The well-established socio-educational model of second language learning motivation developed by R. C. Gardner was adapted and applied to study instrumental music learning motivation. The similarities between music and language suggested that the adaptation might lead to new insights in the study of music motivation. At the heart of the proposed…

Research over the past fifteen years has investigated and developed online science inquiry environments to support students engaging in authentic scientific inquiry practices. This research has focused on developing activity structures and tools to scaffold students in engaging in different aspects of these practices, but relatively little of this…

This study investigated the developmental and fossilized prepositional errors in Persian EFL learners' compositions at three levels of proficiency; participants were divided into lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced levels. For each participant, four compositions were collected, and after identifying the prepositional errors for…

In this study, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (henceforth NSM) was used to carry out a comparative analysis. The compliment response behavior of native Persian speakers was compared with that of Native American English speakers to see if it can provide evidence for applicability of NSM model which is claimed to be universal. The descriptive…

The achievement gap problem is a growing phenomenon in the United States of America. In many schools, minority student populations are failing at alarming rates and are looking at different outcomes than those of their White and Asian counterparts. However, a few schools are breaking through the barriers of poverty, poor school attendance, low…

The present study investigated the development of linguistic awareness in children exposed to the early learning of a second language in Grades 3-5 of primary school, i.e. between the ages of 8 and 10. The aim was to determine whether this bilingual experience enhanced the development of phonological awareness in beginning readers in a bilingual…

Research at the interface of bilingual development and child language disorders has increased greatly in the past decade. The purpose of this article is to highlight the theoretical and clinical implications of this research. Studies examining the similarities in linguistic characteristics between typically developing sequential bilingual children…

What makes a child's language development trajectory have the patterns that it has, and what causes differences across children in those patterns? These fundamental questions have for over half a century been at the heart of research on language development in monolingual children, on the cross-linguistic development of language in children from…

The paper is a response to Holmes and Celani's (2006) invitation to learn from the Brazilian ESP experience. It discusses the conditions which sustained this experience, and compares the Brazilian situation to the Tunisian one. The paper also discusses the challenges that ESP projects in EFL environments face, the opportunities that ESP…

This study investigated the perception of Canadian French word-final vowels by English-dominant and French-dominant bilinguals living in Montreal. In a modified identification task, listeners selected the response that rhymed with the target word, embedded in a carrier sentence. Minimal sets of real and nonsense target words were used, contrasting…

The present study represented a preliminary effort to empirically examine the efficacy of subtitled movie on listening comprehension of intermediate English as a Foreign Language students. To achieve this purpose, out of a total of 200 intermediate students, 90 were picked based on a proficiency test. The material consisted of six episodes…

The present study examined the impact of practicing autonomy on the writing proficiency of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To this end, Preliminary English Test (PET) by Thomas and Sharon (2006) was administered to 92 intermediate language learners as a pre-test. Accordingly, 60 homogeneous learners comprised the research sample. The…

This article examines the language proficiency and achievement outcomes of Latino students enrolled in a dual language programme who varied by language proficiency (Native English speakers, Current English Language Learners--ELLs, Fluent English Proficient/Previous ELLs). Most previous research has not disaggregated Latino students, especially…

This article reports the outcomes of a multiyear study comparing the English and Spanish language and reading performance of Spanish-dominant children randomly assigned, beginning in kindergarten, to transitional bilingual education (TBE) or structured English immersion (SEI) for periods of up to 5 years. On the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and…

Developing reading skills in a second language presents learners with many challenges, including lexico-grammatical decoding. An additional challenge is posed by the different registers of written text and the associated lexico-grammatical features with which learners must contend. Questioning the efficacy of using non-academic reading texts in…