Families that live temporarily abroad for work or education (amongst other reasons) often encounter some difficulties to maintain their children's L1; particularly when they live in English-speaking countries. This study explores the language maintenance experiences of ten Saudi Arabian families sojourning in Australia, from the perspective of…

This article reports on a study that examined how a group of plurilingual students use their linguistic repertoires to achieve a number of purposes such as performing identity, learning and socialising, and negotiating with structure in an English-dominant university. In order to capture the dynamic relationship between language-as-resource,…

The use of interactional metadiscourse markers in opinion paragraphs written by A2-level English learners was investigated in this research. Although metadiscourse is commonly studied in discourse analysis, pragmatics, and language teaching, there has been limited attention given to the writing of beginner-level language learners. Metadiscourse is…

This qualitative case study explored the perspectives of school administrators on implementing structured English immersion (SEI) and dual-language bilingual education (DLBE) programs serving emergent bilingual learners at one urban Arizona elementary school. Using a sociocultural policy perspective, I analyzed findings from a series of interviews…

This paper examined to what extent causal explanation speaking tasks (CESTs) are cognitively appropriate for assessing young language learners' (YLLs) L2 speaking. Ninety-six YLLs (48 from Grade 4 and 6 each) in China performed two CESTs in both L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English). They also completed receptive and productive L2 vocabulary size tests.…

While some researchers claim that the use of the first language (L1) in second language (L2) classrooms should be discouraged since they say that success in learning an L2 is heavily determined by the maximum exposure to it, but others argue that the use of L1 is beneficial particularly in EFL classrooms. This study was conducted to investigate…

Developing effective aptitude test batteries for conference interpreting is highly relevant for China given its large and fast-growing interpreting trainee population. This paper reports on the aptitude tests implemented to 23 first-year students at a CIUTI member and UN MOU university in China. We compared the validity of recall, a test commonly…

Past studies on aptitude for interpreting have investigated the correlation between personal traits and achievement, yet relatively few have singled out students' emotional state as an important aptitude constituent or tracked its developmental patterns. To address this gap, the present study followed 116 Chinese students of interpreting for five…

This paper proposes a tripartite model describing the lexical categories across different registers and levels of formality in the Cantonese language in contemporary Hong Kong: (1) native Cantonese words; (2) Sino-Cantonese words, and (3) Anglo-Cantonese words. Examples of authentic Cantonese use were used to illustrate the histories and etymology…

This research investigated six established areas for quality (Ortega-Martín et al., 2018) in the implementation of CLIL programmes in a Spanish monolingual autonomous community from the perspective of its teachers, in particular focusing on possible differences of opinion between content and English language teachers, an understudied area. Both…

The impact of global mobility and technology innovations on urban linguistic diversity poses a key challenge to understand how and to what extent international students are immersed in the target language. Such diversity of languages and modes of communication has pointed to a fundamental transformation in the way that international students…

With the expanding use of English around the world, it is important to understand various stakeholders' attitudes towards it from a Global Englishes (GE) perspective. The GE perspective has challenged native speakerism and recognized the multilingual nature of the English language. In particular, a GE perspective leads to the sustainable…

Informed by two usage-based approaches, this study investigated to what extent different types of computer-based training facilitated English preposition learning among intermediate Chinese learners of English. The design of the pedagogical materials was informed by the cognitive linguistics (CL) framework while the training format was motivated…

Despite the growing body of studies on collocation learning in SLA research, there are hardly any studies taking the perspective of the individual learner or studies that have examined the effect of individual differences. This study--a qualitative component of a mixed-methods longitudinal project--presents an in-depth exploration of the intro-…

Strategic competence, as a meta-cognitive ability, determines the other translation sub-competences. To tease out how students' strategic competence is developed in translation project is significant in enlightening the translation teaching practice. This study explores how five Chinese college students' translation competence, particularly their…