The present study aimed to develop and validate a questionnaire assessing parents' beliefs about, and attitudes toward, supporting young children's English as a second/foreign language development -- Parent English Language Belief and Attitude Questionnaire (PELBA-Q). The PELBA-Q was piloted with 173 parents of kindergarten-aged children and…

Attempts to prevent language endangerment seem to have overlooked how families proceed in surrendering the language whose intergenerational transmission is their main responsibility. The present paper envisages language maintenance or loss from the vantage point that beliefs about language are the main referents of language use in the family in…

This study sought to contribute to the growing literature on third and subsequent language learning by establishing whether bilingualism has an effect on ability to learn a subsequent language, as indicated by a measure of language aptitude, the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB). Test results were obtained for 142 diplomatic officers in the…

Human behavior is not constant over the hours of the day, and there are considerable individual differences. Some people raise early and go to bed early and have their peek performance early in the day ("larks") while others tend to go to bed late and get up late and have their best performance later in the day ("owls"). In…

Purpose: The purpose of this research forum article is to provide an overview of typical and atypical development of English as a second language (L2) and to present strategies for clinical assessment with English language learners (ELLs). Method: A review of studies examining the lexical, morphological, narrative, and verbal memory abilities of…

The main purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers' Professional Identity and their types of Multiple Intelligences. Moreover, it aimed to see the extent to which their multiple intelligences can predict their professional identity. The participants of the study were 137 Iranian EFL teachers teaching in…

It is widely assumed that the British are poorer modern foreign language (MFL) learners than their fellow Europeans. Motivation has often been seen as the main cause of this perceived disparity in language learning success. However, there have also been suggestions that curricular and pedagogical factors may play a part. This article reports a…

In the study reported here, we explored writing processes employed by 70 undergraduate learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) through questionnaires and think-aloud protocols. Then we looked for possible differences in the writing processes employed by high- and low-aptitude learners. We observed that learners with higher aptitude scores…

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the relationships between working memory (WM) and three commonly used learning strategies or conditions in the nature of proficiency among adult L2 Russian learners. Based on the aptitude-learning condition interaction framework articulated by Robinson (2002b), the study identifies two types of…

The aim of the study is to investigate beliefs students usually held about language learning, based on the Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) questionnaire (Horwitz, 1988). For this purpose, 423 University learners of English in Iran were selected. Running descriptive statistics and the scree plot test, five factors were extracted:…

Learners' beliefs about foreign language learning have been stressed in educational research because they are regarded as fundamental to learners' progress (e.g. Altan, 2012; Russell, 2009; Rieger, 2009; Kormos & Csizér, 2008;). This paper deals with the results of a research project conducted among first-year English language majors studying…

Due to their unique profile as childhood bilinguals whose first language (L1) became weaker than their second language (L2), heritage speakers can shed light on three key issues in bilingualism--timing, input, and cross-linguistic interaction. The heritage speakers of focus in this dissertation are Korean second generation immigrants mainly…

This study examined the second language (L2) development of adult learners of Spanish at three levels of proficiency during and after a semester of instruction. A fundamental goal was to identify cognitive and psychosocial individual differences (IDs) that can explain between-learner variation over time in order to expand our understanding of the…

This study reports on the integration of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) multimedia courseware for oral presentations into a self-learning and elective program for non-English major students in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting. A computer-aided instruction approach, combined with a task-based learning approach, was adopted.…

This study investigated second language metalinguistic knowledge, or explicit knowledge about the second language, in English-speaking university-level learners of German and Spanish. The status of metalinguistic knowledge in relation to the individual difference variables of language-learning aptitude, working memory for language, and…