One of the concerns foreign language teachers may have about using small group (and pair) work is that students will use their shared first language (L1) instead of the target language. This study investigated the effect of learner proficiency pairing and task type on the amount of L1 used by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in pair…

Most linguistic processes--acquisition, change, deterioration--take place in and are determined by a complex and multifactorial web of language internal and language external influences. This implies that the impact of each individual factor can only be determined on the basis of a careful consideration of its interplay with all other factors. The…

Background/Context: English language learner (ELL) students are lagging behind because of the extra challenges they face relative to their peers in acquiring academic English language proficiency, and the added burden of learning content in a language in which they are not proficient. The mandated inclusion of ELL students in the nation's…

In this article, the author shares her experience and her observations as a Roving Scholar of American Studies in Norway through the Norway Fulbright Foundation grant. The author visited upper secondary schools all over Norway, teaching lessons to both students and teachers on topics related to U.S. history, government, culture, and geography. She…

Background/Context: How do we account for the persistence of below-average math test score performance among California Hispanics who are fluent in English, as well as Spanish-dominant English learners? Recent studies have attributed the problem to an overly rigid focus on "what works" in curriculum and fluency in English to the…

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) contracted with Synergy Enterprises, Inc. and edCount, LLC, to complete a study titled Language Instruction Educational Programs (LIEPs): Lessons From the Research and Profiles of Promising Programs. This study includes a review of the foundational literature related to LIEPs, case studies…

The challenge of providing authentic experiences and interactions for fostering oral proficiency and motivation in foreign languages is an opportunity for innovation in educational technology and instructional design. Although several recent innovations have received the attention of scholars, empirical investigation and validation is often…

Most current idiom processing models acknowledge, after Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999) that deriving an idiomatic meaning entails suppression of contextually inappropriate, literal meanings of idiom constituent words. While embedding idioms in the rich disambiguating context can promote earlier suppression of incompatible literal meanings,…

This study is to investigate whether self-assessment contains construct-irrelevant variances of gender and age, and whether self-assessment correlates with test scores. The data were collected from seventy-eight newly arrived international students at the English Language Center, Michigan State University, USA. Prior to class commencement, they…

The Problem: The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the information structure of native-English speaking (NES) ESOL teachers in giving explanations in a grammar class at an Intensive English Program (IEP) at a university in southern California Method: This mixed-method study employed a sequential-exploratory design. Six grammar…

Second language (L2) oral performance assessment always involves raters' subjective judgments and is thus subject to rater variability. The variability due to rater characteristics has important consequential impacts on decision-making processes, particularly in high-stakes testing situations (Bachman, Lynch, & Mason, 1995; A. Brown, 1995;…

Background/Context: While different instructional approaches have been proposed to integrate academic content and English proficiency for English language learning (ELL) students, studies examining the magnitude of the relationship are non-existent. This study examined the relationship between the "form" (i.e., conventions, organization, and…

This article reports on an empirical study that examines general academic difficulties, and academic reading and writing difficulties among Asian ESL (English as a Second Language) international postgraduate students who are completing a Master's Degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at an Australian university. The…

Latino youth in a low-income urban community are at high risk of exposure to violence. Given an accumulation of factors before, during, and after migration, immigrant youth might be at increased risk of exposure to violence and other relevant stressors (e.g., acculturation stress, language proficiency, acculturation/enculturation, and parental…

Previous accounts of morphological variability disagree over whether its cause is representational or computational in nature. Under a computational account, variability is confined to production; under a representational account, variability extends to comprehension and is qualitatively similar to variability in production. This article presents…