This study explored the impacts of translingual practices on English as an additional language (EAL) writing education in a non-English as a medium of instruction (non-EMI) context at a Chinese university. The findings highlighted the benefits of translingual practices in enhancing students' comprehension, easing cognitive challenges, and…

While most empirical studies have investigated the improvement of learners' L2 spoken proficiency via speaking-related interventions, the present study examined the same topic through a different modality: listening. Ninety-five first-year tertiary-level students of English as a second language (ESL) in Hong Kong participated in this three-month…

The current study examined the extent to which native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Spontaneous speech samples elicited from 50 Japanese learners of English with various proficiency levels were first rated by 10 Canadian and 10…

The study reported in this article investigated the proficiency in French of a group of anglophone adult L2 learners of the language, all of whom reported passing regularly for native speakers of French. Tests were administered to these learners to gauge their proficiency in different aspects of French, including a lexico-grammatical measure. A…

In the context of English as a global language in which the interaction is not only between native speakers and ESL speakers but also among non-native speakers themselves, there is a need to investigate how well L2 listeners can judge and successfully comprehend accented English produced by other L2 speakers; particularly, how the specific…

The research project reported in this chapter consists of three studies in which syntactic complexity, lexical variation and fluency appear as dependent variables. The independent variables are task complexity and proficiency level, as the three studies investigate the effect of task complexity on the written and oral performance of L2 learners of…

Research into complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) as basic dimensions of second language performance, proficiency and development has received increased attention in SLA. However, the larger picture in this field of research is often obscured by the breadth of scope, multiple objectives and lack of clarity as to how complexity, accuracy and…

This dissertation investigates lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York. English-origin lexical material was extracted from a stratified sample of 146 Spanish-speaking informants of different ages, national origins, classes, etc., living in New York City. ANOVAs and Pearson correlations determined whether lexical borrowing frequency and the type…

By centralizing the issue of test fairness in language proficiency assessments, this study responds to a call by researchers for developing greater social responsibility in the language testing agenda. As inquiries into language attitude and psychology indicate, there is an underlying uncertainty pertaining to the validity of test use and score…

When analyzing data concerning interlanguage variation and discourse domain, it appears that learners may exhibit more control in their work-domain than in their life-story domain. Data were collected on the Dutch-French interlanguage of two university economics students to investigate the relation of domain to variation in utterances. (Author/…

Papers on linguistics and language teaching in this volume are the following: "Language in Education: Hard Choices for Hong Kong" (Jo Lewkowicz); "EL2--Medium Education in a Largely Monolingual Society: The Case of Hong Kong" (Nigel Bruce); "A Programme for Semantics" (Laurence Goldstein); "Semantics and Its…