This article reports on a set of language attitude experiments undertaken in Belize in 2013--2014. The experiments tested attitudes toward Belizean Kriol in two different situational settings among 96 Belizean university students, exploring the extent to which experimental 'setting' had an effect on survey results. We administered verbal guise…

This study aims at describing in detail how university students in Turkey use euphemisms in their daily language usage. The description of the euphemisms in the study was made according to the linguistic formations of euphemisms defined by Warren and accepted in the literature. The euphemisms used by the participants were determined by asking them…

This study explores variation in willingness to communicate (WTC) in English between whole-class interaction and dyadic and group interaction, and teacher interaction strategies identified to sustain students' WTC in whole-class interaction that primarily followed the initiation-response-feedback (IRF) pattern. Data were collected from a regular…

This study diagnoses how the plurilingual repertoires of mature students (MS) in higher education (HE) are constructed throughout their lives. It addresses the main characteristics of MS; the contexts in which they move throughout their lives, and the situations they contact with languages. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire, mostly…

Inasmuch as the fact that writing is a cognitively demanding task and as a step toward overcoming some of the barriers English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners face during writing performance, this study attempted to investigate Iranian EFL learners' perceptions toward the most common writing difficulties. To this end, 120 Iranian EFL learners…

This study examines the proposition that second language learners tend to map second language (L2) lexical forms onto the existing semantic content of their first language (L1) translations rather than creating a separate semantic network for the second language. To test this, the participants (n=9) responded to three semantic judgement tasks. In…

This paper investigates mainland Chinese students' experiences of learning English as a second language (L2) in a multilingual university in Hong Kong, with particular attention to their negotiation of participation and identity. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with a group of mainland Chinese students, the study revealed that their…

This case study explores the relationship between the results obtained by a group of Industrial Engineering students on a national standardized English test and the impact these results had on language program improvement. The instruments used were interviews, document analysis, observations, surveys, and test results analysis. Findings indicate…

This article addresses a current theoretical debate between the standard pragmatic model, the graded salience hypothesis, and the implicit display theory, by investigating the roles of the context and of the properties of the sarcastic utterance itself in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted where we…

Higher education institutions worldwide base international student recruitment on the assumption that their preparedness in 'English' is assured if they reach a certain level in tests such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). This assumes an abstract, objectivist view of language that sees the 'English' as removable for…

The ethnography of communication, particularly of greetings, among speakers of some Yoruba dialects is the major concern of this paper. The author observed that the much-cherished, rich culture of greetings, among Yoruba, which the author grew up to know, by linguistic globalization and modernization is being eroded fast. The study and…

The framework of linguistic register and case study research on Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) learning statistics informed the construction of a quantitative instrument, the Communication, Language, And Statistics Survey (CLASS). CLASS aims to assess whether ELLs and non-ELLs approach the learning of statistics differently with…

In the field of language and identity, the subcategory of gender has been an area of growing interest (Pavlenko, 2001; Norton & Pavlenko, 2004; Menard-Warwick, 2008; and Higgins, 2010). Adopting the view of gender as "a system of social relationships and discursive practices" (Norton & Pavlenko, 2004, p. 504), social context is…

Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this article we first address the adequacy of the 2 dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing…

In order to improve instruction in introductory astronomy, we are investigating students' preinstructional ideas about a number of cosmology topics. This article describes one aspect of this large research study in which 1270 students responded to a subset of three questions each from a larger set of questions about the following areas: definition…