The ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and accompanying proficiency guidelines have become a mainstay in academic foreign language assessment. In 2006, an asynchronous electronic interface of the OPI was made available in which candidates are asked to record themselves responding to questions delivered aurally via computer, labeled the Oral…

The use of English-origin spontaneous loanwords (e.g., "la babysitter," "el counter," etc.) in otherwise Spanish discourse is criticized by many as a strategy that bilinguals use to compensate for a lack of lexical knowledge in Spanish. The purpose of the current research is to examine the question of lexical proficiency as a…

The focus of this paper is on Lithuania, where government policies continue to limit the use of Russian in education, the public space and the media, while the local economy has recognized proficiency in Russian as a commodity. This is particularly salient in the healthcare industry that grew significantly in the past years with patients from…

This dissertation explores the identity enactments (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) of 14 multilingual university writing center tutors and multilingual student writers who use English and Putonghua to negotiate their interactions. The study is situated within sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978) and uses ethnographic methods such as observation,…

Exploring opportunities by which learners can internalize new knowledge and consolidate existing knowledge has long been a point of interest in English as a foreign language research. This study investigated how meta-talk opportunities on discourse markers created by four task types including text reconstruction, dictogloss, translation and jigsaw…

Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) are widely used to measure speaking ability in a second or foreign language. The Michigan English Language Assessment Battery (MELAB) Speaking Test is an OPI used for academic and professional purposes around the world. However, little research on this or other OPIs has quantitatively compared test takers' speech…

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been argued to cause (mis)communication issues. Research and practice suggest a range of tactics and strategies for educators focused on how to encourage and foster communication in a virtual learning environment (VLE) (eg, Salmon). However, while frameworks such as Salmon's support the effective…

In this descriptive study the efforts of a faculty to prepare a cohort of pre-service bilingual education teachers to pass a newly adopted state certification test of academic Spanish are presented. The faculty's efforts were aimed at offsetting a low pass rate on this test, but unfortunately efforts fell short. To unpack this outcome, the authors…

Many scholars have conducted research into ways to improve EFL learners' writing proficiency by seeking to address several problems related to achieving this goal (Darani, 2014; Lu, 2013; Thomas, Thomas, & Moltow, 2015; Wang, 2013). However, the issues of learner identity in written communication and the role of the language EFL writers use as…

The goal of this study was to explore English instructors' application of accommodation strategies under English-Mediated Instruction (EMI) in English as a lingua franca context of higher education in Taiwan. English instructors' verbal discourses with regard to various types of strategies during instruction were documented and examined. The…

Reading literature in a foreign language (FL) requires a learner to move beyond decoding simple meanings and phrases to analysis and interpretation of multiple meanings. It also involves the development of a global understanding of a text's significance, which entails participation in a complex social practice, situated in cultural, linguistic,…

This paper reports on the classroom languaging practices of a group of science teachers in rural and township schools in South Africa where the majority of learners learn through the medium of English, despite the fact that it is the home language of only a small minority; and learners' poor English proficiency frequently restricts their access to…

The present study analyses bilingual conversations taking place in binational families living in the UK. The focus is on two Polish/English stepfamilies, where the Polish mothers' concern with preserving and developing their children's linguistic and cultural identity collides with the English partner's limited knowledge of Polish. While the paper…

This paper addresses the ideal of "citizenship" in the US and how particular meanings of history, culture, and language are encoded in government policy and practice. The US government (Citizenship and Immigration Services) presents citizenship as a commitment to shared knowledge and values, and it requires applicants to possess…

This paper reports the findings of a study aiming to reveal the recurring patterns of lexical, syntactic and textual errors in student translations of a specialized EU genre from English into Hungarian. By comparing the student translations to the official translation of the text, this article uncovers the most frequent errors that students made…