This viewpoint article provides a critical reflection on the gatekeeping and academic language practices of Anglophone universities, evaluating these in light of the promotional claims universities make about internationalization and global reach. I then consider the arguments put forward in each of the main articles in this special issue from…

The ability to express oneself clearly in both a mother tongue and a foreign language is a foundation principle of the new national curriculum in Estonia. Therefore, research was conducted to determine whether there was a possible relationship between English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' perceptions of effective teaching and the…

This study tested the effect of Spanish-accented speech on sentence comprehension in children with different degrees of Spanish experience. The hypothesis was that earlier acquisition of Spanish would be associated with enhanced comprehension of Spanish-accented speech. Three groups of 5-6-year-old children were tested: monolingual…

This study explores the interplay between early reading, identity and bilingualism. Reading identities, or understandings about what reading is and whom one is as a reader, have been linked to reading achievement and the development of reading skills. Only a small portion of the overall research on reading identities has included dual language…

This study examined two common accounts of heritage speakers' nonnative attainment in their heritage/first language (L1), one attributing it to the influence of the second language (L2) and another to insufficient L1 input. Three groups of children who were heritage speakers of Arabic and who varied in their age of L2 exposure and type and amount…

This study examines several linguistic factors as possible contributors to perceived word difficulty in second language learners in an experimental setting. The investigated factors include: (1) frequency of word usage in the first language, (2) word length, (3) number of syllables in a word, and (4) number of consonant clusters in a word. Word…

If known words can be defined psycholinguistically as "form-meaning mappings", the present article investigates whether prompting learners to evaluate whether the form of a new second language (L2) word fits its meaning generates "mapping elaborations" that aid recall. Thirty Dutch-speaking upper-intermediate learners of…

The aim of this experimental study is to examine the development of gender assignment and gender agreement in bilingual Albanian-Greek and English-Greek children as well as the exploitation of gender cues on the noun ending in real and pseudo-nouns. Four gender tasks were designed, two targeting gender assignment (determiner + noun production) and…

We report on the use of bilingual constructed response science assessments in the context of a research and development partnership with secondary school science teachers. Our project provided a series of workshops for teachers where they explored students' emergent reform-oriented science meaning-making in our project-designed assessments. We…

Although open educational resources (OERs) can help bridge high school-university vocabulary gaps, central questions remain unanswered regarding effective design that enables students to go beyond the "small chunks" that typically characterize vocabulary learning in mobile learning environments (MLEs). This bi-national study adopted a…

The critical importance of second language (L2) input, output, and interaction in TESOL notwithstanding, the decision between immersive (L2-English only) versus nonimmersive approaches is considered "the most fundamental question facing second language acquisition (SLA) researchers, language teachers, and policymakers" (Macaro, 2014, p.…

This study examined the concurrent relations of English (EL) and heritage language (HL) proficiency to executive functions (EF) among low-income dual language learners (DLLs) from immigrant families. In a sample of 90 children (age = 38-70 months) from Chinese-speaking Chinese American and Spanish-speaking Mexican American families recruited from…

Does using a foreign language result in forming different moral decisions than using our mother tongue? Two studies were conducted to investigate whether there is a relationship between foreign language effects (differences between native vs. foreign language conditions) and psychological distance. Study 1 tested four moral dilemmas adapted from…

The expressive lexical skills of 53 Polish bilinguals aged 24-36 months living in the UK and Ireland were assessed using Polish and British English adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Polish vocabulary scores were compared to those of 53 Polish monolinguals matched for age, gender and parental education. The…

In literature on bilingual teaching, different perspectives exist for and against the use of first language (L1) in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. There is a continuing matter of debate on whether L1 contributes to or precludes the learning of a second language (L2). Numerous studies have been conducted on this topic, but no clear…