The effectiveness of various strategies for educating the growing U.S. population of English language learners (ELLs) has attracted a great deal of controversy. Bilingual education theory posits that retention and continued development of native language (L1) skills facilitate academic achievement through two mediating mechanisms. First, L1…

Efforts to improve educational outcomes for English learners often focus on "academic language," but unfortunately the field lacks a clear, agreed-upon definition of the concept. This article reports on a design research study that focused on students' engagement in one academic practice over several months: reading and discussing…

This study presents the main findings from a study which investigated Malaysian multilingual students' practical use of three languages with respect to reading, speaking and writing in Bahasa Malaysia (BM), English and German. In addition, two further aspects have been examined: students' motivation to learn a language, and the respondents'…

"Generation 1.5" is a term being used to describe a type of second language (L2) long-term U.S. resident who may demonstrate persistent language-related challenges (Roberge, Siegel, & Harklau, 2009). Among the difficulties commonly noted with Generation 1.5 students are problems in controlling the academic register expected in…

Research on bilingual word recognition suggests that lexical access is nonselective with respect to language, i.e., that word representations of both languages become active during recognition. One piece of evidence supporting nonselective access is that bilinguals recognize cognates (words that are identical or similar in form and meaning in two…

This dissertation investigates processing of English and Japanese relative clause (RC) sentences by native speakers and second/foreign language (L2) learners. Particularly, the relationship between the sentence processing and individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity was examined. The main question addressed in this study is whether…

Characterized by both cultural and gender-based barriers to English language learning, language learning is a continual process of identity renegotiation, as several theorists have argued. While this identity renegotiation has been explored for women who assume the roles of wives, daughters, and employees, less attention has been directed to the…

In language teaching, emphasis is usually placed on grammatical competence rather than metaphorical competence to improve a learner's proficiency in the target language. Research has shown that figurative language poses a problem for second language learners whether it is in their ability to interpret, process, or produce metaphors. This affects…

Rural African classrooms are still practising discourses and pedagogies that contribute towards students' continued underachievement and marginalisation. The use of behaviourist-based pedagogical approaches and the exclusion of learners' socio-cultural experiences including their mother tongue (MT) still characterise most classroom practices. The…

This study explores transformations in the cultural identities of a group of pre-service teachers from mainland China during their educational experiences in Hong Kong, and how these transformations subsequently impact their professional identity. Individual and focus group interviews were conducted with 16 cross-border pre-service teachers from a…

Multilingualism is an international fact of life and increasing in the United States. Multilingual families are exceedingly diverse, and policies relevant to them should take this into account. The quantity and quality of a child's exposure to responsive conversation spoken by fluent adults predicts both monolingual and multilingual language and…

This paper reports a study of the effectiveness of the mandatory mother-tongue education policy in post-colonial Hong Kong. Special attention has been placed on students' academic achievement before and after the policy implementation in 1998 in order to find out if students learn better through their mother tongue without sacrificing their…

American Sign Language (ASL) is ranked fourth among heritage languages taken by students in the United States. The number of ASL classes offered at the K-12 and Institutions of Higher Education are on the rise, yet the number of certified ASL teachers remains stagnant. This study examines the reasons why American Sign Language teachers choose to…

Acculturation and language proficiency have been found to be inter-related both from the perspective of second language acquisition (Schumann, 1978, 1986) and socio-psychological adaptation in cross-cultural contacts (Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001). However, the predictions as to the effect of a particular strategy on success differ, with…

In this article, factors inhibiting the use of mother tongue as the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in rural foundation phase classes is investigated. I analysed qualitative data from focus group interviews with 20 foundation phase teachers that were selected through purposive sampling. Findings show that factors such as prior learner…