The role of conversational interaction in second language research has increasingly been seen as playing a facilitative role in second language learning. As such there have been a number of studies focussing on different types of interaction, including feedback such as recasts, and their potential role in second language learning. In this study,…

This study addresses differences between pre- and in-service teacher beliefs about readiness and self-competency in helping English language learners' (ELL) language and academic achievement in content area classes. It also examines the role of gender and certain background factors in mediating differences in beliefs while providing suggestions to…

This study evaluated parents' communication, involvement and knowledge of their children's abilities in reading and mathematics among parents who spoke English as a first language (EL1) and those who were English language learners (ELL). Forty-two kindergarten-aged children, their parents and their teachers participated in the study. Results…

Commencing study through a foreign language in senior secondary school brings huge challenges because of the cognitive-linguistic demands of academic subjects. This paper argues for the need to blend sociocultural and systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspectives to address this enormous task. Firstly, readers' attention is drawn to the less…

This article examines teachers' relationships with foreign students during eras marked by large waves of immigration to the United States and by policies that shifted from cultural assimilation (1900-1920) to present-day accountability. We compare teachers' understandings of and instructional practices regarding foreign-born English language…

In an attempt to understand and explain first language (L1) acquisition and second language (L2) acquisition scholars have put forward many theories. These theories can aid language teachers to understand language learning and to assist their students in their language learning process. The current paper will first look at the similarities between…

While researchers generally quantify the amount of information that learners recall correctly in order to measure reading comprehension, the unit of analysis adopted to score the recall protocol differs. Whether and how different scoring systems bring about a different picture of L2 reading comprehension, however, remains unexplored. This study…

Despite many ELT experts' opinions that while teaching a foreign language one should not use the mother tongue in the classroom, new researches show that sparing use of the mother tongue can be effective for the L2 learners. It is true that the 6- year compulsory English education of the school graduates of Saudi Arabia is not quite up to the…

The purpose of this study was to develop specific rubrics for assessing critiques in English 202, an English as a foreign language course at the Lebanese American University to explore the effectiveness of these rubrics on students' writing and to investigate students' attitudes and reactions to the use of these rubrics. After development of the…

The precursors of early English reading success have been widely studied for native English-speaking students, and those findings have been generalized to the English language learner (ELL) student population. However, the development of English language acquisition may be different for ELL students. The purpose of this study was to investigate…

The purpose of this study is to compare the vocabulary learning of monolingual learners of English as a second language with bilingual learners of English as a third language. The study is based on data from 52 monolingual Persian-speaking learners of English and 45 bilingual Azeri-Persian-speaking learners of English. All the participants were…

The Cultural Heritage Bilingual Program (CHBP) was developed for English Language Learner (ELL) students from language groups not served by current bilingual programs in the Houston Independent School District (HISD), which are designed for Spanish-speaking ELLs. The largest group of students in this category consists of ELLs whose home language…

In this article, the language learning experiences and development of a child (the author's daughter) between the ages of five and nine are drawn on to argue that we should re-focus our comparison of first and second language acquisition away from early L1 acquisition to the early schooling/middle childhood period. In addition to the transforming…

This study tries to answer some ever-existent questions in writing fields regarding approaching the most effective ways to give feedback to students' errors in writing by comparing the effect of error correction and error detection on the improvement of students' writing ability. In order to achieve this goal, 60 pre-intermediate English learners…

The paper investigates the semantic area of Epistemic Modality in Modern Greek, by means of a corpus-based research. A comparative, quantitative study was performed between written corpora (informal letter-writing) of non-native informants with various language backgrounds and Greek native speakers. A number of epistemic markers were selected for…