This scholarly investigation delves into the metamorphosis of China's language policies across three distinct epochs spanning over two millennia, tracing from ancient China to contemporary times. Employing a sociolinguistic lens, the analysis elucidates the historical trajectories of these policies, accentuating their theoretical and pragmatic…

This study examines types and characteristics of data collection tasks used in studies on scope ambiguity in English involving a universally quantified noun phrase and negation, and investigates any differences in comprehension patterns across studies using different tasks. Since Musolino's seminal 1998 study using a truth value judgment task,…

The present systematic review examines what factors determine when, how and to what extent previous linguistic experience (from the first language, second language or both languages) affects the initial stages and beyond of adult third language (L3) acquisition. In doing so, we address what a bird's eye view of the data tells us regarding…

This article reviews a century of US data on the impact of learning Latin and explores to what extent the collected findings demonstrate that Latin can play a role in improving pupils' educational attainments, particularly in first language (L1), modern foreign language (MFL) and cognitive development. Contextualising these data allows us to…

This article offers a methodological synthesis spanning 35 years of instructed second language acquisition research on the efficacy of form-focused instruction. Eighty-eight (quasi-) experimental studies were sampled from six academic journals: "Applied Linguistics," "Language Learning," "Language Teaching Research,"…

This paper sets out to peruse the role of various theories or more precisely, hypotheses invoked in second language acquisition (SLA) research by surveying three empirical studies pertaining to the critical period hypothesis in the SLA of phonetics and phonology. In particular, the three studies reviewed are titled in chronological order as (1)…

Early research on the Aspect Hypothesis yielded a rigid developmental sequence for the acquisition of grammatical aspect, in which developing L2 learners applied morphemes to mark aspect in accordance with the inherent lexical aspect of verbal prototypes. While studies from a variety of L2 backgrounds have amassed evidence for this hypothesis,…

Research on first language, second language, and multilingual socialization has flourished over the past three decades in many formal and informal educational contexts around the world. One relatively recent site for such research, particularly for multilingual students learning English as an additional language, is post-secondary institutions…

Given that bilingual education has been under assault for most of its modern existence in the United States, many bilingual educators have acquiesced to transitional bilingual education: the use of the primary language only until English is firmly established. While this placated some critics, the research now demonstrates that this is not in the…

There is growing recognition that multilingualism is a norm rather than an exception and that it constitutes a default state of human linguistic competence. This phenomenon has become particularly relevant due to widespread, yet variously motivated, population movements as well as job-related mobility and the introduction of multiple foreign…

A limited number of studies have examined Asian American children's literature over the last half century. While the selection and availability of this literature has increased substantially in the last two decades, many of these texts continue to perpetuate stereotypes (Morgan, 2012), such as the overachieving model minority (Loh-Hagen, 2014) and…

Idealization plays a fundamental role in scientific inquiry. This article examines the case for maintaining the claim that the second language acquisition (SLA) of grammatical structures such as negation manifests identifiable stages of acquisition. It proposes that, while research has demonstrated the need for de-idealization, there is no need to…

Despite the long history of multilingualism in the U.S., language rights debates have tended to center almost exclusively on the acquisition of English as an issue of equity for citizens who are speakers of other languages. Policies advanced in the name of "access" and "equity" continue to frame English as the only viable means…

The general consensus in the field is that when the home language is different from the language of instruction in school then children's literacy attainments could slow down. In this 26-year review of the literature on children's literacy attainments in low- to middle-income countries, 40 correlational, ethnographic and intervention studies…

Translation and language teaching techniques which take language learners' first language (L1) as point of reference for teaching the second language (L2) have been long discouraged on the ground that these teaching techniques would end in the fossilization of L2 structure forms in the learner's Interlanguage system. However, in recent years, the…