The present study investigated the effects of reducing the number of options per item on psychometric characteristics of a Japanese EFL university entrance examination. A four-option multiple-choice reading test used for entrance screening at a university in Japan was later converted to a three-option version by eliminating the least frequently…

This article looks at two different primary EFL classrooms: one in which the teacher is a general-subject teacher who teaches different subjects to the same group children and another in which the teacher is an EFL specialist who teaches the same subject to different groups of children. First we qualitatively characterize the differences in…

This study examines out-of-school use of Irish and motivation to learn Irish among final year post-primary students from three different instructional backgrounds: mainstream students studying ordinary and higher level Irish as a subject only and immersion students. Information on motivation and use is linked to student proficiency in Irish.…

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of two types of vocabulary instruction--image-schema-based instruction (ISBI) and translation-based instruction (TBI)--on the acquisition of second language (L2) polysemous words. Fifty-eight Japanese high school learners of English were divided into two treatment groups (ISBI and TBI)…

This is an in-process report on over 100 English-as-a-Foreign-Language argumentative compositions written by Spanish university students in first and fourth year philology. The project aim was to compare writing development over 4 years in a cross-sectional design. As data were collected, factors other than developmental stages began to appear,…

A study investigated the beliefs about language learning held by eight university students enrolled in a course in Ancient Egyptian (AE), drawing on results of a larger study of eight languages. The study identifies priorities in students' general beliefs, describes effects such beliefs may have on their learning "dead" languages, and…

A study examined national data on the English language proficiency of Southeast Asian refugees at the time of their arrival (after 1975) in the United States and again in 1983. Information from an annual refugee survey was also used. Comparisons were made for: (1) different ethnic groups (Vietnamese, Chinese, Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and other) and…

An empirical study is reported that investigated the relationship between first language (L1) and English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) reading in terms of efficiency, speed, and comprehension with Chinese university students of English as subjects. Results indicate that reading speed transfers readily from L1 to EFL readers for those who are slow…

A comparative, protocol-based study is reported of the first (Chinese) and foreign (English) language writing processes of six postgraduate English-as-a-Foreign-Language students. The study revealed the approaches of the six writers to the task of producing academic written discourse to be very different, and suggested that if composing strategies…

A study investigated the usefulness of non-native speakers' subjective, relative word frequency estimates as a measure of second language proficiency. In the experiment, two subjective frequency estimate (SFE) tasks, one on French and one on English, were presented to French learners of English (n=126) and American learners of French (n=87).…

Analyses of the Null Subject Parameter (NSP) suggest that several factors may influence the resetting process for second language acquisition, such as specific "trigger" data, awareness of agreement as a part of awareness of agreement (INFL), and stylistic rules such as subject postposing and anaphoric reference. Four tests were…

A study evaluated the ability of older adults to accurately perceive and retain Spanish in their short-term memory. Specifically, the study investigated differences in native language (English) auditory perception, short-term native language auditory memory capacity, monolingual age differences in auditory perception ability in an unknown…

Some of the issues, history, and approaches in the testing of second language writing skills are reviewed. It is argued that because writing serves many important functions in the lives of individuals and activities that speech cannot do equally well, it is time to stop viewing writing as secondary to speech and to accord it equal attention. Most…

The question of dividing language proficiency into components was explored by determining which of three models best fit the experimental data: a model postulating numerous specific sources of variance (the extreme divisible model), one postulating a single, large source of variance (the unitary model), or one postulating a large general factor…

Proficiency, which refers to a concept that is more complex than is generally acknowledged, is an overworked term in second language teaching that lacks a satisfactory operational definition. Linguistic knowledge is currently defined most often in terms of what an individual is able to do with the knowledge, as in the movement for competency-based…