The study aims to explore in-service teachers' epistemological beliefs about the following five critical paradigms in second language education and their corresponding practices: (1) inductive/deductive grammar instruction, (2) intensive/extensive reading, (3) looking up unknown words in the dictionary/guessing from context, (4) focusing on…

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic…

This study developed an integrated-STEM CO[subscript 2] dragster design course using 3D printing technology. After developing a pre-engineering curriculum, we conducted a teaching experiment to assess students' differences in creativity, race forecast accuracy, and learning performance. We compared student performance in both 3D printing and…

Recent years have witnessed a strong and increasing interest in the incidental learning of second language grammar. While much of this research has focused on the acquisition of second language word order or noun-determiner systems, relatively fewer studies have examined the learning of second language morphology. Results of studies that have…

This article focuses on qualitative self-report data from a mixed-methods study which investigated Grade 5 and 6 (n = 274), 11-12-year-old, Irish-medium (IM) immersion students' improvement in linguistic accuracy in response to an explicit-inductive approach to form-focused instruction (FFI). A series of typographically enhanced PowerPoint slides…

Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) increasingly are being used in the United States for inferences about student achievement growth and educator effectiveness. Emerging research has indicated that SGPs estimated from observed test scores have large measurement errors. As such, little is known about "true" SGPs, which are defined in terms…

An in-depth examination of the acquisition of grammatical gender has not previously been conducted for Irish, an endangered indigenous language now typically acquired simultaneously with English, or as L2. Children acquiring Irish must contend with the opacity of the Irish gender system and the plurifunctionality of the inflections used to mark…

This study explored the effects of ABRACADABRA, a free computer-assisted literacy program, on the reading accuracy and comprehension skills of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ABRACADABRA is a balanced literacy instruction program, targeting both code and meaning-based reading abilities. Twenty children with ASD, aged 5-11…

The purpose of this exploratory longitudinal study was to evaluate the efficacy of two new forms of recasts (i.e., elaborated and paraphrased recasts), each of which was designed to be more in accordance with contested views of input processing. The effectiveness of the two new forms of recasts was compared to that of conventional standard…

A quasi-experimental study examined effects of a 10-week word structure intervention with fourth-grade students. During daily 10-15-minute practice periods, students worked individually with mobile apps focused on specific aspects of word identification. Pre- and post-treatment assessments showed no differences in rate and accuracy of oral reading…

Forty native Spanish-speaking children (age 8;0-10;3), 20 with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and 20 with Typical Language Development (TLD), received a battery of psycholinguistic tests, IQ, hearing screenings, and the Spanish Non-word Repetition Task (NRT). The children's repetition of 20 non-words was scored. The percentage of correct…

Task repetition facilitates learners' performance, at least temporarily: Since learners are already familiar with the content of the task at the initial enactment, they are capable of focusing their attention on linguistic form during the following enactment. However, the analysis in previous studies treated various aspects of "form" as…

Language aptitude remains one of the most understudied predictor variables in L1 attrition research. The current study seeks to address this gap by investigating the effects of language aptitude on L1 retention in late attriters. Forty L1 Spanish-L2 Swedish bilinguals living in Sweden participated in the study, along with 20 functionally…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that a nonlinear relationship exists between a performance-classroom climate and the reading achievement of adolescent students with learning disabilities (LD). Participants were 62 students with LD (Grades 5-9) from public elementary schools in northern Greece. Classroom climate was…

Differential bundle functioning (DBF) analyses were conducted to determine whether seventh and eighth grade second language learners (SLLs) had lower probabilities of answering bundles of math word problems correctly that had heavy language demands, when compared to non-SLLs of equal math proficiency. Math word problems on each of four test forms…