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…

The present study examines the effects that a 3-week study-abroad (SA) experience and a set of individual differences have on the foreign language (FL) development of a group of 64 Catalan/Spanish speakers, learners of English as an FL. Moreover, the present study attempts to account for the outcome differences between successful and less…

Building on previous listening strategy research, the author aimed to explore the differences between Chinese high-proficiency listeners (HLs) and low-proficiency listeners (LLs) on their strategy use, problems, and motivation in native language (L1) listening. It involved 1,290 Grade 7 and 1,515 Grade 9 students. Both quantitative and qualitative…

Exploring the popular explanation that the global spread of English may demotivate students with English as their first language to learn other languages, this study investigates relations between student motivation and perception of Global English and tests for differences between traditional "campus" and distance university students…

The present longitudinal study examines the interaction of learner variables (gender, motivation, self-efficacy, and first language literacy) and their influence on second language learning outcomes. The study follows English learners of French from Year 5 in primary school (aged 9-10) to the first year in secondary school (Year 7; aged 11-12).…

English-medium instruction (EMI) is considered to be one of the main instruments to internationalize universities all over the world. Due to its recent implementation, research on linguistic outcomes is on the increase, whereas non-linguistic outcomes have been neglected. In fact, research on motivation in traditional English as a foreign language…

Reading, whether the reader's First language, L1 or Second language, L2, is a cognitive enterprise, and it can be treated as a result of the interaction among the reader, the text, and the context. Metacognitive strategies refer to the behaviours applied by learners to plan, arrange, and evaluate their learning. This study aimed to investigate…

This paper examines the French achievement results of three groups of students: Canadian-born English/French bilingual, Canadian-born multilingual and immigrant multilingual Grade 6 French immersion students, by investigating how the variables of integrative and instrumental motivations, attitudes to the learning situation, French language…

This paper investigates the effects of Content and Language Integrated Learning, CLIL for short, on both the attainment of the subject matter, mathematics in our case, hence the content aspect of CLIL. The second axes of research focuses on the effect of CLIL on the learners' proficiency vis-à-vis the language of instruction, epitomized here by…

Social Networking Sites (SNS) such as Facebook (FB) are currently highly used by students because technology has the potential to become a valuable resource to support their educational communications and collaborations. This paper attempts to present a comprehensive picture of what has been investigated in terms of the use of Facebook as an…

This paper presents findings from a study investigating young English language learners (YELLs) in Sweden in 4th grade (N = 76, aged 10-11). Data were collected with the help of a questionnaire and a one-week language diary. The main purpose was to examine the learners' L2 English language-related activities outside of school in general, and their…

English education in Taiwan has experienced a number of modifications over the past decade. The Ministry of Education (MOE) has initiated several reforms since 1994 with a purpose of changing the pedagogy, focusing on grammar-translation, to a more communicative one aim at cultivating learners of greater communication proficiency for the demands…

Among foreign language educators interest in extensive reading is growing along with questions about learner motivation to read. Maintaining learner motivation over long periods of time is influenced by many variables suggesting that multiple means of stimulating motivation is needed. The psychological theory of flow has been suggested to…

Recent theorizing on second language (L2) motivation has proposed viewing motivation as a function of the language learners' vision of their desired future language selves. This would suggest that the intensity of motivation is partly dependent on the learners' capability to generate mental imagery. In order to test this hypothesis, this study…

This article reports the results of an action-research project that examines enhancing students' English learning processes through the selective use of their mother tongues with the aim of overcoming their reluctant attitudes toward learning English in the classroom. This study involves forty ninth-graders from an all-girls public school in…