This study examined health insurance disparities among recent immigrants. The authors analyzed all working-age adult immigrants between the ages of 18 and 64 using the New Immigrant Survey data collected in 2003. This survey is a cross-sectional interview of recent legal permanent residents on their social, economic, and health status. Respondents…

Numerous studies acknowledge that the well-being of our nation hinges on the health of its people. There is specific concern about children because they represent the future. Ignoring children's health needs can compromise their educational preparedness, occupational pursuits, productivity, and longevity. Current science demonstrates that…

This paper investigates the role of a Turkish Saturday school in the United States in helping students maintain the Turkish language and form a sense of Turkish cultural identity. This case study of one Turkish Saturday school in New York City builds on research in language maintenance and shift, and in language ideologies and linguistic identity…

The goal of this study is to explore the identity constructions of Chinese heritage language students from dialect backgrounds. Their experiences in learning Mandarin as a "heritage" language--even though it is spoken neither at home nor in their immediate communities--highlight how identities are produced, processed, and practiced in our…

Researchers have highlighted the benefits of using virtual worlds such as Second Life in education, but they have also forewarned educators of potential drawbacks. Understanding how virtual worlds work, including their capabilities and limitations, empowers educators to make better decisions regarding their relevance to learning and teaching. This…

The unavoidability of language makes it critical that language policies appeal to some notion of language neutrality as part of their rationale, in order to assuage concerns that the policies might otherwise be unduly discriminatory. However, the idea of language neutrality is deeply ideological in nature, since it is not only an attempt to treat…

Professor Elana Shohamy was born in New York and moved to Israel at a young age. It was an interesting time for the country and the Hebrew language. In this article, Professor Shohamy shares her keen insights into her experiences growing up in Israel. She obtained her teacher's certificate from David Yelin Teacher's College in Jerusalem,…

Marking as one dramatic turnover in language teaching, task-based language teaching (TBLT) has proved itself beneficial and effective in bringing about real situations of language use to take place and in satisfying communicative needs of learners while the former methods were unable to meet actual demands of learners to communicate in the target…

Research into the factors that contribute to reading performance decrement in L2 reading among ESL university students is still being extensively researched in the context of ELT. This is because successful academic performance is highly dependent on good reading ability. While it is widely accepted that poor reading performance is due to lack of…

The present investigation intends to make a comparison between integratively motivated students of English at Islamic Azad University of Shiraz and their instrumentally motivated peers in terms of their oral performance. To this end, 35 junior students (15 males and 20 females) were selected out of 54 initial participants based on their scores on…

Analyzing three waves of data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey, this article explores the process of language assimilation among second-generation Latinos. Although previous studies have focused on the shift from mother tongue to English across immigrant generations, few have examined change in language proficiency over time…

Many college students feel that learning a second language (L2) is necessary to bring value to their future. However, many also feel that during their years of learning an L2, the only experience they acquire starts when they enter the classroom and stops when they leave it. This view may bring a lack of engagement in learning the L2. Research has…

This study investigates how motivation and interaction shape the speaking proficiency of study abroad (SA) and classroom or at home (AH) language learners. The author administered a motivation questionnaire, language contact profile, and pretest and posttest simulated oral proficiency interview. The data reveal that SA and AH students had similar…

Trained peer review, as illustrated in a plethora of peer review or peer response scholarship, has a positive effect on students' writing in general and on improved revision quality in particular (Berg, 1999; Hu, 2005; Min, 2006; Paulus, 1999; Stanley, 1992). From these studies, it is evident that trained peer feedback does have a significant role…

From an information processing perspective, humans have a limited attentional capacity for processing information. Thus, second language (L2) researchers have investigated the role of pretask planning in task performance, finding that planning results in greater fluency and complexity but has mixed effects on accuracy. However, most planning…