense to investigate whether verb location influences how intermediate L2 learners process L2 sentences. Results show that intermediate L2…

This article explores the notion of agency in language learning and use as discursively, historically, and socially mediated. It further explores how agency can be understood as variously enabled and constrained as individuals move from one cultural, linguistic, and/or geographical space to another. These explorations focus on how agency is…

Learners of English might be familiar with several online monolingual dictionaries that are not necessarily the best choices for the English as Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) context. Although these monolingual online dictionaries contain definitions, pronunciation guides, and other elements normally found in general-use dictionaries, they are…

The controversies surrounding written error correction can be traced to Truscott (1996) in his polemic against written error correction. He claimed that empirical studies showed that error correction was ineffective and that this was to be expected "given the nature of the correction process and "the nature of language learning" (p. 328, emphasis…

The Achieving Success Everyday (ASE) group model is used to promote self-esteem and academic performance of English as a second language (ESL) students. The findings from the preliminary data indicated that the participants' self-esteem was significantly improved after participation in the group. There was no significant improvement in the total…

This paper examines the acquisition of interpretable features in English second language (L2) learners of Spanish by investigating the personal preposition a in Spanish. The distribution of a in direct object NPs relates to the animacy/specificity of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject, and the semantics of the predicate (Torrego, 1998;…

This study examines the reading patterns of native speakers (NSs) and high-level (Chinese) nonnative speakers (NNSs) on three English sentence types involving temporarily ambiguous structural configurations. The reading patterns on each sentence type indicate that both NSs and NNSs were biased toward specific structural interpretations. These…