As more higher education institutions in the United States look not only to be designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) but to serve their student population in languages other than English, learning designers who are native speakers or have fluency in languages other than English are utilizing their language and cultural competencies to…

Individuals with lower proficiency in a second language tend to produce more disfluent speech patterns in the second language. Speech disfluencies refer to interruptions in the forward flow of speech and are distinct from the colloquial use of "fluency," to characterize knowledge of a language. Prior research indicates that some speech…

It has long been recognized that collocations, or chunks of formulaic language, are essential and frequent in language (Henriksen, 2012; Sinclair, 2004). Therefore they are a crucial part of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Linguistic scholars Pawley y Syder (1983: 192) remark that "in order to know a language, the [second language] (L2)…

This study compares the language proficiency gains of two groups of students taking a business English course module in a bilingual university in Catalonia (Spain). Whereas one of these groups followed a 'translanguaging' or 'plurilingual' pedagogy, the other followed a strictly monolingual approach. Participants were 54 mostly Catalan/Spanish…

Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the…

We take a multidimensional perspective on the development of second language (L2) speaking ability and examine how changes in the underlying cognitive variables of linguistic knowledge and processing speed interact with complexity, fluency, and accuracy over the course of a 3-month Spanish study abroad session. Study abroad provides a unique…

Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) educate nearly two-thirds of the Hispanic/Latinx students who attend college. Yet little is known about the student populations they serve. Findings from two NSF-funded surveys completed with students at 14 HSIs in Texas and New Mexico in 2018 and four HSIs in TX in 2019 are presented. The combined sample was…

The present study examines the effects that a 3-week study-abroad (SA) experience and a set of individual differences have on the foreign language (FL) development of a group of 64 Catalan/Spanish speakers, learners of English as an FL. Moreover, the present study attempts to account for the outcome differences between successful and less…

The objective of this paper is to trace the actual demand on enrolments over time, as much as the history of wavering public and academic sentiment towards teaching and speaking Spanish in this country during the last century. Secondarily, we examine the question of the value of mother tongue fluency or the acquisition, mastery and usage of the…

In the Basque Country, Northern Spain, Basque (Euskera) and Spanish are official languages. In recent decades, Basque language revitalization and the efforts to make this an unmarked language (normalization) have co-existed with the rapid increase in immigration from outside the Basque region, and most recently from outside Spain. Given the…

The author and her family spent a few weeks traveling through Central America last summer. A few years back, they had been to Guatemala, Belize and Costa Rica yet that was it, not much more exploration of their neighbors to the south. They decided on a short tour of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama and realized this would be a great opportunity…

Being a study abroad student is not all sweetness and light. By definition, study abroad students are faced with acculturative stress (Berry, 2005) by virtue of encountering differences in assumptions, values, and expectations of daily living in their host culture. Add to that the usual challenge of hearing and speaking a different language, and…

This study compared the amount of the second language (L2) use and linguistic gains made by students in three short-term language immersion programs: (1) traditional study abroad, (2) service-oriented study abroad, and (3) foreign language (FL) housing. These were chosen because they represent three distinct program types, providing students with…

This study explores the effects of short-term Spanish study in study abroad (SA) and at home (AH) contexts on oral fluency and Willingness to Communicate (WTC). Following the Input and Interaction Hypothesis and the Output Hypothesis, it is hypothesized that learners from short-term SA programs will demonstrate larger gains in fluency and WTC due…

The lack of consistency in how bilingual language dominance is assessed currently impedes cross-experiment comparisons (Grosjean, 1998). We present a paper-and-pencil dominance scale that can be used to quantify the language dominancy of bilingual participants. The scale targets three main criteria important in gauging dominance (Grosjean, 1998;…