Dual language immersion (DLI) as an alternative model to monolingual English-medium education has continued to expand rapidly over the past decade. As this model continues to grow across the United States, stakeholders look to research to demonstrate sustainability and scalability of dual language programs. Drawing on 224 schools, the statewide…

This study investigates second language (L2) interactional competence in Mandarin Chinese, with a specific focus on dispreference organization in refusals. Twenty-eight L2 Chinese learners at 3 proficiency levels (A2, B1, and B2) and 10 native speakers each participated in 3 role plays. We found that learners at different levels clearly differed…

This study explores the lexical profile of essays written by 48 advanced learners of second language (L2) Russian who participated in the Russian Overseas Flagship, an intensive year-long study abroad program designed to help students reach Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Level 3 proficiency in all skills. Using the lexical frequency profile…

This study investigates the influence of the semantic heaviness of verbs (i.e., heavy or light verbs) and language proficiency on second language (L2) learners' use of constructional information in a sentence-sorting task and a corpus analysis. Previous studies employing a sentence-sorting task demonstrated that advanced L2 learners sorted English…

This article reports on an experimental study addressing the second language acquisition of Mandarin temporality. Mandarin Chinese does not mark past, present, or future with dedicated morphemes; the native English of the learners does. It was hypothesized that, in their comprehension, learners would utilize the deictic pattern of expressing…

The encoding of goal-oriented motion events varies across different languages. Speakers of languages without grammatical aspect (e.g., Swedish) tend to mention motion endpoints when describing events (e.g., "two nuns walk to a house") and attach importance to event endpoints when matching scenes from memory. Speakers of aspect languages…