Ensuring internal validity in quantitative research requires, among other conditions, reliable instrumentation. Unfortunately, however, second language (L2) researchers often fail to report and even more often fail to interpret reliability estimates beyond generic benchmarks for acceptability. As a means to guide interpretations of such estimates,…

Second language acquisition researchers often face particular challenges when attempting to generalize study findings to the wider learner population. For example, language learners constitute a heterogeneous group, and it is not always clear how a study's findings may generalize to other individuals who may differ in terms of language background…

In an increasingly multilingual world, the question of how to improve foreign language speaking skills of pupils in British schools is of paramount importance to language teachers and policy-makers today. This paper examines how an explicit focus on metacognitive strategy use within secondary school foreign language lessons impacts pupils'…

Even though the majority of Colombian professors are also involved in research, they have limitations in their English language skills that separate them from the rest of the scientific society. Evidently, these limitations have become an obstacle in the awareness of professors' modest, but no less important, research work. In order to carry out…

Elicited imitation (EI) has been widely used to examine second language (L2) proficiency and development and was an especially popular method in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, as the field embraced more communicative approaches to both instruction and assessment, the use of EI diminished, and the construct-related validity of EI scores as a…

Concepts of learner autonomy and the self-determination theory provided a theoretical rationale for the action program for learner autonomy. The action program incorporated satisfying learners' basic psychological needs into English Foreign Language (EFL) course education. The action program was implemented for one academic year. Both qualitative…

This study sets out to investigate professors' needs from an English as a foreign language program in a public university regarding demands, interests, and lacks based on the methodology of needs analysis. Data collected through a survey, focus groups, and individual interviews showed that professors need to meet the institutional language policy…

This study examines whether lexical features and textual properties along with individual differences on the part of readers influence word processing times during second language (L2) reading comprehension. Forty-eight Spanish-speaking adolescent and adult learners of English read nine English passages in a self-paced word-by-word reading…

Study abroad is an under-researched domain of language learning. Moreover, most investigations of this phenomenon adopt traditional structuralist approaches, wherein outcomes of study abroad are assessed solely in terms of proficiency gains as measured through conventional exams. The present study builds upon an emerging body of poststructuralist…

Although multilingualism has become a fact of life in the last few decades, this phenomenon has largely failed to find a reflection in research on language learning strategies. Even when scholars have addressed this issue, it has mostly been done with the purpose of proving the advantage of multilingualism over bilingualism, and scant attention…

This study tests the hypothesis that late first-language English / second-language Spanish learners (L1 English / L2 Spanish learners) acquire spirantization in stages according to the prosodic hierarchy (Zampini, 1997, 1998). In Spanish, voiced stops [b d g] surface after a pause or nasal stop, and continuants [ß? ð? ??] surface postvocalically,…

This study investigates research writing anxiety and self-efficacy beliefs among English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) graduate students in engineering-related fields. The relationship between the two writing affective constructs was examined and students' perspectives on research writing anxiety were also explored. A total of 218 survey responses…

This article documents the findings of a study concerning the perspectives on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in the monolingual context of Jaén. The research has involved the design, validation and administration of two sets of questionnaires to 745 informants (692 students and 53 teachers) within eight secondary schools with a…

The interaction between heritage language (HL) and ethnic identity has gained increasing scholarly attention over the past decades. Numerous quantitative studies have investigated and vindicated this interaction within certain contexts. Nevertheless, quantitative evidence on this interaction across contexts is absent to date. The current…

This study examined to what extent English-speaking learners of Arabic demonstrated varied metalinguistic knowledge of a salient feature (head-direction) vs. an unsalient feature (definiteness) in the Arabic construct state. In addition, it examined whether this knowledge was utilized in form-focused task performance. In the target construction,…