This article examines a graduate teacher-training course designed to meet both the Spanish language proficiency needs of mainstream, bilingual, and English as a second language teachers, and their common professional development needs to teach English language learners. For most course participants Spanish is their second language and the course…

Taking its inspiration from a study conducted by Svalberg of Brunei English verb usage (1998), this paper examines the responses of a sample of 205 Filipino university freshmen to grammatically correct and incorrect verb forms in a 20-item Grammaticality Judgment Test. The test covered tense harmony, verb forms, tenses, and modals. Except in the…

This article first reviews important issues of language, power, and testing. It then examines in critical fashion a particular instance of the use of language testing by the Hong Kong government, namely, the Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers (LPAT). Treating the LPAT developments as a form of narrative rather than debate, it presents…

This article examines the primary assumption underlying the recent passage of propositions aimed at meeting the need of English language learners (ELLs). The assumption is that English language learners normally need only one year of intensive structured English immersion to learn English well enough to be academically successful in an all-English…

A sample of 141 international students from different U.S. colleges completed surveys related to social support, demographic variables, and acculturative stress. Findings indicated that social support and English proficiency uniquely contribute to the variance in students' acculturative stress. Results also indicated that students who primarily…

It is unclear how children develop the ability to learn words incidentally (i.e., without direct instruction or numerous exposures). This investigation examined the early achievement of this skill by longitudinally tracking the expressive vocabulary and incidental word-learning capacities of a hearing child of Deaf adults who was natively learning…

This paper examines the relationships among motivation, metacognition, and proficiency in listening comprehension. Adolescent learners of French (N = 57) completed two questionnaires. A motivation questionnaire tapped student responses to three orientations related to motivation: amotivation, intrinsic, and extrinsic. A metacognitive awareness…

In the past few years researchers have begun to show an interest in humour and language play as it relates to second language learning (SLL). Tarone (2000) has suggested that L2 language play may be facilitative of SLL, in particular by developing sociolinguistic competence, as learners experiment with L2 voices; and by destabilizing the…

This paper reports the results of a brief investigation into what non-native English-speaking teachers (non-NESTs) perceive to be their difficulties with the English language. It was hypothesised that the confidence of such teachers, which affects the effectiveness with which they teach, would be low. Results from 15 randomly selected interviewees…

Programs and policies related to the education of English learners are often based on the belief that fluency in English is the primary, if not sole, requirement for academic success. While English is in fact necessary for academic success in U.S. schools, so is a strong base in content-area academics. This study investigated the effects of track…

This article draws upon recent work in the cognitive neurosciences to suggest that the facilitation effect follows naturally within current psychological theory. A view of the mind as consisting of discrete mental modules, called psychological modularity, is defended with case study evidence of double dissociation. It is argued that transfer of…

This paper describes an action research project undertaken to look into the effectiveness of tasks designed to raise learner awareness of conversational strategies. The goal was to test whether tasks and direct instruction aimed at promoting learner awareness of conversational language at the discourse-level had any impact on the students'…

This study investigated attention control in tasks involving the processing of relational terms (more highly grammaticized linguistic stimuli: spatial prepositions) and non-relational terms (less highly grammaticized lexical stimuli: nouns) in a first (L1) and second language (L2). Participants were adult bilinguals with greater proficiency in…

Stimuli designed to selectively elicit motion or color processing were used in a developmental event-related potential study with adults and children aged 6, 7 and 8. A positivity at posterior site INZ (P-INZ) was greater to motion stimuli only in adults. The P1 and N1 were larger to color stimuli in both adults and children, but earlier to motion…

Intonation, long thought to be a key to effectiveness in spoken language, is more and more commonly addressed in English language teaching through the use of speech visualization technology. While the use of visualization technology is a crucial advance in the teaching of intonation, such teaching can be further enhanced by connecting technology…