This paper presents an effectiveness study of a computer-based English reading program, the Waterford Early Reading Program (WERP), among first and second grade students in Israel. Students who used the program were compared to a control group only receiving English as a foreign language (EFL) instruction as part of the school curriculum. First…

This quantitative study examines current practice and challenges of Chinese-English bilingual education in Chinese tertiary institutions and presents a case study of a bilingual course by investigating learners' attitudes toward this educational and language policy. Using a convenience sampling strategy with an instrument modified from a…

One problem common to many Oral Communication (OC) classrooms in universities in Japan and other countries is that English major students often lack the impetus to proactively develop their oral language proficiency. In this paper, we present our investigation into whether regular self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment would promote the use of…

This study investigated the cognitive strategies used by Persian EFL (English as a foreign language) graduate students while reading a hypermedia text. Prior to the start of the study, the Nelson-Denny Reading Test was used in order to measure the reading ability of the students. Data was collected through think-aloud protocols, and the strategies…

The present research investigated the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies by 60 young and 90 adult learners of different levels of education across different fields of study. The intermediate level young participants included junior-high and senior-high school learners between the ages of 14 and 17. The high-intermediate adult…

This study investigated the developmental and fossilized prepositional errors in Persian EFL learners' compositions at three levels of proficiency; participants were divided into lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced levels. For each participant, four compositions were collected, and after identifying the prepositional errors for…

English Language Learners (ELLs) are the fastest growing group of students in American public schools. According to Payan and Nettles (2008), the ELL population doubled in 23 states between 1995 and 2005. Yet ELL achievement remains among the lowest of all students. For example, on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 72% of…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires that English Language Learners, who are reclassified as Fluent English Proficient, be monitored for two years. Short of requiring states to annually submit numerical data on these students, there are no specific instructions on how this monitoring is achieved in practice and little has been written…

Portuguese is the sixth-most-spoken native language in the world, with approximately 240,000,000 speakers. Within the United States, there is a growing demand for K-12 language programs to engage the community of Portuguese heritage speakers. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 85,000 school-age children speak Portuguese at home. As a result, more…

This study employed the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), version 7.0 (ESL/EFL) developed by Oxford (1990) to examine differences in language-learning strategy use. It focused on how learner factors such as gender, age, nationality, and proficiency level influence the choice of language-learning strategies. The participants were 75…

This study examined the relationship between student strategy use and the development of proficiency in a Korean as a Foreign Language classroom. A total of 66 English native speakers learning Korean as a Foreign Language were administered the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), Version 5.1. Findings indicated a low positive…

Lexical access was examined in English-Spanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., "Click on the beans"). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with…

This paper forms part of a wider research project which examines how the Kantian concept of "Mundigkeit" or "maturity" may be represented in subjective accounts of language learning, known as "language learner narratives". It is shown that the metaphors used in these texts frequently do not so much represent congenial relations of hospitality…

This experimental study offers empirical evidence of the effect of the computer-mediated environment on the linguistic output of low proficiency learners. The subjects were 32 female undergraduates with high and low proficiency in ESL. A within-subject repeated measures concurrent nested QUAN-qual (Creswell, 2003) mixed methods approach was used.…

This article report on the development and use of an analytical framework intended to map the language demands encountered by English learners as they engage in science performance assessments. Grounded in functional and interactional views of language and language use, the authors--two science education researchers and a language…