The present study examines two factors in relation to English L3 proficiency development and school performance in a third language: (a) parental education and (b) second language exposure within the living community. Participants (n?=?50) are Italian L1 students with German L2 and English L3. All students (eighth grade, 14 years of age) were…

In this article we consider how the roles of learner and teacher are configured in a teletandem exchange between two students working in a university language centre with no external tutor present. Teletandem is a multilateral exchange (Lewis et al. 2011) via desktop videoconferencing. It is based on the tandem method, where two learners with…

This study examines the role of the use of the L1 in EFL classes from the perspective of EFL learners. The triangulated data were collected using class observations, focus group semi-structured interviews and the learners' written reports of their perceptions and attitudes in a purpose-designed questionnaire. The participants consisted of sixty…

The focus of this paper is on the relationship between Albanian speakers' ethnolinguistic vitality (EV) perceptions and their language maintenance, language use and choice patterns. A subjective EV questionnaire, and a language usage questionnaire capturing domain-specific language use was completed by 200 Albanian immigrants of first and second…

International comparisons reveal that lower-secondary-level students in Austria perform below the OECD mean in science. Guided by the search for remedies and improvements in science teaching, this study investigates whether cross-age peer tutoring is an appropriate method for teaching physics. A modern and concise definition of peer tutoring is…

This article reports on an investigation of the role raters' language background plays in raters' assessment of test takers' speaking ability. Specifically, this article examines differences between American and Indian raters in their scores and scoring processes when rating Indian test takers' responses to the Test of English as a Foreign…

Hong Kong is linguistically complex and diverse with three principal languages: Cantonese, English and Putonghua. A substantial debate on the language policies governing the three principal languages has continued for more than two decades among policy-makers and educators. The political transition in 1997 has greatly affected Hong Kong society,…

Numerous studies, examining the acquisition of non-referential it in [-pro-drop] English by learners of [+pro-drop] languages, have revealed that their participants omit non-referential subjects in English if their L1 allows null-subject position. However, due to the specificity of their focus, these studies have not considered other difficulties…

One major competence for learners in the 21st century is acquiring a second language (L2). Based on this, L2 instruction has integrated new concepts to motivate learners in their pursue of achieving fluency. A concept that is adaptable to digital natives and digital immigrants that are learning a L2 is Gamification. As a pedagogical strategy,…

The current study investigated task effects on listener perception of second language (L2) comprehensibility (ease of understanding). Sixty university-level adult speakers of English from 4 first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese, Romance, Hindi, Farsi), with 15 speakers per group, were recorded performing 2 tasks (IELTS long-turn speaking task…

Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) is a framework to help adult English as a second language (ESL) educators renovate their practices into effective, culturally responsive programs, readily accessible to adult learners. Four CRT strategies that can be used include (a) validation through caring, (b) valuing cultural experiences, (c) creating a…

This study investigated the influence of frequency effects on the processing of congruent (i.e., having an equivalent first language [L1] construction) collocations and incongruent (i.e., not having an equivalent L1 construction) collocations in a second language (L2). An acceptability judgment task was administered to native and advanced…

Acquisition of English grammatical morphology was examined in five internationally adopted (IA) children from China (aged 0;10-1;1 at adoption) during the first three years' exposure to English to determine whether acquisition patterns were characteristic of child second language (L2) learners or monolingual first language (L1) learners. Results…

It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present…

This study compares mastery of gender assignment and agreement in Italian by adult Italian-German bilinguals who have acquired two languages simultaneously (2L1), and by adult German highly proficient second language learners (L2ers) of Italian. Our data show that incompleteness in bilingual acquisition and in second language (L2) acquisition…