In much of the literature on the exploitation of corpora for language learning, the learners are viewed as researchers, who formulate and test their own hypotheses about language use. Having identified difficulties encountered in corpus investigations by our intermediate-level students of Italian in a previous study, we have designed a…

A strong case can be made for developing more flexible and relevant multilingual strategies for teaching and learning within the field of bilingual education. This paper aims to demonstrate how current linguistic and educational practices in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Ethiopia suggest new directions for research and practice. A…

Although the business community increasingly recognizes information literacy as central to its work, there remains the critical problem of measurement: How should employers assess the information literacy of their current or potential workers? In this article, we use a commercially available assessment to investigate the relationship between…

While many students in a foreign language classroom are successful at learning the prescribed curriculum, they may never move beyond the grammar and vocabulary to experience transformative learning. On the other hand, students who do not achieve proficiency may experience a perspective transformation as a result of studying a foreign language.…

This paper examines cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition relative to language typology, psychotypology and proficiency level. In particular, it observes how learners make use of their background languages when faced with a language they know little to nothing about. The participants, native French speakers with English as a…

This article reports on a study that explored the use of e-journals to understand through students' personal narratives what factors (gender, living situation, classroom dynamic, social network) may have influenced their learning during the study abroad semester. Pretests on language measures were compared with posttest results, and information…

Is it possible to undo or reverse language attrition? In other words, has there been, in the case of attrition, a permanent change with respect to the speaker's L1 knowledge, or do we only see temporary effects on the control of that knowledge? It is proposed here that the concept of attrition should include the temporary loss of language skills…

The research on text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), while generally acknowledging the potential benefits afforded by the medium's capacity for extensive self-repair, has done little in the way of exploration of the nature of such text. Indeed, until quite recently, output logs have been favored almost exclusively at the…

There are normally two major research reasons for assessing second and foreign language (L2) knowledge: either to gauge a participant's actual level of competence/proficiency or to assess language development over a period of time. In testing, the corresponding contrasts are typically referred to as proficiency tests on the one hand and…

In this paper, I investigate the status of the so-called "weaker" language, French, in French/German bilingual first language acquisition, using data from two children from the DuFDE-corpus (see Schlyter, 1990a), Christophe and Francois. Schlyter (1993, 1994) proposes that the "weaker" language in the unbalanced children she studied has the status…

More and more learners of English from the Expanding Circle are travelling to Outer Circle contexts to learn English or to improve their English proficiency. This is also the case for some Korean families who moved to Potchefstroom, South Africa. This phenomenon poses challenges in terms of assessment of English proficiency, and emphasizes the…

This research project undertook a review and synthesis of previous research on the effectiveness of feedback for individual writing development. The work plan was divided into two main phases. First, we surveyed all available studies that have investigated the effectiveness of writing feedback, including both quantitative and qualitative research,…

This is a study with descriptive hypothesis-testing design investigating the true nature of L2 grammatical proficiency via focusing on its component parts. It examines the performance of 60 female EFL learners between 19 and 30 years of age at 2 proficiency levels using 2 types of computerized Grammaticality Judgement tasks in different orders…

This dissertation study seeks to understand how teachers who work in an ASL/English bilingual educational program for preschool children conceptualize and utilize phonological instruction of American Sign Language (ASL). While instruction that promotes phonological awareness of spoken English is thought to provide educational benefits to young…

We investigated reading and writing in two domestic languages (Swedish and Finnish) and one foreign language (English) among multilingual university students with (n = 20) versus without dyslexia (n = 20). Our analyses encompassed overall speed and accuracy measures and an in-depth analysis of grapheme-phoneme-grapheme errors and inflectional…