In the study reported on here we investigated the effects of sign language barriers among Deaf learners in special schools for the Deaf and Blind in the Motheo District in the Free State province of South Africa. Semi-structured focus group interviews were held with 7 teachers (2 males and 5 females) and 10 Grade 8 learners (6 males and 4 females)…

Over the past three decades, second language writing has witnessed a growth of studies on learners' writing strategies, as well as a shift from product-oriented to process-oriented research. Although the field has achieved a greater understanding of strategies used by English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) writers, limited research has examined…

Research comparing the reading strategy use of native and second language (L2) readers has often relied on self-report measures and has, at times, been conducted without measures of reading proficiency. In the present study we used regression and Bayes' factors to explore how L2 reader status and reading proficiency relate to self-report reading…

The introduction of the Seal of Biliteracy (SoBL) has presented a potent opportunity for community heritage language schools to credential the heritage language proficiency of their students in a U.S. context. This study explores the involvement of community heritage language schools in the SoBL initiative. It investigates how seven heritage…

Factors that affect comprehension of accented English (e.g., Harding, 2011) have been well studied, but little research examines how listeners' proficiency affects their sensitivity to second language (L2) accent. The current study investigated the effect of test takers' English proficiency on their comprehension ratings and ability to correctly…

This study is the first to compare objective and subjective measures of explicit and implicit knowledge under learning from incidental exposure. An experiment was conducted, during which L1 English speakers were trained on a semiartificial language, "Japlish." A measure of explicit knowledge and a recently proposed measure of implicit…

The present study looks at pre-service teachers' beliefs about multilingualism in school and to what extent these can be influenced. It is based on the pre- and post-test evaluation of a seminar concept promoting linguistically responsive teaching, which was tested with N = 27 pre-­service teachers in Germany during the course of one semester. The…

Research Findings: This study evaluated the impact of Chinese literacy interventions on Chinese language learning of South Asian children and their mothers in Hong Kong. A total of 44 children and eight of their mothers participated in Chinese literacy interventions that consisted of two approaches -- Copying and Morphological Awareness Training…

Learner corpus studies using syntactic complexity as a construct for characterizing learner proficiency have found that higher proficiency permits learners to produce more complex syntactic structures. However, the majority of previous studies have focused on writing, almost exclusively with adult second language (L2) learners. Given the…

In this article, we present a research study with a group of newcomer and refugee learners who have resettled in the Niagara region in Canada to create new lives. Over the course of four months, we came to know the stories of fifteen adult language learners, and we witnessed their steady induction, acceptance and enjoyment of multimodal…

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that…

To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…

The 2011 Census in England broke new ground, as a question about language had never previously been asked. After stakeholder consultations and a series of trials, the census authority decided on two questions based on earlier censuses in the USA: one about the respondent's "main language" and another about proficiency in English. This…

In many environments in which foreign languages (FL) are taught, the emergent bilingual status of FL learners is often overlooked. The dominant monolingual language pedagogies of conventional FL classrooms do not fundamentally recognise the natural interaction of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) in the learners' minds. Although the…

As humans, we all experience the fundamental need to belong. Often, this sense of belonging is inherited and nurtured by our families and their histories, the languages we speak and the cultures we adhere to; and it is in our experiences and engagement with these aspects of ourselves that our identities are formed, contested, negotiated and…