Purpose: This study examined the development and validation of a criterion-referenced Spanish-English Language Proficiency Scale (SELPS) that was designed to assess the oral language skills of sequential bilingual children ages 4-8. This article reports results for the English proficiency portion of the scale. Method: The SELPS assesses syntactic…

Ojibwemotaadidaa Omaa Gidakiiminaang (let's speak Ojibwe to one another here on our Earth) is an Ojibwe language immersion program funded by Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College (FDLTCC, Cloquet, MN) and with grants from the State of Minnesota. With a development team that included FDLTCC President Larry Anderson, among others, participants…

Verbal fluency tasks are used extensively in clinical settings because of their sensitivity to a wide variety of disorders, including cognitive decline and dementia, and their usefulness in differential diagnoses. However, the effects of bilingualism on neuropsychological assessment, and verbal fluency in particular, are currently not completely…

This study aims to analyze the literature about teaching and learning English speaking in depth and draw main guidelines about how to increase speaking accuracy and fluency in language classrooms for both English language learners and teachers. The first section of the paper is about the general features of speaking skills. The second section…

This paper presents a framework for incorporating the assessment of psycholinguistic constructs into spoken language proficiency testing. Although response time and automaticity of language processing are vital factors in language acquisition, as constructs they are rarely explicitly assessed in language tests. It is proposed that efficiency of…

This study evaluated the influence of the frequency of reading and writing habits (RWH) associated with education on the performance of adults in brief neuropsychological tasks. A sample of 489 Brazilian subjects, composed of 71% women, aged 21-80 years, with 2-23 years of formal education, was evaluated by the Brazilian Brief Neuropsychological…

In the seven decades since Leopold's groundbreaking 1939 study, there has been no longitudinal study covering more than two years of a Japanese bilingual subject's development. Despite the lack of longitudinal research, however, we have been broadly informed by the veritable outpouring of research on a short-term basis since the late twentieth…

Although word searching in children is very common, very little is known about how adults support children in the turns following the child's search behaviours, an important topic because of the social, educational, and clinical implications. This study characterizes, in detail, teachers' use of prompting, hinting, and supplying a model. From a…

The purpose of this investigation was to test the assumption of asymmetric mapping between words and concepts in bilingual memory as proposed by the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM, Kroll & Stewart, 1994). Twenty four Spanish-English bilinguals (experiment 1) and twenty English-Spanish bilinguals (experiment 2) were presented with pairs of words,…

Based on Robinson's (2001a,b, 2003) Cognition Hypothesis and Skehan's (1998) Limited Attentional Capacity Model, this study explored the effects of task complexity on the fluency and lexical complexity of 108 EFL students' argumentative writing. Task complexity was manipulated using three factors: (1) availability of planning time; (2) provision…

Social inclusion typically refers to the integration of the disadvantaged into the mainstream society as a national agenda. However, social inclusion in a broader sense addresses aspirations to be included in a global imagined community as well as a local community of like-minded people. Drawing on a qualitative study of men and women learning…

Researching the longitudinal development of second language (L2) learners is essential to understanding influences on their success. This 7-year study of oral skills in adult immigrant learners of English as a second language evaluated comprehensibility, fluency, and accentedness in first-language (L1) Mandarin and Slavic language speakers. The…

Being a study abroad student is not all sweetness and light. By definition, study abroad students are faced with acculturative stress (Berry, 2005) by virtue of encountering differences in assumptions, values, and expectations of daily living in their host culture. Add to that the usual challenge of hearing and speaking a different language, and…

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the relationships between working memory (WM) and three commonly used learning strategies or conditions in the nature of proficiency among adult L2 Russian learners. Based on the aptitude-learning condition interaction framework articulated by Robinson (2002b), the study identifies two types of…

It is a good practice to try to understand matters at hand by first stepping back and adopting an historical perspective, which I will begin this review by doing. Next, I will take up the challenges that each of the authors in the articles in this volume has presented for the study of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in second language…