Students must have a working understanding of the language of instruction to be successful in school. In the United States, English is the predominant language of instruction, and students who come from homes where a language other than English is spoken face the additional challenge of learning both subject matter content and the dominant…

Speaking constitutes one of the main goals of learning a second language (L2). Despite the increasing attention on the role of planning and language transfer in L2 learning, the combined effect of using different languages and pre-task planning on language production remains unclear. This study investigated whether the use of different languages…

The increasing linguistic diversity of the students in schools poses a major challenge for inclusive educational systems in which everyone can learn the language of instruction effectively and, likewise, can have access to contents, being language the necessary tool to the latter end. Research suggests that there is a robust connection between…

Orthography-phonology mapping in world languages exhibits variations. Extensive research has investigated whether orthographic-phonological consistency impacts the cognitive processing of written words. A major body of work has focused on the recognition of phonographic first language (L1) written words. Results show that the more transparent the…

In contexts of first language (L1) acquisition, prediction and adaptation are often viewed as fundamental to the learning process (Rabagliati et al., 2016). One mechanism that has been proposed to specifically account for such adaptive behavior is error-based implicit learning (e.g., Chang et al., 2006). According to this account, speakers…

Today, it is widely acknowledged that the use of the Internet and the development, production, and sharing of content over the web has become widespread. Web technologies that provide these conveniences are commonly referred to as Web 2.0 tools. This study aims to develop the skills of pre-service teachers who will teach Turkish as a mother tongue…

Languages differ in the importance of acoustic dimensions for speech categorization. This poses a potential challenge for second language (L2) learners, and the extent to which adult L2 learners can acquire new perceptual strategies for speech categorization remains unclear. This study investigated the effects of extensive English L2 immersion on…

First Language (L1) has been assumed to play a role in Second Language ability (Bachman & Palmer, 1996). However, the interplay between them across skill, task, or scoring criteria is more complex (Hamp-Lyons & Davies, 2008). Using Many-Facets Rasch Measurement, this study investigates the main effects of examinee ability, rater severity,…

This study investigated and compared family language policies (FLPs) from the perspectives of two groups of Singaporean bilingual children: 2,971 English-Chinese and 780 English-Malay children (aged 9-11 years). It also examined how different FLP components -- namely, language beliefs, practices, and management -- influenced their leisure reading…

We investigated the technical characteristics of a brief early numeracy screening battery for both English learners (ELs) and English proficient students (EPs). Results indicated there were differences in performance of ELs and EPs. Further, we found reasonable overall accuracy of the screener predicting student outcomes. Similar overall accuracy…

An indigenous or community language is the language that nurtures the child in the early years of his or her life. The UNESCO land mark publication in 1953 underscores the importance of educating children in their community languages: an education that is packaged in a language which the child does not understand is simply difficult for the child.…

In their first year, infants begin to learn the speech sounds of their language. This process is typically modeled as an unsupervised clustering problem in which phonetically similar speech-sound tokens are grouped into phonetic categories by infants using their domain-general inference abilities. We argue here that maternal speech is too…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

Translanguaging has now become central to a sociolinguistics that foregrounds globalization and mobility as key concepts for grasping human beings' capacity to engage with and draw on both multiple linguistic -- including named languages -- and semiotic resources dynamically and in combination for the purpose of meaning-making (García, Ofelia…

Background: Previous studies show that students improve communication skills throughout post-secondary study proportionately to first-year ability, yet important questions remain. How does post-secondary affect the development of reading comprehension and related skills? How does this development vary between L1 and L2 speakers, and how much…