We examined the naturalistic pronunciation development of two groups of L2 speakers over 10 years. Initially, 50 beginner ESL students participated in production tasks; despite attrition, the tasks were administered eight more times. Here we report listener judgements of accentedness, comprehensibility and fluency for the remaining six Mandarin…

Language assessment for citizenship is a ubiquitous enforced and enacted policy in several developed countries (e.g., Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Netherlands, to name a few). In this regard, language testers have expressly argued that this practice enacts injustice for and adds hurdles to marginalized…

As Canada is increasingly committing to refugee resettlement, there is a critical need to understand how youth from refugee backgrounds can be supported to achieve their full potential in Canadian schools. This multi-year qualitative ethnographic case study explores the affordances of in-school video production for one plurilingual adolescent…

Many parents express concerns for their children's multilingual development, yet little is known about the nature and strength of these concerns - especially among parents in multilingual societies. This pre-registered, questionnaire-based study addresses this gap by examining the concerns of 821 Quebec-based parents raising infants and toddlers…

Disfluencies, such as 'um' or 'uh', can cause adults to attribute uncertainty to speakers, but may also facilitate speech processing. To understand how these different functions affect children's learning, we asked whether (dis)fluency affects children's decision to select information from speakers (an explicit behavior) and their learning of…

Within the same learning context, learners' outcomes in terms of oral fluency vary greatly. This study tracked the relative contributions that first language (L1) and initial second language (L2) fluency skill and working memory (WM) made to L2 fluency development. We assessed the performance of French-speaking Grade 6 learners' (n = 47, mean age:…

"Second Language Acquisition -- Learning Theories and Recent Approaches" will aim to present the process of learning an additional language apart from one's native language. The process of understanding, writing, and speaking another language with fluency involves complex intellectual and emotional responses as well as continuous…

This paper investigates the language fluency problems of skilled immigrants from mainland China to Canada. It capitalises on interview data to explore the relationships between Chinese immigrants' identities, second language practices, and language skills. It reports the informants' difficulty in integrating into their workplaces and their…

This study investigates how using a voice-based Asynchronous Technology-Mediated Communication framework (ATMC) can affect English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students' fluency, accuracy, and intelligibility. Research has highlighted the benefits of ATMC in improving various elements of spoken communication, but to date, its application to EAP…

Activities that promote fluency development or the automatization of speech are often ignored in second language classes because they do not teach new things; instead, they focus on speeding up language use (Nation & Newton, 2008). Anxiety also decreases chances for fluency development, as learners are less willing to produce output (Gregersen…

Willingness to communicate (WTC) has recently been researched as a dynamic variable, with some investigations viewing it as a complex dynamic system (CDS). One important property associated with CDS is the notion of attractor states, which are characterized by stable patterns of behavior. The present study employed an idiodynamic method to monitor…

Bilingual children experience more variation in their language environment than monolingual children and this impacts their rate of language development with respect to monolinguals. How long it takes for bilingual children learning English as a second language (L2) to display similar abilities to monolingual age-peers has been estimated to be 4-6…

This study examines the effects of the pedagogical use of an interactive mobile digital game, Prêt à Négocier (PàN), on improving learners' pronunciation of French as a Second Language (FSL), using three holistic measures: comprehensibility, fluency, and overall pronunciation. Two groups of FSL learners engaged in different types of game-playing…

British Columbia (BC), Canada, is home to 34 Indigenous languages, all of them classified as endangered. Considerable work is underway by First Nation communities to revitalize their languages. Linguists classify many of the languages of BC as polysynthetic, meaning that words are composed of many morphemes, or units of meaning. While strong…

Although the development of second language (L2) oral fluency has been widely investigated over the past several decades, there remains a paucity of research examining language instruction specifically aimed at improving this cognitive skill. In this study, the researchers investigate how instructional techniques adapted from drama can positively…