This article reports on an exploratory study that examines how social networks can be used in foreign language teaching and learning. Qualitative data including interviews, online observations, and students' responses to open-ended survey questions was collected. The data suggests that there are both advantages and challenges associated with using…

Mobile technologies have been successfully implemented in language learning, and have supported various innovative designs. However, many of these designs require considerable technical knowledge and support that are beyond the workload capacity of most language teachers. This paper discusses a study using an over-the-market mobile device combined…

This paper is based on a qualitative inquiry that investigated the role of teachers' mediation in three different modes of coding in a kindergarten foreign language classroom in China (i.e. L2-coded intralinguistic mediation, L1-coded cross-lingual mediation, and L2-and-L1-mixed mediation). Through an exploratory examination of the varying effects…

This study investigates task-related variation in learner performance in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environment. For our study, we collected data from 15 beginner and then intermediate second language (L2) learners of German who worked on 3 distinct activity types over 16 months: free composition, translation, and sentence…

This study explores the roles of depth and breadth of lexical repertoire in L2 lexical inferencing success and incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading. Students read a graded reader containing 13 pseudo-words and attempted to infer the meanings of underlined target words. The Word Associates Test (WAT, Read, 2004) and the Vocabulary…

This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic "wh"-clefts such as "what our brains do is complicated information processing" in 160 lectures drawn from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. Like much linguistic research on this academic genre, the investigation is motivated by the…

Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 10) to test pre-attentive speech discrimination in two language contexts. ERPs were recorded while participants silently read magazines in English or Spanish. Two speech contrast conditions were recorded in each language context. In the "phonemic in English"…

I interrogate my personal diaries documenting my life in New York, Beijing, Tokyo, and Sydney over a 20-year period. Taking bearings from Bakhtinian thoughts, I explore the emergence of my post-diasporic identity as a second generation Korean American through watching South Korean dramas. By conversing with journals kept over a 20-year period, I…

Texts are routinely simplified to make them more comprehensible for second language learners. However, the effects of simplification upon the linguistic features of texts remain largely unexplored. Here we examine the effects of one type of text simplification: intuitive text simplification. We use the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, to examine…

Foreign Language in Elementary School (FLES) teachers in the West Des Moines schools incorporate the Day of the Dead into the fourth grade curriculum each year. The teachers discuss the Day of the Dead celebration at the Art Center, and many ask for volunteers from fourth grade to participate in the event. Student presentations include a wide…

A group of 87 teacher certification candidates in a program at a large university in Southern California took the California Teaching Performance Assessment task for assessing learners in 2004-2005. These candidates' tests were analyzed with qualitative research methods and their scores calculated with quantitative methods. Subsequently, three…

The present study utilizes texts from social psychology to examine the effects of textual enhancements on reading comprehension with 185 native adult Chinese speakers learning English in China. Participants read two different vignettes, either with or without an adjunct. Each adjunct consisted of a "what" question along with instructions…

This study explores how readers' interest, gender, and test types (multiple-choice questions, Yes/No questions, and short-answer formats) affect second language reading comprehension in three different levels and five different categories of topics. A questionnaire was administered to 168 Turkish EFL students to find out the gender-oriented topic…

Discussions about the adult L2 learning capacity often take as their starting point stages where considerable L2 knowledge has already been accumulated. This paper probes the absolute earliest stages of learning and investigates what lexical knowledge adult learners can extract from complex, continuous speech in an unknown language after minimal…

We review empirical findings from children with primary or "specific" language impairment (PLI) and children who learn a single language from birth (L1) and a second language (L2) beginning in childhood. The PLI profile is presented in terms of both language and nonlinguistic features. The discussion of L2 learners emphasizes variable patterns of…