We examined negative transfer from English and Spanish to Portuguese pronunciation. Participants were native English speakers, some of whom spoke Spanish. Participants completed a computer-based Portuguese pronunciation tutorial and then pronounced trained letter-to-sound correspondences in unfamiliar Portuguese words; some shared orthographic…

This article presents a study of written development in English as a foreign language produced in a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) environment. The texts analysed, from history classes, were collected annually over the four-year obligatory junior secondary education program from the same students (aged 12 to 16), in two state…

It has long been suggested that, in a bilingual setting, the proficiencies achieved in the first (L1) and second (L2) language may have a bearing on a subject's cognitive and, consequently, academic functioning. The study is set in Malta, a country in which Maltese (L1) and English (L2) are learnt simultaneously at school from age 5. It…

This article is based on a study conducted at the first Arabic and Hebrew bilingual school in Israel (Neve-Shalom/Wahat-Alsalam--NSWAS). The article focuses on Jewish as well as Palestinian parents' perspectives and responses to survey questions and interviews conducted at the school. Parents named reasons for choosing the school, satisfaction…

Studies on monolingual children have shown that home language and literacy support is crucial in children's early literacy acquisition. However, such support has not been examined as thoroughly among bilingual children, including heritage speakers. This study investigated the effect of home language and literacy support on important precursors of…

In this article, the authors describe a Southern California school district's application of response to intervention for all students to bring about successful academic outcomes. Chula Vista Elementary School District's strong commitment to addressing all students' needs using response to intervention, with particular attention to English…

The current study compares the responses and statements of English as a second language (ESL) and content area teachers in discussions about the instruction of English language learners (ELLs). A study on how these two sets of teachers understand the field is important because commonalities and differences in their opinions may have an impact on…

Purpose: Bilingual aphasia generally affects both languages. However, the age of acquisition of the second language (L2) seems to play a role in the anatomo-functional correlation of the syntactical/grammatical processes, thus potentially influencing the L2 syntactic impairment following a stroke. The present study aims to analyze the influence of…

This study investigated the use of comics (Cary, 2004) in a guided writing experience in secondary school Italian language learning. The main focus of the peer group interaction task included the exploration of visual sequencing and visual integration (Bailey, O'Grady-Jones, & McGown, 1995) using image and text to create a comic strip narrative in…

The central focus of this research has been to document immigrant and non-immigrant students' storytelling practices and cultural knowledge and identify how these might be adapted as "cultural data sets" for academic literary study in ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous, middle-grade classrooms. Such data sets, however, have limited use…

We investigated how long-term retention of new words was affected by task type, number of word occurrences in the teaching materials and the combination of the two factors. The tasks were: reading a text with occasional Focus on Form when learners used dictionaries (T+F), or reading a text with Focus on Forms, i.e. word focused exercises (T+Fs).…

Motivation has been studied throughout the field of language acquisition for the past 20 years. Demotivation has also been researched in Japan at primarily the university and high school level. To provide a deeper understanding of demotivation for Japanese junior and senior high school learners, this study explores the following three questions.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the Iranian EFL learners' beliefs on the role of RL in vocabulary learning, and how it could affect their achievement. One-hundred and three students majoring in English (Literature, Translation, and Teaching) at the Departments of Foreign Languages and Linguistics at Roudehen and the Western Branch of…

Taking an assertive stance toward research being reviewed or reported is a challenging task for second language writers. This aspect of interpersonal meaning is especially difficult to address through direct instruction, as attention to particular grammatical and lexical choices outside of contexts of use is not enough to help students develop the…

EAP courses usually not only aim to improve students' level of English but also to convey useful academic study skills and introduce students to the common genres of their discipline. These are extra skills and information other international students do not have ready access to. Yet, few studies have focused on how the academic experiences of…