Student diversity has become a typical phenomenon in American public schools. The impact of increasing diversity on literacy instruction is unchallenged. Teachers reinforce this message by often citing ESL student diversity as a barrier for literacy teaching. In order to better understand the complexity of diversity issues, I explored two ESL…

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. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that by 2050, the Hispanic school-age population will exceed the non-Hispanic white school-age public school…

Assuring that English language learners (ELLs) receive the services to which they have a right requires accurately identifying those students. Virtually all states identify ELLs in a two-step process. First, parents fill out a home language survey. Second, students in whose homes a language other than English is spoken and who therefore might…

SLA researchers agree that explicit knowledge and learning play an important role in adult L2 development. In the field of cognitive linguistics, it has been proposed that implicit and explicit knowledge differ in terms of their internal category structure and the processing mechanisms that operate on their representation in the human mind. It has…

This paper describes an adaptive learning system based on mobile phone email to support the study of Japanese Kanji. In this study, the main emphasis is on using the adaptive learning to resolve one common problem of the mobile-based email or SMS language learning systems. To achieve this goal, the authors main efforts focus on three aspects:…

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education and the ACTFL suggest that a high proficiency in the Spanish language is essential for all Spanish teachers. With the growth of the Spanish-speaking population in the United States and the diversity of Hispanic culture, teacher education programs need to ensure that teacher candidates are…

This article discusses theoretical and practical aspects pertaining to oral presentations in the EFL context. It discusses issues and proposes ideas concerning the advantages of presentations, types of presentations, ways of arranging presentations in the classroom, possible topics of presentations and sources of data and information obtained for…

Using science notebooks effectively in the classroom can encourage students who are learning English to keep up and keep interested. English language proficiency might head the list of content areas that schools can teach properly and effectively through science. Amaral, Garrison, and Klentschy (2002) reported that a successful inquiry-based…

Research in the field of second language learning indicates that proper use of language learning strategies leads to the improvement of overall Second Language (L2) or Foreign Language (FL) proficiency as well as specific language skills. This essay firstly attempts to build a theoretical framework of learning strategies theories by clarifying the…

The present study investigates the locus of language selection in less and more proficient language learners, specifically testing differential predictions of La Heij's (2005) concept selection model (CSM) and Kroll and Stewart's (1994) revised hierarchical model (RHM). Less and more proficient English dominant learners of Spanish participated in…

While much attention has been paid to the gap between beginning language instruction and literature courses, there is another gap which presents significant challenges to college instructors, namely the gap in proficiency levels between students in the same third-year course. This article argues that bridging this particular gap can productively…

Lardiere suggests that second language acquisition (SLA) researchers should pay more attention to the distribution of a given feature in source and target languages, using the distribution of [plural] in English, Chinese and Korean to illustrate. I argue that the distribution of [definite] in English shows a similar complexity, and that this has…

This paper introduces a corpus-driven measure as a method to assess EFL learners' knowledge of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody here is defined as the tendency of some words to occur in a certain semantic environment. For example, the verb "cause" is associated with unpleasant things--death, problem and the like. Subjects were 60…

The study addresses a problem which is inadequately investigated in second language acquisition research, that is, personality predictors of foreign language aptitude. Specifically, it focuses on the Five Factor model which includes Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (Costa & McCrae, 1992) as…

We report an investigation on the relationship between metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and comprehension monitoring of language learners in English as a foreign language context. Participants were thirty first year university students majoring in electronics. They completed a questionnaire aimed at discerning the strategies that…