Drawing on theories of family language policy and literacy environment, this inquiry explores and describes how family language policy is managed through literacy resources and literacy related activities in transnational families in the UK. A total of 66 families, each with at least one child between the age of 2 and 8, participated in this…

This study investigates the functions served by learners' first language (L1) in classroom interaction among Iranian learners of English (L2). The study aims to determine how learners' L1 serves them in their L2 learning. It adopts a qualitative approach. The study involved the participation of eleven Grade 9 learners in one Iranian high school in…

This paper focuses on the attitudes towards reading in the home, handed down through the generations and experienced by the young children in four families of Pakistani and Indian origin. The children's families originally arrived in the UK in the 1960s, and this paper unpicks the stories and attitudinal changes in relation to both English and the…

Pedagogical tasks in language learning settings promote learner-learner interaction and provide second language (L2) learners with opportunities to process authentic input and produce output (Philp, Adams, & Iwashita, 2014). During these interactions, learners use their language repertoire to mediate their output (Swain & Lapkin, 2000).…

In this study, we examined the bilingual language development among Korean American first-graders in two southern California cities and explored the opportunities for language use available to them in various spaces: at school (one dual language immersion school and one traditional English-only public school), at home, and in the community. Data…

Family language practice can be significantly influenced by social, historical, and political contexts, especially in immigrant households where a society's minority languages are used. Set in a large city in Japan, this study examines how institutional power can affect Filipino mothers' language use at home. Drawing from the cultural historical…

This study examined how language learners' preconceptions about a task influence their approaches to second language reading and the sociocultural basis for such preconceptions. Participants were 30 students learning English at a Korean university. The researchers told half of the participants that they would do a recall task after reading an…

Uganda introduced the use of mother tongue as medium of instruction in primary schools in 2007. This was meant to promote interaction and participation in the learning process and improve children's proficiency in reading and writing. Drawing elements of interaction and participation from the socio-cultural theory, the child-centred pedagogy was…

English education in Taiwan has experienced a number of modifications over the past decade. The Ministry of Education (MOE) has initiated several reforms since 1994 with a purpose of changing the pedagogy, focusing on grammar-translation, to a more communicative one aim at cultivating learners of greater communication proficiency for the demands…

Due to the growing number of plurilingual learners in the world today (Hammarberg, 2010), the present multiple case study examines four plurilingual participants' beliefs toward first language (L1) and second language (L2) mediation in the acquisition of French as a third language (L3). During a 16-week classroom-based study in a French university…

While much feedback research in L1 and L2 writing has been conducted in pre-university and university contexts, little attention has been paid to supervisors' comments at the graduate level. Specifically, the nature and role of supervisors' commentary on the writing of graduate-level academic genre is under-explored. Designed to fill such an…

This qualitative instrumental case study explores various factors that might influence upper-intermediate-level English as a second language (ESL) students' summarizing from a sociocultural perspective. The study was conducted in a formal classroom setting, during a reading and writing class in the English Language Institute at a university in the…

This paper is a qualitative case study of a Korean first grade child. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the nature of a first grade Korean child's oral language interactions with teachers, parents, peers, and community members and to examine how a child's oral language impacts his literacy learning in English. The data were…

This study reflects a social constructivist theoretical framework in which the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a central element, as two teaching approaches, communicative language teaching (CLT) and explicit focus on form (FonF) are examined. Research questions include: Are CLT and explicit FonF conducive to reaching the ZPD? Is there a…