Although Black students made up 15.7% of all enrollments in higher education in the fall of 2021 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022), they constituted only 4.1% of all Americans studying abroad in the 2020-2021 academic year (International Institute of Education, 2022). Recent research has begun to turn toward a more qualitative investigation of the study…

Second language (L2) researchers have long acknowledged the role of language anxiety in communication processes, such that learners with greater language anxiety tend to be less willing to engage in communication. However, little research has explored links between L2 speakers' perceptions of conversation and dynamic measures of anxiety.…

Stakeholders at DoD language training organizations seek to improve foreign language learner test scores. The method selected for the researched organization was to add foreign language immersive virtual reality games into the learning environment at the current institute. Earlier studies provided evidence of other organizations pursuing similar…

This study used a mixed methods research design to investigate use of Web-based lexicographic tools during real-time second language (L2) writing activity in an English as a foreign language university context and the impact of their use on writing quality. Participants included 22 adult Japanese EFL learners, elementary to advanced language…

While social networking sites (SNSs) have attracted growing scholarly interest in uncovering L2 learners' participation within these sites, the impact of writing on SNSs upon students' writing performance and learner autonomy remains underexplored. This study reported on a college EFL writing course participated by two groups of Chinese first-year…

Within the last two decades, theorizing and research on language teaching and teachers have witnessed a fundamental shift of attention and orientation towards socio-cognitive aspects of teaching. This epistemic shift has been paralleled by the global reach of the English language, inspiring scholars to call for a paradigm shift in Applied…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine changes in English and Spanish morphosyntactic standardized scores over time in bilingual children. Method: One hundred bilingual children participated in this longitudinal study. The average age of the children at the beginning of the study was 5;11 (years; months). A subset of the participants was identified…

Fifty-one learning strategies were developed and validated in this study to make language learners more knowledgeable about unfamiliar environments. The study tested the effectiveness of the strategies in improving the creativity of students. 75 university students participated in the study and they were divided into three groups: (1) students who…

Theoretical models have posited that social contexts influence parental attitudes, which in turn modulate parental behaviors. The current study asks whether parental attitudes on bilingualism differ by local language context and whether parents who perceive bilingualism as more valuable are more likely to engage in activities with their child in…

The fusion of education with the digital world is still a developing and crucial phenomenon, especially in light of the growth of metaverse applications and the lingering effects of pandemic-induced educational changes. Learning about the efficacy of platforms like Gather.town becomes increasingly important in this situation. This study explores…

The quality of writing in a second language (L2) is one of the indicators of the level of proficiency for many college students to be eligible for departmental studies. Although certain software programs, such as Intelligent Essay Assessor or IntelliMetric, have been introduced to evaluate second-language writing quality, an overall assessment of…

While writing courses often include instruction in rhetorical aspects of writing (i.e., learning to write), business content courses often assign writing as a tool for learning and assessing content knowledge (i.e., writing to learn), with little attention to students' rhetorical understanding of genres. This leaves students with an incomplete…

In their paper "Do Bilinguals Automatically Activate Their Native Language When They Are Not Using it?," Costa, Pannunzi, Deco, and Pickering ("Cognitive Science," 2017) proposed a reinterpretation of Thierry and Wu's (2004, 2007) finding of native language-based (Chinese, L1) ERP effects when they tested Chinese-English late…

Scaffolding is one of the key dimensions of the sociocultural theory that has been proposed in a substantial body of work as a potential metaphor for promoting second language (L2) learning. However, there is plenty of evidence that the term is misinterpreted and presents a number of epistemological problems. The first and foremost concerns the…

Since the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) was first put forward in 2006, it has inspired a growing body of research on grammatical processing in nonnative (L2) speakers. More than 10 years later, we think it is time for the SSH to be reconsidered in the light of new empirical findings and current theoretical assumptions about human language…