This volume presents state-of-the-art research in early foreign language (L2) education in instructed contexts with a special focus on primary school (ages 5-12). Over the past two decades, early language teaching has become an important factor in both academic inquiry and education policy. Studies have attested to the value of early L2 learning…

Foreign-accented speech is generally harder to understand than native-accented speech. This difficulty is reduced for non-native listeners who share their first language with the non-native speaker. It is currently unclear, however, how non-native listeners deal with foreign-accented speech produced by speakers of a different language. We show…

Research on second language Spanish encompasses a sophisticated and broad-reaching body of work. Nevertheless, there is a bias in this literature toward English-speaking learners. The implication of this bias is that our search for universal trends of acquisition is undermined by an inability to distinguish between challenges that are specific to…

This study aims to investigate how the dominance of the English language at Bisha King Abdullah Hospital in Saudi Arabia affects service delivery. Specifically, the research focuses on the attitudes of patients and staff towards communicating in English instead of Arabic, which is the primary official language in Saudi Arabia. First, the study…

This study investigated the influence of L1 allophonic rule, L1 segment articulation, and gender in Korean learners' production of English /s/ in two different contexts (i.e., before a high front vowel vs. elsewhere) and at three different proficiency levels in English (i.e., low vs. intermediate vs. high). The influence of the Korean allophonic…

The purpose of this case study is twofold: it (1) explores multilingual raters' judgements regarding the accentedness and comprehensibility of second language speech and (2) examines how the raters' language backgrounds influence their judgements. In this study, six multilingual Singaporean raters judged the accentedness and comprehensibility of…

In foreign language (FL) teaching and learning, a substantial amount of content is provided in grammar exercises supplied by textbooks. The main focus of this study concerns the selection of grammar exercise types in FL textbook series. In our analysis, we focus on Dutch, Finnish and global textbooks for beginners aged approximately 13-15 years…

This article examines the development of Japanese as a heritage language (HL) in linguistically mixed families. While families where parents share a mother tongue have been investigated extensively in recent decades, this particular demographic has received minimal attention in Canada. The article, part of a larger study, is based on…

Input variability is key in many aspects of linguistic learning, yet variability increases input complexity, which may cause difficulty in some learning contexts. The current work investigates this trade-off by comparing speaker variability effects on L2 vocabulary learning in different age groups. Existing literature suggests that speaker…

Many college students set out on Study Abroad Programs to other countries in which the variant of the foreign language spoken in the region differs from the variant to which learners have been exposed. This study explores the perception of L2 Western Andalusian Spanish aspiration of word-final /s/ by L1 American English listeners, in relation to…

This paper presents a critical review of the cross-cultural writing styles in the light of contrastive rhetoric approach established by Kaplan in 1966. Although Kaplan compared different writing styles depending on the culture each language was attached to, his comparison was criticized by some scholars the prominent one of which is Conor 1996.…

This investigation aimed to provide insights into the controversial debate on the role that age at onset of bilingualism plays in human language capacity with a focus on what it entails for first language (L1) attrition. L1 performance of Turkish immigrants (n = 57) in the United Kingdom with age at onset ranging between 7 and 34 years was…

The current study aimed to explore the effect of first language (L1) orthography on second language (L2) Chinese morphological awareness. One hundred and twenty-nine students (61 L1 English readers and 68 L1 Thai readers) who studied Chinese as a second language participated in this study. They completed four tasks of morphological awareness…

It has been a topic in psychiatry, it is referred to by translingual writers, and bilinguals report it frequently -- the feeling of becoming a different person when using a different language. The present study was set out to investigate the reasons behind this feeling. We looked at the effects of biculturalism and personality traits, as well as…

The present study explores the relationship between Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) and Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) and a number of teacher-centered variables within the Spanish classroom context. Participants were 210 former and current learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) from all over Spain who filled out an online…