This multifactorial corpus-based exploration of past tenses focuses specifically on the present perfect (PP) versus simple past (SP) alternation in intermediate-to-advanced learner English produced by French and German native speakers. While existing work on past tenses in L2 has traditionally focused on the role of lexical aspect in the…

Background: A substantial proportion of adolescents, particularly girls and minority youth, fail to meet daily physical activity (PA) recommendations. Social support contributes to adolescent PA, but studies examining this relationship have yielded inconsistent results and rarely focus on diverse, urban populations. Aims: This study examines the…

Summarization and persuasive writing are important in postsecondary education and often require the use of source text. However, students entering college with low literacy skills often find this type of writing difficult. The present study compared predictors of performance on text-based summarization and persuasive writing in a sample of…

This paper investigates the factors influencing the likelihood of choice of Gaelic-medium primary education in Scotland by means of the analysis of a national survey of public attitudes conducted in 2012. Binary logistic regression is used to investigate the association of five dimensions found in previous literature to be associated with the…

The expressive lexical skills of 53 Polish bilinguals aged 24-36 months living in the UK and Ireland were assessed using Polish and British English adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Polish vocabulary scores were compared to those of 53 Polish monolinguals matched for age, gender and parental education. The…

This study investigated relations among microlevel and macrolevel domains of oral narrative retells within and across the languages of Spanish-speaking bilingual children. Fifty-six first and second graders (M[subscript age] = 7 years, 3 months) were assessed on a retell task in Spanish and English. Two statistical analyses were conducted: (a)…

This study focuses on metalinguistic awareness (MLA) and its relation to academic achievement for mono-, bi- and multilingual adolescents in Denmark. While MLA is one of several cognitive measures positively related to bilingualism and bilingualism is associated with academic advantages, Danish bi-/multilingual pupils appear not to benefit from…

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall "Humor" component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also…

The majority of multilinguals immersed in different cultures report feeling different when switching languages. Although the influence of personality on self-perceptions has been investigated, little attention has been paid to acculturation aspects. The present study is based on a mixed-method approach combining questionnaire and interview data.…

Several attempts have been made to illustrate the organization of the monolingual mental lexicon and each model proposed so far has highlighted different aspects of lexical processing. What they have in common is the fact that their depictions rely on single lexical items and paradigmatic relations come to the fore in their explanations. Hoey's…

Recent studies have used Coh-Metrix, an automated text analyzer, to assess differences in language characteristics across different genres and academic disciplines (Graesser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011; McNamara, Graesser, McCarthy, & Cai, 2014). Coh-Metrix analyzes text on many constructs at different levels, including Word Concreteness…

Research has shown that the overall climate in a school can encourage or deter learning. One significant factor promoting a positive climate is the use of motivational language by school leaders. This article presents empirical evidence of teachers' perceptions of motivational language used by school principals and the effects of this language on…

Since 2006, the enrollment of African students in Chinese universities has been increasing steadily. A majority of the students have been recruited through the China Scholarship Council. Cast against that background of growth in the number of African students in Chinese universities, it is important that their educational experience in a country…

Background: Nonverbal communication abilities, including gesture use, are impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, little is known about how common gestures may influence or be influenced by other areas of development. Aims: To examine the relationships between gesture, fine motor and language in young children with ASD compared with a…

One of the focuses of language revitalisation policies is to incorporate minority languages into education. Evaluation of new language-of-instruction models is usually based on the increase of minority language speakers. However, it is also important from an educational perspective to study the possible relationship between performance and…