This study examines how three age-on-arrival (AOA) groups of Chinese-background ESL students use two types of cohesive devices on a standardized essay exam. A discourse analysis of 90 first-year students' expository writing samples was conducted to ascertain how factors such as first language (L1) and length of residence (LOR) in Canada influence…

Findings are presented from studies of the academic and language achievement of 1,307 young immigrant students whose educational history was traced from their arrival in Canada and entry into primary education in the early 1990s until their graduation from secondary schools. Five major findings are reported: school mobility, disappearance and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine sentence-recognition performance for a large, diverse group of nonnative speakers of English on the recently developed Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentence materials and to determine whether BEL sentence lists are equated in difficulty for this population. Method: The BEL sentences were presented…

The present study investigates heritage learners' recognition of native-like and non-native-like mood selection in Spanish volitional constructions along two dimensions: age of onset of bilingualism in English (operationalized as age of arrival) and language use. Thirty-two heritage learners completed a grammaticality judgment (GJ) and an editing…

This article integrates findings from earlier research (Roessingh & Kover, 2003; Roessingh, Kover, & Watt, 2005) linking distinct patterns of achievement for diverse age-on-arrival (AOA) cohorts of ESL learners on the grade 12 Alberta English language arts (ELA) examination to their vocabulary and reading comprehension scores on a standardized…