The growing population of young English language learners (ELLs) in American schools creates an urgency for educators to understand, value, and support the wide array of students' native language practices as a way to support both the ELLs' first language and their native cultures and communities. Considerable research shows the importance of…

The purpose of this article is to examine how struggles over language ownership are played out in a minority language setting, focusing on the case of Irish in the Republic of Ireland. The article examines the more or less serious struggles that emerge between so-called native, or L1, and nonnative, or L2, speakers of Irish in a language learning…

The relationship between English Language Learners' (ELL) academic achievement and teacher education programs that prepare preservice teachers for working with those students has largely been ignored in the literature to date. This article reports findings from a study of how graduates from one elementary teacher education program, in which the…

The sociolinguistic phenomenon of bidialectism can significantly influence foreign-language learning. This study provides empirical evidence (drawn from the Greek Cypriot bidialectal community) for this influence and it supports the recommendation that foreign-language educators be trained in language-variation issues. The study's methodological…

This study modeled vocabulary trajectories in 91 English language learners (ELLs) with Punjabi, Tamil, or Portuguese home languages, and 50 English monolinguals (EL1) from Grades 1 to 6. The concurrent and longitudinal relationships between phonological awareness and phonological short-term memory and vocabulary were examined. ELLs underperformed…

The use of computer-supported collaborative learning is more and more commonplace in language learning classrooms; this has given rise to the need for more research on roles and processes of telecollaboration in language teaching and learning and how online interactions are integrated with face-to-face classroom activities. Using a data-driven,…

This paper examines the use of CMC in both Japanese and English dominated "domains" by Australian learners of Japanese. The natural, social online communication of 12 Australian university students with 18 of their Japanese contacts was collected for a period of up to four years, resulting in a corpus of approximately 2,000 instances of…

There is growing interest in language barriers in health care (LBHC)--interest, that is, in how the quality of health care service delivery might be compromised when patients and health care providers do not share the same first language. This article discusses LBHC as an emerging research area that provides valuable opportunities for researchers…

This study examines the differences in the interpretation of ten "in context" verbal probability expressions used in accounting standards between native Chinese speaking and native English speaking accounting students in United Kingdom universities. The study assesses the degree of grouping factors consensus on the numerical…

English language learners represent the fastest growing segment of the U.S. school-age population, raising the question of how best to teach this new and challenging group of students. The research and scholarly literature has identified a number of instructional strategies and classroom practices that have been shown to be effective in teaching…

With the change of focus in language teaching from grammar-based approaches to more communicative approaches, contextual language learning gained importance and found body in the English Language classroom. Global issues constitute one of the most popular contexts for purposeful language learning and meaningful language use. Increasing number of…

This study examines the effects of working memory capacity and content familiarity on literal and inferential comprehension in second language (L2) reading. Participants were 62 Turkish university students with an advanced English proficiency level. Working memory capacity was measured through a computerized version of a reading span test, whereas…

In this article I examine the collocational behaviour of groups of semantically related verbs (e.g., "head, run, manage") and nouns (e.g., "issue, factor, aspect") from the domain of business English. The results of this corpus-based study show that much of the collocational behaviour exhibited by these lexical items can be explained by examining…

Currently postgraduate hospitality courses are attracting large numbers of international students, many of whom do not speak English as a first language. In addition, these programmes are also popular with first language students drawn from non-traditional academic backgrounds. Both cohorts experience difficulties with the academic genre…

Libben and Titone (2009) recently observed that cognate facilitation and interlingual homograph interference were attenuated by increased semantic constraint during bilingual second language (L2) reading, using eye movement measures. We now investigate whether cross-language activation also occurs during first language (L1) reading as a function…