As a language, Irish is unique to Ireland and is, therefore, of crucial importance to the identity of the Irish people, to Irish culture and to world heritage. The Irish language however has had a turbulent and traumatic history and has endured a complex and varied relationship with the Irish people. Since the foundation of the Irish Free State,…

This qualitative case study investigates the transformative power of a leadership course designed for immigrant secondary school students learning English as an additional language with a social justice orientation. Course projects allowed the students to get involved in tutoring, present at a conference on intercultural education, deliver equity…

This study compares the language learner and test-taking strategies used by Chinese-speaking graduate students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in an English multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. Thirty-six participants at a large mid-western university performed three tasks: A content knowledge vocabulary…

Grounded in constructivist theories of reading and informed by the contemporary theories of identity, this study explored how three Korean adult speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL) constructed meaning of the novel "The Catcher in the Rye", and how their identities mediated this process. Sources of data included think aloud…

Community language schools are complementary schools set up and run by minority communities in Australia. They aim to assist in intergenerational language and identity transmission, but previous research has indicated that these schools position their students in monolingual ways that contradicts how bilingual speakers use their language in…

Due to the growing number of plurilingual learners in the world today (Hammarberg, 2010), the present multiple case study examines four plurilingual participants' beliefs toward first language (L1) and second language (L2) mediation in the acquisition of French as a third language (L3). During a 16-week classroom-based study in a French university…

English is spoken in five countries as the native language and in numerous other countries as an official language and the language of instruction. In countries where English is the native language, it is taught to speakers of other languages as an additional language to enable them to participate in all domains of life of that country. In many…

This study investigated the effects of immigration and home language on academic achievement over time. Using data from Ontario's Assessments of Reading, Writing and Mathematics administered to the same students in Grades 3 and 6, logistic regression was used to predict if students achieved proficiency in Grade 6 if they were not proficient in…

Analysing the effects of second language (L2) production on L2 learners' interlanguage (IL) modifications is the main scope of this paper. For this purpose, English L2 learners' output production and IL modifications in performing two different task types, one-way and two-way tasks, are compared. The one-way task used in this study was a story…

This paper aims to review the theoretical concept of interlingual interference of the mother tongue, Thai to the target language, English and intralingual interference found in EFL student writing in Thai context with the attempt to define the existence of errors according to their sources. This review article also exemplifies some frequent errors…

The present study utilizes readings taken from texts in social psychology to examine the effects by gender of embedded "what" questions and elaborative "why" questions on reading comprehension. During regular class time, 97 advanced second language (L2) learners of Spanish read two different vignettes, either with or without…

Extensive reading is gaining credibility as an effective way of boosting students' affect especially in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context where access to a second language (L2) input is minimal. This study uses a pattern-matching, single case study research design to examine an adult reader's motivation and anxiety shifts towards…

Most research on cognates has focused on words presented in isolation that are easily defined as cognate between L1 and L2. In contrast, this study investigates what counts as cognate in authentic texts and how such cognates are read. Participants with L1 Danish read news articles in their highly proficient L2, English, while their eye-movements…

The aim of this study was to explore pragmalinguistic strategies employed by a group of Iranian English language learners when making refusals to invitations, requests, offers and suggestions in their first (Persian) and second (English) languages. Data were collected from 86 participants through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The social…

This research study investigated how the teachers and students at a Persian heritage language class acknowledged and modified their affective behavior based on the affective feedback they received from one another. The notion that interactants can modify their affective output in such fashion is referred in the literature as affective alignment…