This article addresses language rights as a legitimate political tool for language policy scholarship and activism. The article begins by engaging several critiques of language rights. It analyzes Ruiz's language-as-right orientation to language policy, and then reviews recent scholarship challenging language rights from poststructural and…

The primary aim of this investigation was to determine what combination of target word variables (frequency, patternedness, length, cognateness, lexicalization) could best predict the difficulty of incidentally acquiring vocabulary through reading. A group of adult English First Language (EL1) (n = 20) and adult English as a Foreign Language (EFL)…

The global trend of introducing second language learning, namely, English, in primary schools is increasing. In Saudi Arabia, where English has never been taught in primary schools, the government to implement English as a second language at the primary level in 2005; however, this generated controversy. Opposition to the learning of English has…

Learning a foreign language is a critical skill in the current context of globalization and multicultural communication. Present secondary and post-secondary foreign language classes admit increasing numbers of students with learning disabilities (LD). Given the particular challenges faced by these students in the area of language processing,…

This article presents an overview of literacy teaching and learning, based on the author's extensive research and, in particular, the recently revised and extended "Learning to be Literate: Insights from Research for Policy and Practice" (Routledge, 2016). It is set against a background in England in which government policy dictates…

This study investigated whether video-based materials can facilitate second language learners' text comprehension at the levels of macrostructure and microstructure. Three classes inclusive of 98 Chinese-speaking university students joined this study. The three classes were randomly assigned to three treatment groups: on-screen text (T Group),…

Although there is a growing body of literature on the development of reading skills of Spanish-speaking language minority children, little research has focused on the development of writing skills in this population. This study evaluated whether children's Spanish early reading skills (i.e., print knowledge, phonological awareness, oral language)…

Despite the numerous studies on English article acquisition, the acquisition sequence, differences, and difficulties by English-as-a-second language learners (ELLs) remain to be further explored. With a detailed literature review, this study investigated the acquisition sequence, differences, and difficulties of English articles by ELLs with…

The spacing effect is a ubiquitous phenomenon, whereby memory is enhanced for the information that is learned across different points in time rather than being learned at once. A considerable amount of research has focused on the nature of the spacing effect, and there is general acceptance that spacing learning events out in time promotes…

The debate whether the second language or foreign language learners' mother tongue should be included in L2 settings is among the crucial issues of second language acquisition and language teacher training (Atkinson, 1987; Brooks-Lewis, 2009). Moving with this debate, this study focuses on the uses and functions of Turkish in the collaborative…

In an attempt to survive in the highly competitive terrain of academic publications, Portuguese humanities and social science professors are increasingly giving up writing their papers in Portuguese, and, instead, they now opt to write in English, today's scientific default language. This paper aims to portray the current panorama of humanities…

How parent-child interaction effectively supports children's bilingual heritage language development in a shared book-reading practice is an under-researched area. The in-depth study reported in this paper examined an episode of one child, a four-year-old girl and her father, reading an English story in Chinese. Approximately 70 hours of video…

Incidental grammar acquisition involves learners "picking up" a grammatical feature while their primary focus is on some other aspect of language--either message content or another language feature that is taught directly. This article reports a study of children's incidental grammar acquisition of two grammatical features--plural…

This paper includes two interrelated studies. The first production study investigates the timing patterns of English as spoken by Chinese learners with different dialect backgrounds. The second comprehension study explores native and non-native speakers' assessments of the intelligibility of Chinese-accented English, and examines the effects of…

Purpose: This study examined the extent to which children with specific language impairment (SLI) across Germanic languages differ from their typically developing (TD) peers in the use of past tense morphology. Method: A systematic literature search identified empirical studies examining regular and/or irregular past tense production by English…