Adult Japanese speakers often experience difficulty learning English /r/-/l/. Previous research has reported the effectiveness of using perception-based high-variability identification training with natural speech stimuli on improving Japanese speakers' perception and production of /r/-/l/. Recent studies have also shown the effectiveness of using…

The "College English Teaching Reform Project", issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education aims to strengthen the practical English instruction and improve the English language proficiency of the college students (Ministry of Education, 2007). However, the problem of "naturalness" in handling English by the college students…

This article offers a critical examination of language ideological constructions, advocating for language practices that favor culturally and contextually appropriate practice. Although discourses on multicultural inclusive practice in England are not new, the position of minoritized languages in early years education is still absent and highly…

Integrated test tasks, such as listening-to-speak or reading-to-write, are increasingly used in second language assessment despite relatively limited empirical insights into what they assess. Most research on integrated tasks has primarily focused on the productive skills involved; studies exploring the receptive skills mostly investigated tasks…

The main objective of this research was to explore communication competence traits deemed as essential for initial teacher training of schoolteachers of language -- in both the Spanish and "Mapuzugun" -- by primary school teachers and university teachers who are familiar with linguistic diversity in the southern-central area of Chile in…

Heritage language learners (HLLs) need to be exposed to different genres of academic texts (Chevalier, 2004; Correa, 2016) and instructors need to find resources to maximize HLLs' learning experiences. There are multiple gains in improving HLLs' writing to create an awareness of the power of the HL through the use of authentic resources with a…

Though the relevance of language teachers' native/non-native (N/NN) background has been researched extensively, little is known about its applicability to cases where the lecturer uses English as the medium of instruction (EMI). This study's purpose, which was conducted in Israeli higher education institutions, was to elicit students' perceptions…

How languages are acquired and what stages learners go through has been the focus in language teaching area, and this cross-sectional study investigated the use of English adverbs by elementary, pre-intermediate and intermediate level Turkish EFL students at Anadolu University School of Foreign Languages by analyzing it from acquisitional…

Families' social, demographic, and economic circumstances can have direct and indirect effects on children's development. Structural inequities in access to resources such as education, income, or food can promote disparities in children's health and school readiness. Similarly, children can face more or fewer barriers in their development…

Studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a first language do not agree on the patterns and factors relevant for coda development. In order to shed light on the questions involved, a longitudinal study of coda development in Northern European Spanish was carried out to explore the relationship between accuracy, markedness and frequency. The study…

When young children interpret novel nouns, they tend to be very much affected by the perceptual features of the referent objects, especially shape. This article investigates whether children might inhibit a prepotent tendency to base novel nouns on the shape of referent objects in order to base them on conceptual features (i.e. taxonomic object…

This paper reports the qualitative analysis of an interlanguage study investigating Thai EFL students' pronunciation of English loanwords used in the Thai language. It aims to analyze the extent to which the stress and tonal systems in Thai affect the stress placement of English polysyllabic loanwords in the pronunciation of Thai students, as…

Over the first weeks and months following birth, infants' initial, broad-based perceptual sensitivities become honed to the characteristics of their native language. In this article, we review this process of emerging specialization within the context of a cascading "critical period" (CP) framework, in which periods of maximal openness…

Heritage Spanish is often influenced by English, and previous research on late Spanish-English bilinguals suggests that their relative clause attachment preferences in Spanish are affected by English exposure. Nevertheless, recent work with heritage speakers has revealed that early (high-proficiency) Spanish-English bilinguals demonstrate a…

The present study investigated German-learning 6-month-old infants' preference for visual speech. Visual stimuli in the infants' native language (German) were contrasted with stimuli in a foreign language with similar rhythmical characteristics (English). In a visual preference task, infants were presented with 2 side-by-side silent video clips of…