The authors of papers in this special issue are in agreement that if schools are to reverse underachievement among rural and township students in the South African context the instructional space must be expanded to include students' and teachers' multilingual repertoires together with a focus on explicitly demystifying how academic language…

Medical laboratory scientists are health care practitioners who perform testing on blood and other body fluids providing vital information to physicians for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of patients in health and disease. Miscommunications between laboratory personnel and other health care practitioners can result in unwarranted delays…

Discourse connectives (DCs) are multi-functional devices used to connect discourse segments and fulfill interpersonal levels of discourse. This study investigates the use of selected 80 DCs within 11 categories in the argumentative essays produced by L1 and L2 university students. The analysis is based on the International Corpus Network of Asian…

This study examined cross-language transfer of word reading accuracy and word reading fluency in Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals. Participants included 51 Spanish-English and 64 Chinese-English bilinguals. Both groups of children completed parallel measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy,…

This article reports a study that sought to determine whether non-native sentence comprehension can show sensitivity to two different types of Spanish case marking. Sensitivity to case violations was generally more robust with indirect objects in ditransitive constructions than with differential object marking of animate direct objects, even among…

Knowledge of lexical items is arguably the most essential aspect of being able to communicate in a foreign language (Richards, 2000). Many studies have examined effective strategies for retaining the meaning of foreign words, but studies investigating the effectiveness of different methods for the retention of essential grammatical features of…

In South Korea, "Damunwha" students (students from multicultural family backgrounds) have difficulties at school because of others' derogatory perception of them and the different linguistic and cultural settings. In light of this issue, this paper addresses the "Damunwha" students' identities and participation within the…

This study reports on the results of classroom research investigating the effects of using data-driven learning methods by students in revising their writing errors. The main purpose of the study is to examine to what extent is consulting a corpus effective in correcting lexical errors in their writing. It has been found in previous research that…

The most significant constructs of ESL pronunciation models are "accentedness," "intelligibility," and "comprehensibility" (Derwing & Munro 2005; Jenkins, 2000; Pickering, 2006). It is clear though that the assessment of these characteristics shows no consideration for the potential affection of the assessor…

Metacognition appears to be a significant contributor to success in second language (SL) and foreign language (FL) learning. This study seeks to investigate empirical research on the role metacognition plays in language learning by focusing on the following research questions: first, to what extent does metacognition affect SL/FL learning? Second,…

It is late at night, after working all day on her postdoctoral research Laura Colombo is trying to wind down while drawing and jotting down thoughts in her notebook. She is in the living room/office of her apartment in Buenos Aires, the city where she was born and left when she was 26 years old to pursue her graduate studies in the United States…

This article presents findings from an exploratory research project entitled "Gaelscoileanna and Multicultural classrooms: the potential for transfer to enhance L2 learning experiences". The project focussed on two language immersion contexts in Ireland which, despite obvious differences, share a range of significant commonalities. One…

This study considers the upper limit of ultimate attainment in the L2 French and L3 English of trilingual learners. The learners are native speakers of Moroccan Arabic who started learning L2 French at eight and L3 English at 16. They are advanced in both languages. Four constructions representing the verb movement and null subject parameter were…

Our paper discusses trends and challenges faced by Lithuanian Higher Education (HE) internationalisation policy processes in the context of European and global internationalisation tendencies. Using 2001-2011 EU mobility statistics and data from recent HE Lithuanian strategic programmes aimed at promoting the internationalisation of university…

Gaelic medium education (GME) was established in Scotland in 1985, with 24 students enrolled in that year [Bòrd na Gàidhlig. (n.d.). "Gaelic education." Retrieved May 20, 2013, from http://www.gaidhlig.org.uk/bord/en/our-work/education/index.php (Bòrd na Gàidhlig website)]. Since this time, growth within GME has been incremental, and in…