Young word learners fail to discriminate phonetic contrasts in certain situations, an observation that has been used to support arguments that the nature of lexical representation and lexical processing changes over development. An alternative possibility, however, is that these failures arise naturally as a result of how word familiarity affects…

As students move through the grades, content area learning becomes increasingly significant for reading, writing, and speaking tasks. One research-evidenced approach to actively engaging adolescent learners in acquiring, remembering, and using academic vocabulary in reading, writing and speaking tasks across disciplines is multisensory structured…

The effects of repeated oral reading and timed reading on L2 oral reading fluency were examined among Japanese university students (N = 50) over 12 weeks. Three quasi-experimental groups were used in the study. Group 1 practiced two types of reading: Repeated oral reading with chunking practice and timed reading. Group 2 did timed reading only.…

Based on a larger ethnography, this article explores intergenerational relationships between First-Generation Immigrants and Second-Generation youth and focuses on psychological damages (Piller, 2016), particularly "linguistic injuries," within a new "mainland" Chinese church in Canada. Specifically, I show why…

Recent migration combined with strategies to diversify the teacher workforce has led to complexities in teacher diversity identified by the term 'superdiversity' (Vertovec, 2006). This article builds on recent work on the processes of convergence and superdiversity (Wessendorf, 2011) by focusing on meaningful encounters in the mathematics…

In the field of Modern Higher Education, the background of teachers as native or non-native speakers of the language they teach is of major concern in the field of teacher education. First things first, in teacher education each teacher has an ideal self of her or his own as non-native English-speaking teachers of English, as a second or foreign…

As a result of the global presence of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), it has been argued that learners of English should be exposed to a range of varieties of English, rather than a single variety of English, so that they can be better prepared to communicate with other people in ELF communication. However, little is known about second language…

The importance of secondary-stressed (SS) and unstressed-unreduced (UU) syllable accuracy for spoken word recognition in English is as yet unclear. An acoustic study first investigated Russian learners' of English production of SS and UU syllables. Significant vowel quality and duration reductions in Russian-spoken SS and UU vowels were found,…

The aim of this paper is to determine whether all languages in the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual speaker manifest cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and establish the directions of CLI on the basis of chosen vowels from the linguistic repertoire of two groups: the Bilingual group (L1 Polish/L2 Danish) and the Multilingual group (L1…

Previous research has shown that the presence of English word spellings facilitates children's oral vocabulary learning. Whether a similar orthographic facilitation effect may exist in Chinese is interesting but not intuitively obvious due to the character writing system representing morphosyllabic but not phoneme-size information, and the more…

Notwithstanding a surge of novel insights into the male/female variable on human behaviour and cognitive functions, the gender factor is still far from being well understood. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, informed by neuroscientific research, this study used linguistic and psychological measures to investigate gender differences in the…

Phonological decoding, defined here as converting the written forms of words (or letter strings) into the phonological forms they represent, has been argued to play an important role in various aspects of L2 learning. Previous studies have emphasised the importance of transfer in L2 decoding, interpretable as the automatic triggering of L1-based…

This study explores useful ways of using an instant messenger in a peer-tutoring environment when two students exchange their mother languages. Seven learners of Korean and seven Korean students learning English were paired randomly to conduct language exchange via an instant messenger, KakaoTalk. The pairs (five of male and female pair and two of…

This study investigated the occurrence of incidental focus on form in an under-researched context, i.e. the intact foreign language classroom with near-beginner adolescent learners. Two classes of near-beginner learners of L2 French and of L2 Spanish participated in the study. All interactions involving the teacher and a proportion of the students…

As a case study of non-linguists' perceptions of accent, this paper investigates how accurately and on what basis Japanese-accented English (JAE) is discernible from other L2 varieties of English in New Zealand (NZ). The paper sheds light on how a feature salient in speech is associated with the perceived sociolinguistic identity of speakers. An…