Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving nonnative phonological contrasts. Even relatively advanced learners, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /?/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty…

While Ruiz's (1984) influential work on language orientations has substantively influenced how we study and talk about language planning, few teacher education programs today actually embed his framework in the praxis of preparing pre-service and practicing teachers. Hence, the primary purpose of this article is to demonstrate new understandings…

In the past decade, there has been increased scholarly interest in the purpose and functions of community language schools, also known as heritage, supplementary or complementary schools. In particular, previous studies have focused on schools operating in minority communities deriving from Asian and Eastern-European countries, showing that…

The perceptual fluency hypothesis claims that items that are easy to perceive at encoding induce an illusion that they will be easier to remember, despite the finding that perception does not generally affect recall. The current set of studies tested the predictions of the perceptual fluency hypothesis with a picture generation manipulation.…

The purpose of the article is to present of an innovative type of exercises in the Russian language, referred to as the complex intellectual-linguistic. The novelty of these exercises is: a) in an unusual arrangement of linguistic material which creates an educational research situation; b) in giving non-traditional tasks, aimed at simultaneously…

English is widely regarded as an essential skill for the globalized economy by governments around the world which devote considerable resources to its teaching in formal education, though often with limited success in terms of achievement levels. Thailand is a case in point. Set against the putative benefits of acquiring proficiency in English,…

Automaticity, or instant recognition of combinations of letters as units of language, is essential for proficient reading in any language. The article explores automaticity amongst competent adult first-language readers of isiZulu, and the factors associated with it or its opposite - active decoding. Whilst the transparent spelling patterns of…

The Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) has synthesized key data on English learners (ELs) into two-page PDF sheets, by topic, with graphics, plus key contacts. This Fast Facts covers data in the following categories: (1) States, Including D.C., with the Highest Concentration of ELs Who Are Black; (2) States, Including D.C., with the…

The Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) has synthesized key data on English learners (ELs) into two-page PDF sheets, by topic, with graphics, plus key contacts. The topics for this report on English Learners (ELs) Who Are American Indian and/or Alaska Native (AI/AN) include: (1) States With the Highest Percentage of ELs Who Were AI/AN:…

This report summarizes Austin Independent School District elementary dual language teachers' Spring 2016 survey results. Teachers were asked about different aspects of the district's dual language models, instructional practices, and support.

This quantitative-qualitative study aimed to fathom out whether and how informal features are exploited in articles of applied linguistics written in English by natives and non-natives. To this end, a corpus of 200 articles was compiled. We employed the classification of informal features proposed by Chang and Swales (1999) representing 10…

The authors tested theoretically driven predictions as to the ways in which syntactic awareness, or awareness of word order within sentences, might contribute to reading comprehension, the end goal of reading development and instruction. They conducted a longitudinal study of 100 English-speaking children followed from Grade 3 to 4. Children…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are particularly sensitive to phonological complexity in their language. Their performance drops when there are specific phonological structures or when complexity increases. A nonword repetition (NWR) test, which aims to assess the phonology of bilingual speakers with and without SLI, should…

Writing is considered varied with context and cannot be distilled down to a set of abstract cognitive or technical abilities. It always involve a combination of talent and skill and that makes it complex yet writing becomes more complex for ESL learner when they write using the second language in the academic context. With the growing interest in…

The current study examined the effects of first language (L1) textual and audio glosses along with the moderating effect of learners' visual and auditory perceptual style on second language (L2) vocabulary learning. The participants were first divided into two groups of auditory and visual learners based on their scores obtained from a learning…