This study investigates the motivations of both heritage and non-heritage students of Portuguese at two universities in Rhode Island where Portuguese-speaking migrant communities have settled and their language has strong visibility. Attention is drawn to motivation since it is known to be a significant factor in the development of linguistic…

This study examined the perceived and assessed speaking proficiency levels of 10 in-service Spanish teachers, their use of Spanish in and outside of work, and factors that motivate or hinder the maintenance or development of their proficiency. It also compared their current proficiency levels with their proficiency levels before completion of…

Word forms such as "walked" or "walker" are decomposed into their morphological constituents (walk + -ed/-er) during language comprehension. Yet, the efficiency of morphological decomposition seems to vary for different languages and morphological types, as well as for first and second language speakers. The current study…

The foreign and second language (L2) learning process is shaped by a constellation of individual difference (ID) factors, some of which (e.g., age, anxiety, motivation, aptitude, learning styles, language learning strategies) have long been investigated by specialists, whereas others have only recently attracted their attention. One of such…

This study proposed an innovative automated approach to differentiation of the vocabulary proficiency of Chinese speakers. A robust K-means algorithm was designed to compare the oral proficiency between L1 and L2 Chinese speakers regarding lexical richness and how relatively effective the various lexical measures were in performing the…

Language is a quintessentially human trait. Many decades of neurolinguistic research provided evidence of neural structures which specialize in complex linguistic and cognitive processes supporting human communications. Because the world is multilingual, (Crystal, 2010; de Bot, 2019) a prominent question related to brain processes supporting…

Although extensive research has focused on the perceptual abilities of second language (L2) learners, a significant gap persists in understanding how cognitive functions like phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and nonverbal intelligence (IQ) impact L2 speech perception. This study sets out to investigate the discrimination of L2 English…

Research is scarce about the lexical processes undertaken by thousands of L2 learners worldwide who already command one or more languages. Some aspects involved in lexical organisation and production, such as clustering and switching, have been traditionally approached through manual methods, which depend on subjective judgments of semantic…

In second language listening assessment and pedagogy, practitioners hold different views on whether to repeat a listening text in contexts where inferences about listening ability are to be drawn from task performance. To address this issue, we investigated the effects of repeating the listening text (double play) on listener performance,…

The field of Heritage Language has experienced a great deal of advancement in the past few decades. Much research effort has been dedicated to analyzing and understanding different aspects of heritage language speakers, but less work has been done in the topic of pedagogical approaches. The few recent studies on pedagogical approaches have focused…

While gamified technology integration in vocabulary instruction within a flipped classroom has yielded beneficial teaching outcomes, specific studies have raised concerns about potential adverse effects linked to this approach. As a result, conducting a comparative analysis between gamified technology and conventional paper-based methods within…

The role of practice has been largely overlooked in second/foreign (L2) pragmatics research. Furthermore, very few studies have directly compared the effects of different "practice contexts" (e.g. practice in a telecollaborative context versus practice in a face-to-face context) on L2 learners' pragmatic competence (e.g. in compliment…

The extent to which L2 television is viewed by foreign language learners will depend on the degree to which it is understood. The addition of captions has been shown to support comprehension (e.g., Birulés-Muntané & Soto-Faraco, 2016; Montero-Perez, Peters, & Desmet, 2014), especially when proficiency is low (e.g., Lavaur & Bairstow,…

Web-based games can be an alternative learning media for students to improve their vocabulary mastery in reading. Nevertheless, few studies look at how web-based games can be used as a teaching tool to help junior high school students improve their vocabulary, especially in the context of reading. The main objective of this research is to know the…

Readers should construct a coherent discourse during reading comprehension. The ability to build coherence has been examined using coherence and cohesion judgment tasks. Although eye-tracking studies have been conducted on building coherence or processing cohesion among native language users, few such studies have been conducted with second…