The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine and gain a clearer understanding of the perceptions of foreign language learning of adult foreign language learners attending a South-West Missouri community college. This study was based on the Multiple Intelligence (MI) theory of Howard Gardner. It examined the perceptions of adult language…

This dissertation is a variationist account of two non-standard relative clause (RC) structures in Spanish: resumptive pronouns (RPs) and prepositional-phrase (PP) chopping. Previous typological studies considered RP explanations based on difficulty of processing (Hawkins, 1994), while Spanish-specific quantitative studies proposed a number of…

Many of the commercial Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) programs available today typically take a generic approach. This approach standardizes the program so that it can be used to teach any language merely by translating the content from one language to another. These CALL programs rarely consider the cultural background or preferred…

This descriptive study utilized frequency data to identify and describe the learning strategy preferences of English as a Second Language learners at an Intensive English Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Qualitative data were gathered by journals, observations, and interviews. Additionally, feedback from teacher observations were gathered. The 36…

Communicative competence is set out to be of the eight key competences which individuals need for personal fulfilment and development, active citizenship, social inclusion and employment (European Commission 2004, p. 3). The success of the sustainable development of communicative competence requires existing concepts of communicative competence…

This paper investigates the impact of content validity of language tests on both teacher and learner. Educational evaluation produces too much stress in both teacher and learner, but it is given less attention by the teacher than any other teaching tasks. This inconvenience comes from the doubt with which this topic is approached. Tests are…

This paper presents the perspectives of youth participating in the Society for Educational Visits and Exchanges in Canada's Volunteer Youth Experience (VYE) as gathered by way of pre- and post-program questionnaires, observations, interviews, and journals. The pan-Canadian questionnaire results suggest that this short, bilingual volunteer…

This article attempts to highlight the importance of theoretical linguistics and empirical cognitive linguistics studies for the practical teaching of Spanish as a second language. Looking at the domain of subject pronominal use as an example, I endeavor to show how formal linguistics can be useful to language instructors. This is a significant…

This study adopted a multilevel modeling (MLM) approach to examine the contribution of rater and essay factors to variability in ESL essay holistic scores. Previous research aiming to explain variability in essay holistic scores has focused on either rater or essay factors. The few studies that have examined the contribution of more than one…

Little is known about the language acquisition of refugees in Western countries. This study examines how pre- and post-migration characteristics of refugees are related to their second language proficiency. Data are from a survey of 3,500 refugees, who were born in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, former Yugoslavia and Somalia, and who resided in the…

This paper presents the results of an acoustic analysis of English diphthongs produced by three L1 speakers of Hindi and four L1 speakers of Punjabi. Formant trajectories of rising and falling diphthongs (i.e., vowels where there is a clear rising or falling trajectory through the F1/F2 vowel space) were analysed in a corpus of citation-form…

Since "multicompetence" was proposed by Cook, there have been debates about the nature of distinction between monocompetence and multicompetence, the distinctiveness of languages in the mind and the homogeneity of language knowledge across speakers and contexts. The paper will address these issues from a linguistic perspective and make an attempt…

Professional standards for the teaching profession have received considerable attention over the last decade in Australia and internationally. Teachers of languages and cultures in Australia have been active in this period in developing their own professional standards, supported by a series of nationally funded projects arising from federal…

This article discusses the production of English speech sounds by advanced Cantonese ESL learners in Hong Kong. A total of forty university students participated in the study, which included three speech production tasks investigating participants' production of target English speech sounds in isolated words, minimal pairs and passages. The…

This article is based upon a presentation given at the Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) held in Denver, Colorado, in March 2009. That presentation reviewed some of the recent attempts from within our research community to "tell the story" of our field over several decades. It explored how the discourse of these narratives contributes to…