This study investigates the enhancement of spoken English proficiency among students at Taiwan's technological and vocational education (TVE) universities. The focus is on the significant impact of positive learning attitudes and effective methodologies, using questionnaires and in-depth interviews to assess students' confidence and perceptions of…

English is a compulsory course for students in China from primary education to postgraduate education. Recently more and more policymakers at Chinese universities have been forcing English education to be performed using a one-way English immersion approach. In their views, the more English practices in English classes, the better the learners'…

The current study examined cognitive effects of two pathways of second language (L2) acquisition longitudinally in Chinese speakers learning English in an L2-dominant environment. Thirty-nine participants who attended an intensive 10-week English course (L2-instruction group) were compared to 38 participants who attended regular university courses…

This exploratory study evaluated the impact of a Spanish second language (L2) domestic immersion (DI) program that was developed expediently at a large university in the United States in response to widespread study abroad (SA) program closures due to COVID-19. Spanish language learners (n = 14) participated in an intensive, six-week summer…

The present study examines the language- and culture-learning perceptions of domestic and international students from a Canadian university who participated in an intensive four-week-long Spanish language and cultural immersion program in Spain. The study draws on quantitative and qualitative data to explore the ways in which the participants'…

The research purposes were to: 1) develop lesson plans for content-based instruction; 2) evaluate the students' perceptions of the effectiveness of content-based instruction; and 3) investigate the effects of content-based instruction on English language performance of Thai undergraduate students in a non-English program. The sample group was 19…

In this article, we analyze the plurilingualism of instructors and their students in a program taught through the medium of French at a multilingual, Anglophone university in Western Canada. We employ the lenses of plurilingualism and plurilingual competence in the analysis of data from a one-year qualitative study of plurilingualism across the…

Anxiety experienced in the course of learning a foreign language is specific and unique (Horwitz et al., 1986; MacIntyre & Gardner, 1989). This paper reports a study on anxiety in Chinese undergraduate non-English majors at three different proficiency levels in a three-week immersion summer camp. By way of survey, interviews, reflective…

The current study examines English-speaking learners of Spanish and their pragmatic development of request forms during a six-week immersion program in Madrid, Spain. Elicited production and intuition data were analyzed, focusing on personal deictic orientation, directness evidenced by clause type, and the use of "por favor"…

This article explores the beliefs about second language (L2) sociolinguistic competence of four university-level advanced L2 learners. It places particular emphasis on 1) how these university learners conceptualized L2 sociolinguistic competence; 2) how they thought about two different language learning contexts (viz., the L2 classroom versus…

This article describes a department-coordinated Facebook group for psychology students and graduates. An evaluation of the postings in the past year by the group, with 900 members, showed that the group averaged 2.5 postings per day. The most common types of postings involved (1) information about recent research findings, (2) information about…

This study examines proposals made during planning talk--a speech act that has received little attention in previous literature--to determine the applicability of the stages of second language (L2) pragmatic development posited by Kasper and Rose (2002). Although Kasper and Rose suggest that formulas play a prominent role in L2 pragmatic…

This paper reports the results of a cross-lingual study on the role of comprehension monitoring in L1 (English) and L2 (French) reading proficiency. Fifty-two undergraduate students from two FSL backgrounds, French immersion (FI) and core French (CF), were given reading comprehension tests as well a monitoring task in both languages. Results…