This study examined the linguistic competence in Korean of Korean heritage language learners (HLLs), compared to English-speaking non-heritage language learners (NHLLs) of Korean. It is unclear and controversial as to whether heritage languages learners are exposed to early but are interrupted manifest as L1 competence or share more…

This article explores problems with the trend of business language making its way into schools and provides strategies for how to address this issue.

The use of students' mother tongue (MT/L1) in the second/foreign language classroom has been debated in language teaching theory and practice for many decades. Most language teaching methods advocate the use of the target language (TL) in the classroom. However, recent research has elevated the role of L1 in the classroom. This paper illustrates…

Language acquisition research frequently concerns itself with linguistic development and result of the acquisition process with respect to a first or subsequent language. For some, it seems tacitly assumed that a first language, once acquired, remains stable, regardless of exposure to and the acquisition of additional language(s) beyond the first…

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…

This paper reports on an investigation of the potential for a shared-L1 advantage on an academic English listening test featuring speakers with L2 accents. Two hundred and twelve second-language listeners (including 70 Mandarin Chinese L1 listeners and 60 Japanese L1 listeners) completed three versions of the University Test of English as a Second…

This study investigated the use of text-message abbreviations (textisms) in Australian adolescents and young adults, and relations between textism use and literacy abilities. Fifty-two high school students aged 13-15 years, and 53 undergraduates aged 18-24 years, all users of predictive texting, translated conventional English sentences into…

In this article I describe my interaction as an English for academic purposes (EAP) practitioner with a supervisor and her two postgraduate international students, both of whom were second language speakers of English (L2). Because of linguistic and relationship issues the supervisory experience for the parties was challenging and frustrating. I…

This study explores the language variation in university student public speech across two academic disciplines: business administration and education. A corpus of university student public speech, made up of 102 classroom presentations (approximately 215,000 words), was designed, constructed and analysed using both quantitative and qualitative…

This paper attempts to introduce and explain the famous Three Concentric Circles proposed by Kachru, namely, the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle. Based on Kachru's theory, the paper proceeds to discuss four fallacies in EFL and ESL contexts, which are (1) English learners in the Outer and Expanding Circles learn English…

This study focuses on the analysis of variation at the phonological level, specifically the variable realization of palatalization of dental stops before the high vowel /i/ and vowel nasalization in the speech of bilingual speakers of Uruguayan Portuguese (UP) in the city of Rivera, Uruguay. The data were collected in participant-observation and…

Teaching about culture at the college level is always a challenge with regards to the heterogeneous reality of Spanish. The debatable status of the language within the United States is not always reflected in the language and literature departments of institutions of higher education. Moreover, standardization has been continuously favored in the…

Lexical variation abounds in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and is commonly associated with the introduction of the Australasian Signed English lexicon into Deaf education in 1979, before NZSL was acknowledged as a language. Evidence from dictionaries of NZSL collated between 1986 and 1997 reveal many coexisting variants for the numbers from one…

The language settings used on personal computers interact with the spell-checker in Microsoft Word, which directly affects the flagging of spellings that are deemed incorrect. This study examined the language settings of personal computers owned by a group of Canadian university students. Of 21 computers examined, only eight had their Windows…

This study investigated second language (L2) learners' acquisition of English /t, d/ deletion patterns in word-final consonant clusters, (a) focusing on how constraints such as grammatical conditioning and phonological environment affect deletion of /t, d/ in L2 acquisition and (b) determining the extent to which these L2 learners had acquired…