This study explores what young Danish learners found anxiety-provoking or difficult in their English as a foreign language (EFL) classes. Participants (n = 32) were early and later starters (ages 8 years vs. 10 years) at two primary schools where children were not assessed in English. The qualitative inquiry aimed to examine what differences…

Since Ure (1971) and Halliday (1985), different measures have been proposed in the research literature as a proxy for investigating lexicon advances. They are called lexical richness measures and are an important tool in assessing advance of the lexicon (Johansson, 2009). This article evaluates three lexical richness measures of progress in the…

In community colleges, English Language Learners (ELL) comprise several subgroups of students, each of which has a distinct background and data profile. Among these subgroups, three clearly emerge, each of which interact with placement systems and curriculum in distinct ways based on their prior educational experiences and contexts. These three…

This study deals with the research into the relationship between gender, motivation and achievement in learning English as a foreign language. A good command of English is of paramount importance for an individual to be successful in numerous aspects of life such as professional, personal and educational. The aim of this research was to determine…

With the increasing need to learn languages as a result of globalization there is a great demand on the part of the learners to communicate in a second/foreign language, which is also supported downwards by the governments and upwards by the parents. Among the many aspects of foreign language learning, affective factors are researched a lot as…

Classrooms in Czechia are changing. What used to be a relatively ethnically homogeneous environment changed after 1989 and became much more diverse. How are children, both of Czech, as well as migrant origin, coping? What strategies do they use to negotiate their everyday lives in the classroom? We conducted an ethnographic study in two classes of…

Researchers have used various theories to explain deaf individuals' reading skills, including the dual route reading theory, the orthographic depth theory, and the early language access theory. This study tested 4 groups of children--hearing with dyslexia, hearing without dyslexia, deaf early signers, and deaf late signers (N = 857)--from 4…

Purpose: The authors created a database of expository oral language samples with the aims of describing the nature of students' expository discourse and providing benchmark data for typically developing preteen and teenage students. Method: Using a favorite game or sport protocol, language samples were collected from 235 typically developing…

This study investigated whether German learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) acquire additional recoding strategies that they do not need for recoding in the consistent German orthography. Based on the psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) we expected students with little experience in EFL to use the same…

The central aim of this study was to clarify whether sign language (SL) nativeness is a significant factor in determining prelingually deaf individuals' reading skills and whether its contribution is modified by the reader's orthographic background. A second aim was to elucidate similarities and differences between native and nonnative signers in…

Language brokering is a common practice for Latino youth with immigrant parents. Yet little is known about how youth's feelings about this responsibility contribute to the parent-adolescent relationship. In this study, we examined the longitudinal associations between language brokering attitudes and parent-adolescent closeness in a sample of…

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) prepares an annual report on graduates and dropouts in Texas public secondary schools. This report includes state summaries of the annual dropout rate, longitudinal graduation and dropout rates, and state attrition rates. In addition to statewide statistics, the report provides historical information about dropout…

In studies dealing with language learning strategies in the school context, the variables of proficiency and age are often difficult to isolate since students accumulate more hours of foreign language instruction as they move up from grade to grade. This study aimed to deal with these two variables independently by analysing learning strategy use…

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) prepares an annual report on graduates and dropouts in Texas public secondary schools. This report includes state summaries of the annual dropout rate, longitudinal graduation and dropout rates, and state attrition rates. In addition to statewide statistics, the report provides historical information about dropout…

It has been suggested that linguistic proximity affects the ease of acquisition between typologically similar languages, due to the fact that the languages have shared phonological and orthographic properties (Koda, 2008). Thus, a native Hebrew speaker learning Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) would be expected to easily develop linguistic…