This study examines the interaction effect of age in L2 attainment. It explores whether success in foreign language learning at early childhood grades varies depending on age. It also addresses the beliefs of foreign language teachers regarding the variables under review. Eighty-three 11 year-old language learners who started learning English at…

This study examined the relationship between Acculturation Strategy and Social Supports on Acculturative Stress and Academic Performance Among Hispanic/Latino/a College students. The sample of approximately 522 students was recruited at the City College of The City University of New York. Various statistical methods, including one way ANOVAS,…

This dissertation provides a language processing perspective on the study of second language acquisition (SLA) of tense and aspect. Of special interest are the universal vis-a-vis language-specific dimensions of temporal and aspectual semantics involved. According to the Aspect Hypothesis (AH, e.g. Andersen & Shirai, 1994), the initial…

In 2008, a new language education policy called "Gaikokugo Katsudou" [Foreign Language Activities] was issued by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science, and Technology (MEXT) in Japan. Effective 2011, foreign language education became mandatory in all Japanese public elementary schools for the first time. With this dramatic…

Reform of public schooling has been at the forefront of the national debate over education for more than 25 years. One prominent reform initiative, school chartering, was selected for the study that examined whether a selected school district allocated comparable resources for charter and non-charter schools. The study used the Odden et al.…

The present longitudinal case study investigated the development of fluency, complexity and accuracy--and the possible relationships between them--in the written production of L2 French. We assessed fluency and complexity in five intermediate learners by means of conventional indicators for written L2 (cf. Wolfe-Quintero et al. 1998), while…

This study is an attempt to examine the effect of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) on reading comprehension in an Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) context. It was hypothesized that CALL has an effect on reading comprehension. Forty female learners of English at intermediate level after administering a proficiency test were…

Comprehensibility, a major concept in second language (L2) pronunciation research that denotes listeners' perceptions of how easily they understand L2 speech, is central to interlocutors' communicative success in real-world contexts. Although comprehensibility has been modeled in several L2 oral proficiency scales--for example, the Test of English…

This study contributes to L2 writing research which seeks to tie predictions of the Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan, 1998; Skehan & Foster, 2001) and Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2001, 2005, 2011a, 2011b) to models of working memory in L1 writing (Kellogg, 1996). The study uses a quasi-experimental research design to investigate…

One dimension of language proficiency considered important for reading and writing academic texts is morphological awareness--the understanding of how complex words are formed from meaningful smaller units (i.e., affixes, roots) that contribute to words' meanings and functions. This quasi-experimental study evaluated the effects of instruction on…

This study, which is part of a large-scale study of using objective measures to validate assessment rating scales and assessment tasks in a high-profile school-based assessment initiative in Hong Kong, examined how grammatical complexity measures relate to task type and analytic evaluations of students' speaking proficiency in a classroom-based…

This article explains two components in the review process of a university's principal preparation program. A superintendents' focus group session and an analysis of other universities' program profiles revealed a need to eliminate dated courses, include certification in the degree requirements, update the program curriculum with best practice,…

The Bilingual Education Policy, which was launched in 1974 and revised in 1987, has resulted in the limited exposure of Filipino learners to the English language. This is because the policy reversed previous policies and stipulates that in only two content area subjects, namely, Science and Mathematics is English to be used as medium of…

Fostering foreign language proficiency is an important goal of university teaching. We identified German university students' (N = 1265) goal orientations developed during secondary school as predictors of attitudes toward receiving instruction in English at university. Mastery goal orientation was proposed to "directly" promote positive…

To investigate the construct validly of a section of a high stakes test, an exploratory factor analysis using principal components analysis was employed. The rotation used was varimax with the suppression level of 0.30. Eleven factors were extracted out of 35 reading comprehension items. The fact that these factors emerged speak to the construct…