This article summarizes the individual contributions to this special issue and discusses the advantages and implications of adopting a multilingual approach. The advantages include the possibility of examining language practices in context and providing insights about the way languages are acquired and used. This multilingual approach also opens…

Investigators of first language attrition, early bilingualism and child second language learning have found common ground on a number of important points. The present review of the research will show that the study of unevenness in the early development of two languages reveals more clearly how the critical problems for future research on…

Folk perceptions of language diversity often differ from the criteria laid out by linguists and have particular implications for applied/sociolinguists since the collective identification of language diversity largely determines the ways in which individuals regard the categorisation of their own (and others) linguistic uses as belonging to a…

Rating scales act as the de facto test construct in a writing assessment, although inevitably as a simplification of the construct (North, 2003). However, it is often not reported how rating scales are constructed. Unless the underlying framework of a rating scale takes some account of linguistic theory and research in the definition of…

In 1997 I published a paper in Language Teaching entitled "Form-focused instruction and second language acquisition: A review of classroom and laboratory research". The paper reviewed the results of studies investigating the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) on second language (L2) learning. It was organized around seven questions,…

Focus on form, i.e. brief attention to language items within a larger meaning-focused context (Long 1991; Ellis 2001), occurs in a variety of L2 instructional contexts. Meta-analyses of the effectiveness of focus on form have found overall positive effects; however, these meta-analyses have commented on the small number of studies available for…

We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the cross-language relations between the phonological awareness (PA) skills of preschool children learning more than one language are dependent upon their first-and second-language oral language skills. Four hundred sixty-six Spanish-speaking language minority children participated in this study.…

This article investigates whether and how L2 sentence processing is affected by memory constraints that force serial parsing. Monitoring eye movements, we test effects of working memory on L2 relative-clause attachment preferences in a sample of 75 late-adult German learners of English and 25 native English controls. Mixed linear regression…

In this paper, the on-going process of language policy-making in Suriname is dealt with using quantitative data obtained from students as well as teachers in primary and secondary schools. The Republic of Suriname is a former Dutch colony on the Caribbean coast of South America. Suriname shelters around 20 languages. Dutch is the official language…

This study reviews the empirical literature of self-efficacy, a central component of social cognitive theory, in the area of second language learning by focusing on two research questions: first, to what extent, has self-efficacy, as a predicting variable, been explored in the field of second language learning? Second, what factors affect…

This study examines a major linguistic event underway in New York City. Of its 10 million inhabitants, nearly a third are speakers of Spanish. This community is socially and linguistically diverse: Some speakers are recent arrivals from Latin America while others are lifelong New Yorkers. Some have origins in the Caribbean, the historic source of…

As historical relationships of Slavs and Albanians in the western Balkans have been subject to a wide range of scholarly interpretations, this dissertation seeks to present the facts of linguistic evidence of Slavic-Albanian contact, and apply them to an informed understanding of Slavs' and Albanians' interactions historically. Although individual…

Gumuz is a Nilo-Saharan dialect cluster spoken in the river valleys of northwestern Ethiopia and the southeastern part of the Republic of the Sudan. There are approximately 200,000 speakers, the majority of which reside in Ethiopia. This study is a phonological and grammatical analysis of two main dialects/languages: Northern Gumuz and Southern…

The structure of Biblical Hebrew (BH) verse remains an open question today despite the extensive amount of investigation that the question has inspired. Much headway has been made in terms of describing the features and devices that find expression in BH verse, but little has been done to make a compelling and consistent distinction between BH…