This study examined the effects of three subtitle conditions on English vocabulary learning, form recognition and meaning recall, from TED Talks videos while controlling for vocabulary size and initial knowledge of the target words. The participants, 105 Libyan students (16 males and 89 females) at intermediate English proficiency level, were…

Spanish heritage speakers in the United States exhibit a wide range of linguistic profiles due to a combination of political, social, and educational factors. Most of them acquire Spanish at home without formal instruction in writing. Although previous research has explored the main challenges faced by these learners in Spanish writing courses, no…

In Ecuador directors of Indigenous education administer a Kichwa proficiency exam as a requirement for employment. This article considers promises and challenges of the exam, such as how standardized language ideologies manifest in it, and what it says about how institutional knowledge is classed, racialized, and urbanized. Furthermore, though…

This study presents a quantitative analysis of pre-emptive strategies used by first language speakers in talk addressed to second language speakers with moderate proficiency. The strategies identified in the conversations are reformulation, simplification, left-dislocation, and decomposition. The data come from simulated emergency calls in which…

Jessica Wu is Research and Development Program Director at the Language Training and Testing Center (LTTC) in Taipei, Taiwan. Jessica has been deeply involved in the development and validation of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) in addition to a number of other foreign language testing programs. Her research focuses on speaking…

Purpose: This study aims to understand the effect of therapies on dual language children with developmental language disorder (DLD) on a range of bilingual language outcomes, compare with second-language-only therapy and determine whether there is any cross-linguistic transfer. Methods: A systematic review of English articles in 10 electronic…

Bilingual children demonstrate varying levels of proficiency in each of the two languages to which they are exposed. Even though it is widely acknowledged that bilingual children are not a homogenous group, existing studies on dual-language profiles in bilingual children have focused on expressive language profiles. In this study, we used the…

This study attempts to explain a systematic phenomenon that has been described in interlanguage grammars crosslinguistically: Null-Prep, which consists of omitting the obligatory preposition in certain movement constructions. We propose that Null-Prep is not related to lack of knowledge of "wh"-movement, as previously assumed, but to…

This research, conducted at a major university in Tanzania, investigated the personal experiences of multilingual students vis-à-vis the government's language policy requiring Swahili as the language of instruction (LoI) at the primary level and English at the secondary level. The participants, who spoke 25 different languages as their L1, were…

The study examines a corpus of 306 request emails written by 32 English-speaking (ES) teachers and 121 L2 learners from distinctive L1 backgrounds (i.e., Chinese, French, Spanish) and with different levels of L2 proficiency. Pragmatic competence is analyzed through the coding of direct and indirect request strategies used in formal and informal…

This study reports syllable position effects on second language (L2) Portuguese speech perception, revealing that L2 segmental learning may be prone to an influence from the suprasegmental level. The results show that first language (L1) Mandarin learners had diminished performance on the discrimination between the target Portuguese liquids (/l/…

This paper explores eight Kazakhstani postgraduate students' reflections of their international educational experiences in the UK after their immediate re-entry into Kazakhstan. Special focus was on their language identity development after their one-year stay in the UK. It was informed by Benson et al.'s ([2013]. "Second Language Identity in…

To this day, there are only a few studies that have used a controlled instructional intervention on specific linguistic structures to investigate if language instruction is beneficial for heritage learners (HLs), in the same way it is for second (L2) language learners, and more research in this area is rapidly needed (Bowles, 2018). The results…

In response to the increasing linguistic diversity in educational settings resulting from migration waves into the Global North, this study delves into the beliefs of secondary teachers regarding multilingualism within predominantly monolingual policy schools in Flanders, Belgium. Despite the recognized benefits of multilingual pedagogies,…

It is generally agreed that first language (L1) morphological awareness, the ability to reflect upon, analyze and manipulate morphemes and morphological structure of words, can transfer and facilitate second language (L2) reading subskill acquisition. However, the facilitative role of L1 morphological awareness is unclear in the literature…