The role of the learner's mother tongue in second and foreign language classrooms has been a subject of debate for many decades (Brice, Mastin, & Perkins, 1998; Cook, 2001; Ferguson, 2003; Almulhim, 2014; Al-Amir, 2017). This debate about the use of the learner's first language is reflected in the absence of a clear policy on its use within…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how beginner English Language Learners (ELLs) at the high school level were able to develop literacy skills in English by working collaboratively, accessing content presented which employed multimedia and multimodal resources, and expressing their learning through similar modes. The…

Collaborative writing tasks have been claimed to offer language learning opportunities because they implicitly draw learners' attention to form. Nevertheless, their efficacy has been claimed to be moderated by proficiency, as low proficiency learners tend to override form over meaning. These claims, however, are mostly based on adult learners and…

This paper adds to writing to learn research by reporting on empirical and conceptual studies on the subject matter but also by speculating on the learning virtues that writing offers besides its function as an assessment tool, namely that it can provide students with an adequate avenue to reflect on their learning. For this purpose, I reviewed 17…

This study investigated the effects of individual word frequency, collocational frequency, and association on L1 and L2 collocational processing. An acceptability judgment task was administered to L1 and L2 speakers of English. Response times were analyzed using mixed-effects modeling for 3 types of adjective-noun pairs: (a) high-frequency, (b)…

The main purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the planned writing model on the writing anxiety, self-efficacy and Turkish course achievement of those learning Turkish as a foreign language. For this purpose, a 6- week planned writing model was applied in the research. The study group of the research consisted of 32 students studying…

Linguistic landscaping is an emerging field of sociolinguistics exploring language in its textual form in the public sphere. Studies on Linguistic Landscape (LL) can be used as a tool to interpret language vitality in a given territory. The present study investigates visibility and vitality of languages in public space of Bihta, an upcoming…

This study investigated the vocabulary development of children (N = 547) from linguistically and socioeconomically diverse classrooms in Germany from age 3 in preschool to age 7 in Grade 1. The results showed that for dual language learners (DLLs, n = 107) growth rates in their German majority language skills varied over classrooms. Compared to…

Purpose: Individuals vary in their ability to learn the sound categories of nonnative languages (nonnative phonetic learning) and to adapt to systematic differences, such as accent or talker differences, in the sounds of their native language (native phonetic learning). Difficulties with both native and nonnative learning are well attested in…

Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English-Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers' speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book…

Providing first language (L1) translations in L2 vocabulary interventions may be beneficial for L2 vocabulary learning. However, in linguistically diverse L2 classrooms, teachers cannot provide L1 translations to all children. Social robots do offer such opportunities, as they can be programmed to speak any combination of languages. This study…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit disordered speech prosody, but sources of disordered prosody remain poorly understood. We explored patterns of temporal alignment and prosodic grouping in a speech-based metronome repetition task as well as manual coordination in a drum tapping task among Cantonese speakers with ASD and…

This study investigated family and coach responses to a two-year community-based research program, Strong Beginnings for Babies (SBB), designed to support families in fostering infant language development. The study focused on families of infants from low-income backgrounds, as these children may be at risk for delayed language development. The…

This paper investigates the prospects in the use of mother tongue as a medium of instruction in Nigeria's primary level of education. With the multilingual nature of Nigeria, many scholars have continued to clamour for the use of indigenous languages as a medium of instruction in Nigeria's primary schools. This paper also seeks to justify the…

This commentary discusses Westergaard's (2021) keynote article, which presents a comprehensive model of first language (L1), second language (L2), and third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary presents evidence from a previous study of L3 learners that provides support for Westergaard's property-by-property transfer proposal. The commentary…