This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

Although biliteracy plays a vital role in academic achievement, there has been little research on the unique needs of female and male English language learners. Becoming biliterate is a complex process, compounded by other variables such as 1st-language background, class, culture, and gender. Among these variables, gender has been the least…

In this article, Huw Jarvis and Stephen Krashen ask "Is CALL Obsolete?" When the term CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) was introduced in the 1960s, the language education profession knew only about language learning, not language acquisition, and assumed the computer's primary contribution to second language acquisition…

Through examining all instances of the nontarget "be" before verbs in the written interlanguage of Chinese learners at different proficiency levels, the present study reveals that nontarget "be" performs different functions, and there is a function shift from low to high proficiency levels. At the lowest levels, "be"…

Objective: This study, nested within a large cohort study, sought to explore how well Vietnamese mothers with pre-school children understood the dental health education material commonly available in New South Wales, Australia. Design: Qualitative research. Setting: Home-based interviews. Method: Vietnamese-speaking mothers ("n" = 24)…

After the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, 11 languages (English, Afrikaans and 9 indigenous African languages) were given official status. In the higher education landscape, English remains the dominant language of scholarship. At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, English is the main medium of instruction but the institution's language…

This book examines the benefits of multilingual education that puts children's needs and interests above the individual languages involved. It advocates flexible multilingual education, which builds upon children's actual home resources and provides access to both the local and global languages that students need for their educational and…

We present a new feedback strategy implemented in a natural language generation-based e-learning system for German as a second language (L2). Although the system recognizes a large proportion of the grammar errors in learner-produced written sentences, its automatically generated feedback only addresses errors against rules that are relevant at…

This qualitative case study investigates the transformative power of a leadership course designed for immigrant secondary school students learning English as an additional language with a social justice orientation. Course projects allowed the students to get involved in tutoring, present at a conference on intercultural education, deliver equity…

This study compares the language learner and test-taking strategies used by Chinese-speaking graduate students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in an English multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. Thirty-six participants at a large mid-western university performed three tasks: A content knowledge vocabulary…

Grounded in constructivist theories of reading and informed by the contemporary theories of identity, this study explored how three Korean adult speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL) constructed meaning of the novel "The Catcher in the Rye", and how their identities mediated this process. Sources of data included think aloud…

Due to the growing number of plurilingual learners in the world today (Hammarberg, 2010), the present multiple case study examines four plurilingual participants' beliefs toward first language (L1) and second language (L2) mediation in the acquisition of French as a third language (L3). During a 16-week classroom-based study in a French university…

English is spoken in five countries as the native language and in numerous other countries as an official language and the language of instruction. In countries where English is the native language, it is taught to speakers of other languages as an additional language to enable them to participate in all domains of life of that country. In many…

This article documents a fairly rare kind of interlanguage phenomenon, namely one in which interlanguages exhibit syntactic constructions that are grammatical neither in a learner's native language nor in his or her target language, but are nevertheless typologically attested. The target construction is "wh"-scope marking, a cross-linguistically…

This study examined the effects of first language characteristics on the development of two aspects of English morphological awareness: derivational and compound awareness in English language learners (ELLs) with Chinese or Spanish as their first language. It also assessed the contribution of derivational and compound awareness to word reading in…