The present study examined the relations between three motivational variables, i.e. academic self-efficacy, task importance, and interest with three types of learning behaviours, i.e. class engagement, metacognitive self-regulation, and avoidance coping with 1954 secondary students in Singapore. Positive correlations were found between the three…

This survey research investigated the attitude of Iranian Azeri native speakers towards Azeri language. A questionnaire was developed and its reliability was estimated (r = 0.74) through a piloting phase on 54 Azeri native speakers. The participants, for the main phase of this study, were 400 Azeri native speakers with different social and…

This study aimed at exploring the possible differences between Iranian English and non-English major students in terms of their attitude towards native English speakers and reported self-identity change. It also attempted to investigate the possible significant relationships between these two variables. The results of the independent-sample…

Not only does Singapore have a unique ethnic and multilingual makeup, it also boasts unique language policies, especially with regard to the learning of the official languages. Previous studies of Singaporean youths have largely focused on the differences in attitudes and code-switching between linguistic varieties (e.g. Colloquial Singapore…

This paper presents a study on the use of learning strategies in foreign languages, and more specifically Spanish. The study was conducted with 376 Chinese and American students who were studying Spanish in their countries of origin. The results obtained from a latent class cluster analysis identified five groups of participants based on the…

Do French-Canadian (FC) minorities in New Brunswick and Ontario remain as committed as majority Francophone Quebecers in developing their vitality within Canada's bilingual belt? FCs constitute host communities for interprovincial migrants of FC and English-Canadian (EC) background who can bolster or weaken the vitality of FCs. How FCs and ECs…

This study analyses the influence of ethnic identity on the acculturation orientations of Basque undergraduates, towards groups in traditional contact (native Basques and native Spaniards) and towards recent immigrant groups. Five dimensions were used to measure the Basque and/or Spanish identities: linguistic, cultural, political, global, and the…

Educational sojourns abroad are not only increasingly popular; it is also believed that they have many positive outcomes for students. The transformative potential of a study sojourn abroad has been claimed in linguistic and broader intercultural terms (e.g. Brown [2009] "The Transformative Power of the International Sojourn: An Ethnographic…

The present study examined the practice of language brokering (LB) among South Asian Canadian college-age adults and how such practice relates to acculturation to mainstream and heritage cultures, as well as personal empowerment. One hundred and twenty-four young adults reported on three different indices of LB (brokering frequency, diversity of…

Israeli university students who have difficulty reading academic texts in English are required to take reading comprehension courses in English for academic purposes (EAP) in order to complete their BA degree. Whereas most students pass the courses, some repeatedly fail. Since Israel is a multilingual country, there is also a question about…

In 2011, the Taiwanese Government began a campaign to encourage new immigrants to teach their native languages (heritage languages) to their children. However, these heritage languages are seldom used in cross-national families and the effectiveness of formal heritage language courses in Taiwan has yet to be explored. The present study examines…

According to a recent report, the top skill that employers are looking for in graduates is an ability to work collaboratively with teams of people from a range of backgrounds and countries. So as universities seek to internationalise, an important question is how successful they are in developing this skill. Both research and anecdotal evidence…

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has often been considered a monolithic, monolingual state but, in fact, it is linguistically and culturally diverse. Despite the size, there is still a lack of sociolinguistic studies on the Han Chinese in the PRC. Therefore, this study focuses on the language attitudes of Cantonese-speaking students in…

In this paper, we present a synthesis of a series of studies, carried out by our research groups, from the Greek educational context on teachers' and immigrant students' views on issues of bilingual acquisition and of heritage language learning and teaching. Albeit including heterogeneous samples and employing quantitative and qualitative…

Compared with reading, writing and listening, there has been a paucity of empirical data documenting learners' experiences of speaking English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) in different learning contexts in spite of the fact that developing the ability to speak in a second or foreign language is widely…