This study investigates whether raters' knowledge of test takers' first language (L1) affects how the raters orient themselves to the task of rating oral speech. The authors qualitatively investigated the effects of accent familiarity on raters' score assignment processes. Twenty-six trained raters with a second language of Mandarin Chinese,…

Russia's secondary school populations are becoming increasingly diverse in terms of ethnicity, culture, language, and religion. The growing diversity makes a considerable impact on the functions and goals of schools, the realization of which requires the implementation of an equitable language policy. In this article, I briefly represent Russia as…

This study examines the development and evaluation of a bilingual Vocabulary Size Test (VST, Nation, 2006). A bilingual (English-Russian) test was developed and administered to 121 intermediate proficiency EFL learners (native speakers of Russian), alongside the original monolingual (English-only) version of the test. A comparison of the bilingual…

Second language (L2) learners have been found to experience difficulty in tasks that require the integration of discourse-pragmatic properties with syntactic and semantic properties (Sorace and Serratrice, 2009; Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006; Valenzuela, 2006). The present article investigates the sources of L2 difficulty in a phenomenon where multiple…

The study explores first language (L1) influences on the mechanisms of spelling in English as a foreign language (EFL). We hypothesized that the transparency of L1 orthography influences (a) the amount of hesitation associated with spelling irregular English words, and (b) the size of units EFL spellers operate. Participants were adult speakers of…

This study contributes to current trends of heritage speaker (HS) acquisition research by examining the syntax of psych-predicates in HS Spanish. Broadly defined, psych-predicates communicate states of emotions (e.g., to love) and have traditionally been categorized as belonging to one of three classes: class I--"temere" "to…

The present research study investigated the effects of 8 versions of a computer-based vocabulary learning program on receptive and productive knowledge levels of college students. The participants were 106 male and 103 female Korean EFL students from Kyungsung University and Kwandong University in Korea. Students who participated in versions of…

This dissertation investigates the linguistic and social constraints on the occurrence of creaky voice quality (creak) in Beijing Mandarin (BM), as well as the effect of linguistic and prosodic context on creak's social meanings for Mandarin listeners. It is a two-phase study, composed of 1) a production study of the distribution of creak in the…

This volume offers a wealth of new information about the forms of several speech acts and their social distribution in Vietnamese as L1 and L2, complemented by a chapter on address forms and listener responses. As the first of its kind, the book makes a valuable contribution to the research literature on pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and language…

The present study aims to demonstrate how the estimation of vocabulary size might be affected by two neglected factors in vocabulary size tests. The first factor is randomization of question sequence, as opposed to the traditional high-to-low frequency sequencing. The second factor is learners' confidence in choosing the correct meaning for a…

Cross-language effects on reading skills are of particular interest in the context of foreign language immersion programs. Although there is an extensive literature on cross-language effects on reading in general, research focusing on immersion students and including different dimensions of reading acquisition such as reading fluency and reading…

Transformative learning theory (TLT) describes the process of reframing discriminative worldviews with a more permeable and reflective epistemology. Although TLT has been around for more than 50 years, few studies empirically engage critical theoretical frameworks to move beyond personal learning to identify the impacts of transformation on…

This article focuses on the work of cultural and language maintenance and fortification with Indigenous youth populations. Here, the idea of work represents two strands of thought: first, research that is partnered with Indigenous youth-serving institutions and that prioritizes Indigenous youth perspectives; and second, the work of cultural and…

English education in Taiwan has experienced a number of modifications over the past decade. The Ministry of Education (MOE) has initiated several reforms since 1994 with a purpose of changing the pedagogy, focusing on grammar-translation, to a more communicative one aim at cultivating learners of greater communication proficiency for the demands…

Higher education institutions in South Africa are dominated by English, a result of the colonial history of the country and its education system, a legacy which is intensified by the current dominance of English in higher education worldwide. This paper applies a decolonial theoretical lens to argue that the dominance of English in South African…