This study considered the songs currently in use in Gaelic groups for 0-3 year olds in Scotland, whilst investigating how practitioners use them in the groups. In this article, I argue that Gaelic Early Years practitioners insufficiently understand the potential of song in relation to Gaelic language acquisition with young children and their…

Little is known about language development after late-to-moderate premature birth, the most significant part of prematurity worldwide. We examined minimal-pair word-learning skills in 18 eighteen-month-old healthy full-term (mean gestational age [GA] at birth = 39.6 weeks; 7 males; 100% Caucasian) and 18 healthy late-to-moderate preterm infants…

In everyday life, children hear but also often see their caregiver talking. Children build on this correspondence to resolve auditory uncertainties and decipher words from the speech input. As they hear the name of an object, 18- to 30-month-olds form a representation that permits word recognition in either the auditory (i.e. acoustic form of the…

This project studies how Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals use language learning strategies (LLS) differently depending on their order of language acquisition when they are learning French as an L4. Considering that the use of LLS has been pointed out as a sign of successful language learning, the study inquires whether being a simultaneous…

The pandemic has affected many aspects of our lives including education and that has caused the Government to provide alternative teaching methods and make recommendations for online learning. Since smartphones and laptops using the internet are the only tools for learning, students are increasingly playing online games and being exposed to…

This study reports on strategies to indicate plural referents in hearing learners of Sign Language of the Netherlands. This is the first explorative study that focuses on L2 expressions of plurality in a sign language. Using data from two datasets, I examined when learners start to express plural and which strategies they apply, and I noted…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

Active learning is recognized as an instructional approach that engages students in active participation and encourages them to reflect on the learning process. This research study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of implementing active learning in the "English at Work" course and to explore EFL undergraduate students' attitudes…

Copying words by writing and typing are two effective methods in traditional learning, but their merits for learning L2 words have seldom been compared. Because of technological advances and the growing popularity of utilising smart mobile products to acquire L2 vocabulary, this study investigated the effectiveness of writing and typing techniques…

Aim/Purpose: This exploratory qualitative case study examines the perceptions of high-school learners of English regarding a pedagogical intervention involving progressive reduction of captions (full, sentence-level, keyword captions, and no-captions) in enhancing language learning. Background: Recognizing the limitations of caption usage in…

Studies of non-linguistic statistical learning (SL) have often linked performance in SL tasks with differences in language outcomes. Most of these studies have focused on Western and high-income educational contexts, but children worldwide learn in radically different educational systems and communities, and often in a second language. In the west…

Most speakers' first language (L1) in Hong Kong and Guangdong China is Cantonese. Even though the L1 of both Guangdong Cantonese speakers and Hong Kong Cantonese speakers is the same, their second languages (L2) belong to different language families. Previous studies have pointed out that L2 status in third language (L3) acquisition is a salient…

Purpose: This study was designed to distinguish the degree of sharing of representations between different modalities by investigating whether a word encountering experience in one modality impacts word processing in another modality. Method: In three experiments, participants experienced some words frequently in the auditory modality (Experiment…

This study examines the effectiveness of study abroad and pragmatic instruction on L2 learners' acquisition of the speech acts of requesting, thanking, and refusing. In the study, speech acts produced by L2 learners of Spanish who studied abroad for six weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina and L2 learners who received eight weeks of pragmatic…

The need to integrate digital literacy into curricula as a fundamental skill set for navigating the complexities of the digital age has increased. This study aims to explore how knowledge and skills of digital literacy present in language arts standards and what elements of digital literacy are emphasized. To achieve this, we used text mining…