A crucial area in FL reading research is the transfer of reading skills from L1 to FL. Among all the reading skills, comprehension monitoring plays an important role. This study examines relationship between comprehension monitoring outcomes in L1 and FL reading among Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) with different FL…

The current debate in second language acquisition and heritage language learning is no longer about whether communicative language teaching should include a focus on form, but rather "how" and "when" this is most effective. The proposals for Spanish for heritage language learners (HLLs) courses show a marked preference for an integrated approach…

In recent years, several researchers have made strong calls for research on teaching for "intelligible" (rather than "native-like") pronunciation. Their reasoning is that, while maintaining their first language (L1)-related accents to a certain degree, students need to fulfill the minimal phonological requirements to be comprehensible in order to…

Over their 1st year of life, infants' "universal" perception of the sounds of language narrows to encompass only those contrasts made in their native language (J. F. Werker & R. C. Tees, 1984). This research tested 40 infants in an eyetracking paradigm and showed that this pattern also holds for infants exposed to seen language--American Sign…

Behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures are reported for a study in which relatively proficient Chinese-English bilinguals named identical pictures in each of their two languages. Production occurred only in Chinese (the first language, L1) or only in English (the second language, L2) in a given block with the order counterbalanced…

The purpose of this article is, first, to describe Sami children's education and its status in the Finnish education system and, secondly, to contemplate its development in Finland. The core of the article is intertwined with issues concerning the status, language, and culture of indigenous peoples. According to the article, the western school…

The present study investigates voice onset times (VOTs) to determine if cognates enhance the cross-language phonetic influences in the speech production of a range of Spanish-English bilinguals: Spanish heritage speakers, English heritage speakers, advanced L2 Spanish learners, and advanced L2 English learners. To answer this question, lexical…

In our increasingly diverse schools, students bring diverse ways of speaking to the classroom. In turn, as features from students' home language varieties transfer into their readings of texts, teachers' assessment and intervention plans may be directly affected. If teachers conflate dialect influence with reading error in Standard English, they…

This study offers a Minimalist analysis of the L2 acquisition of binding properties whereby cross-linguistic differences arise from the interaction of anaphoric feature specifications and operations of the computational system (Reuland 2001, 2011; Hicks 2009). This analysis attributes difficulties in the L2 acquisition of locality and orientation…

It remains unclear whether adult-learned second language (L2) depends on similar or different neurocognitive mechanisms as those involved in first language (L1). We examined whether English past tense forms are computed similarly or differently by L1 and L2 English speakers, and what factors might affect this: regularity (regular vs. irregular…

The present study is an attempt to empirically test and compare the results of three methods of word association (WA) analysis. Two of the methods--namely, associative commonality and nativelikeness, and lexico-syntactic patterns of associative organization--have been traditionally used in both first language (L1) and second language (L2)…

It is well known that adult US-English-speaking learners of French experience difficulties acquiring high /y/-/u/ and mid /oe/-/[openo]/ front vs. back rounded vowel contrasts in French. This study examines the acquisition of these French vowel contrasts at two levels: phonetic categorization and lexical representations. An ABX categorization task…

This study tests native Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers of second language (L2) Spanish in the domain of phonologically null object pronouns. This is a worthwhile first language (L1)-L2 pairing given that these languages are historically and typologically related and both seemingly allow for object drop. Nevertheless, the underlying syntax of…

Community participation in the governance of school systems is a recurrent theme of educational reform in developed and developing countries alike. This article analyses the effort of one developing country -- Nepal -- to promote broader participation in educational decision-making through local school governance structure. It looks at how the…

For native (L1) comprehenders, lower-level language processes such as lexical access and parsing are considered to consume few cognitive resources. In contrast, these processes pose considerable demands for second-language (L2) comprehenders. Two reading-time experiments employing inconsistency detection found that English learners did not detect…