Chinese immersion programs have been increasingly popular in US schools. However, we have insufficient data on young English-speaking children's acquisition of Chinese as a second language in these programs, and specifically on social contextual variables systematically promoting or hindering Chinese language use. Taking a variationist…

We take a multidimensional perspective on the development of second language (L2) speaking ability and examine how changes in the underlying cognitive variables of linguistic knowledge and processing speed interact with complexity, fluency, and accuracy over the course of a 3-month Spanish study abroad session. Study abroad provides a unique…

The aim of this article is to show that the use of Spanish grammatical aspect is biased by inherent aspect depending on the learner's first language (L1). It considers both the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH; Andersen, 1986, and his followers) and the L1 Transfer Hypothesis (Izquierdo & Collins, 2008; McManus, 2015), and it compares the use of…

This study examined the similarities and differences in the functioning of component processes underlying first language (L1) and second language (L2) word reading in Chinese. Fourth-grade Chinese children in Singapore were divided into L1 and L2 reader groups based on whether they used Mandarin or English as their home language. Both groups were…

This article provides a snapshot of the experiences of 18 students studying abroad in Cairo, Egypt. Using a modified version of the language contact profile (Freed, Segalowitz, & Dewey, 2004), I investigate their language use and find that students use English more than they use Arabic and that there is considerable individual variation in…

This study compared the uses of emotion vocabulary in narratives elicited from monolingual speakers of Russian and English and advanced American learners of Russian. Monolingual speakers differed significantly in the distribution of emotion terms across morphosyntactic categories: English speakers favored an adjectival pattern of emotion…

In a follow-up project, this study examined how and when six university language teachers actually used English and the target language in the classroom. Results suggest that switches to English may be made to help maintain classroom order, to create solidarity or empathy, to cover lack of experience or strategies, or to rephrase or modify their…