According to the common underlying proficiency model (Cummins, 1981), as children acquire academic knowledge and skills in their first language, they also acquire language-independent information about those skills that can be applied when learning a second language. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relevance of the common underlying…

This study examines whether lexical features and textual properties along with individual differences on the part of readers influence word processing times during second language (L2) reading comprehension. Forty-eight Spanish-speaking adolescent and adult learners of English read nine English passages in a self-paced word-by-word reading…

The present study investigates whether the emotional content of words has the same effect in the different languages of bilinguals by testing the effects of word concreteness, the type of task used, and language status. Highly proficient bilinguals of Catalan and Spanish who learned Catalan and Spanish in early childhood in a bilingual immersion…

This study explores the degree of language knowledge of Japanese living in Catalonia and their perceptions of the two particular languages used in this multilingual/bilingual society. The data on language proficiency was obtained via a questionnaire survey which was evaluated by the subjects themselves and analysed by means of correspondence…

This study tests the hypothesis that late first-language English / second-language Spanish learners (L1 English / L2 Spanish learners) acquire spirantization in stages according to the prosodic hierarchy (Zampini, 1997, 1998). In Spanish, voiced stops [b d g] surface after a pause or nasal stop, and continuants [ß? ð? ??] surface postvocalically,…

Educators need ways to assess orthographic knowledge and differentiate word study instruction for secondary, emergent bilingual learners. In this study, the spelling of 199 students in grades 7-12 across eight features and four spelling stages was examined to understand students' orthographic development; all but two were learning Spanish and…

Historically, the manner in which translation ambiguity and emotional content are represented in bilingual memory have often been ignored in many theoretical and empirical investigations, resulting in these linguistic factors related to bilingualism being absent from even the most promising models of bilingual memory representation. However, in…

Studies of the acquisition of the lenited allophones of Spanish voiced stops have traditionally focused on the production (Lord, 2010; Rogers & Alvord, 2014; Zampini, 1994), but not on the perception of these sounds. This pilot study examines relationships between (a) learner proficiency and perception of target sounds; (b) learner perception…

Oral narrative retelling is a complex linguistic and cognitive task that has been shown to map onto reading fluency and comprehension. Therefore, it is important to understand oral retelling skill, especially among "emergent bilingual" children--those who are learning two languages simultaneously. In this article, exploratory…

This study examined the development of interactional competence (Hall, 1993; He & Young, 1998) by beginning learners of Spanish as indexed by their use of alignment moves. Discourse analysis techniques and quantitative data analysis were used to explore how 52 learners expressed alignment and changes in participation patterns in two sets of…

This study attempts to ascertain if the WebCAPE placement exam can be used to measure improvement in an upper division grammar course. The WebCAPE online placement exam is a widely used instrument designed to help university language programs place students into the basic language course best corresponding to their proficiency level. This is done…

In the present study, we examine sentence reading in low-proficiency Spanish learners using an eye-tracking methodology. This method reveals the real-time, uninterrupted process of reading comprehension, and can therefore shed light on L2 learners' functional proficiency. We created sentence pairs that were identical except for one word. The…

Even though there has been a significant advancement in human rights, social justice and social practices around the world; some Ecuadorian indigenous students still struggle against many social and linguistic limitations, especially in Chimborazo province. This research was carried out with 30 Ecuadorian indigenous students who studied English as…

Despite acknowledgment that language-minority children come from a wide variety of home language backgrounds and have a wide range of proficiency in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages, it is unknown whether differences across language-minority children in relative and absolute levels of proficiency in L1 and L2 predict subsequent…

Previous studies have shown that study abroad has a positive effect on second language (L2) learning outcomes for students who spend at least a semester abroad. It is unclear, however, whether a short-term experience also has a measurable impact on L2 development. The present study examines the relationship between speaking proficiency gains made…