According to discoursal views on language, variations in textualization strategies are always sociocontextually motivated and never happen at random. The textual forms employed in a text, along with many other discoursal and contextual factors, could certainly affect the readability of the text, making it more or less processable for the same…

With use of self-assessment (SA) of young language learners on the rise, educators of young learners often want to know what SA captures and how best to use it in order to assist their students' learning. This study focuses on understanding how young learners' processes for responding to SA items differ by age and by context of implementation…

Stemming from issue of migration for education, the study explored the language learning experience of Korean university students who come to the Philippines for education. Specifically, it documented the changes in the students' implicit and explicit knowledge that occurred in the preactional until the actional phase of their learning journey in…

Second language (L2) reading research suggests that successful reading comprehension usually involves a repertoire of strategies. Although Chinese is considered to be a challenging language for foreign language readers, thus far, few studies have investigated how strategies are orchestrated by readers of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) to…

This article reports the findings of sociolinguistic research investigating the use of second-person singular pronouns in Costa Rica. The study was carried out onsite and involved 132 interviewees from all seven provinces of the country. These subjects reacted to scenarios in which they had to choose their preferred pronoun of use…

Lots of studies have tried to test the effect of strategy training on vocabulary development. However, instead of trying to uncover the strategies that learners actually use, they have tried to expose learners to a list of strategies supported by theories. Although these theory-driven studies have provided the field with significant and…

There is a considerable amount of research investigating students' transition from college to university but it is important this focus is directed specifically towards the transition of international students, as the difficulties they face are profound. The literature surrounding international students seems to lack an in-depth understanding of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of contexts in the memory of meaning in foreign vocabularies. The study was based on the cognitive processing hierarchy theory of Craik and Lockhart (1972), the memory trace theory of McClelland and Rumelhart (1986) and the memory trace theory of cognitive psychology. The subjects were non-English…

Drawing on insights from Communities of Practice and critical discourse theory, this study investigates how teacher identities are discursively constructed in course of teacher education and under the influence of social structure. The participants were seven Hong Kong and nine mainland Chinese pre-service teachers. Two focus group interviews and…

This paper asserts that English teachers' understanding of their professionalism enables them to "put the learner in the spotlight" through their highly-developed awareness of local contexts of English use. Changing attitudes to English language teacher identity include a revaluation of the "native-non-native speaker" dichotomy…

This article explores the beliefs about second language (L2) sociolinguistic competence of four university-level advanced L2 learners. It places particular emphasis on 1) how these university learners conceptualized L2 sociolinguistic competence; 2) how they thought about two different language learning contexts (viz., the L2 classroom versus…

As the demands placed on the literacy coach have evolved, so too have the roles of these educational providers who are often responsible for working with school teams to turn around student performance on standardized literacy tests. One literacy coach based in a Queensland primary school recounts her experiences via open-ended interview over a…

This study investigated comprehension of indirect meaning among learners of L2 Spanish via an original computer-delivered multimedia listening test. The comprehension of implied speaker intention is a type of indirect communication that involves the ability to understand implied intention by using linguistic knowledge, contextual cues, and the…

This paper explores factors contributing to the willingness to communicate (WTC) in English as a foreign language (L2) in a Thai university setting. The study uses multiple methods within a qualitative research approach. Data were collected through interviews, stimulated recall, and classroom observations. Relevant contextually-related variables…

This article is part of a longitudinal study of American college students studying Mandarin in China. Its main data are drawn from monthly speaking events (four sessions with each student) conducted in Chinese with each of 29 participants in a study-abroad program in China. The study yielded these results: (a) Students made significant progress in…