Background & aims: Throughout typical development, children prioritize different perceptual, social, and linguistic cues to learn words. The earliest acquired words are often those that are perceptually salient and highly imageable. Imageability, the ease in which a word evokes a mental image, is a strong predictor for word age of acquisition…

There is no dearth of studies on pronunciation problems of students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL); however, research on pronunciation problems of young learners is scarce. Therefore, to fill this research gap, the present quasiexperimental study aimed at investigating the effect of L2 input on the pronunciation performance of young…

The paper aims at discussing the difficulties that students from French speaking countries who are pursuing their education in a Ghanaian university face in identifying English determiners. This is a qualitative study that analysed the difficulties that level 100 Francophone students who have French as a Second Language(L2) and English as a…

One major view as to the mechanism underlying metaphor interpretation is that it is based on relational-structure consistency (a.k.a. analogy) between target and vehicle. This entails a possibility of varying levels of stringency of analogical processing by individuals. This can be viewed as metaphor literacy. The study, involving 77 Indonesian…

Adopting the framework of projection from Systemic Functional Linguistics, the present study explored the deployment of projection in summary writing by three levels of college EFL learners from a university in mainland China. Data were collected from one summary writing by three classes of different levels' learners in an English program from a…

In this contribution, we aim to address the following questions: What does it mean to do language advocacy in 2022? Under which conditions does it operate? What are the fights, aims, and challenges? On the one hand, answering these questions heavily depends on the political, social, cultural and linguistic context, as well as on the interests,…

Situated within the Simple View of Reading, this study examined the code-related (word reading) and oral language (receptive vocabulary, narrative comprehension, narrative production) skills that contribute to English and Arabic reading comprehension in two groups of Arabic-English bilingual children (7-9 and 10-12 years) living in an English…

Purpose: This study explores whether the quality of parent-child interaction is associated with language abilities cross-sectionally and longitudinally up to preschool-age among children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Participants were 97 monolingual children with DLD and their parents from the Helsinki Longitudinal SLI study,…

The roles of grammar in the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) have long been discussed. This study explored viewpoints of five categories of local stakeholders regarding the roles of grammar in the Thai EFL context. Questionnaires were administered to two groups of Thai university students, and focus-group and semi-structured…

Adultism within English learner (EL) policy in the United States relegates youth to the status of objects whose English proficiency and academic achievement is assessed, monitored, and developed. This study challenges this institutionalized adultism by centering youths' interpretations of their own schooling experiences. It uses an intersectional…

Young learners' language aptitude is understudied due to a lack of tests covering this period of life. Young learners, in contrast with adults, are still acquiring their L1. Consequently, a language-dependent aptitude test should be carefully designed for it to be valid. An additional challenge is found when the young learners who are to take the…

Even in math class, English learners can work on their oral language development. The math tasks described here, designed for K-3, illustrate how.

Civic education provides adult English learners with the tools to be able to actively engage in their communities. This knowledge allows them to gain agency, develop a sense of belongingness, and facilitate lifelong learning. However, teaching civic education can be challenging for instructors for many reasons, such as prioritizing on developing…

A considerable amount of research has emerged in recent years concerning second language (L2) learner sensitivity to various information types. From this, Clahsen and Felser proposed the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) to account for increased learner sensitivity to certain kinds of non-structural (e.g., contextual, discoursal, semantic, and…

This study uncovers controversies about the use of mother tongue as a medium of instruction in Ethiopia. It examines motives for the use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction at the elementary level, and on which grounds the rights of minority linguistic groups to be instructed in their mother tongue are overlooked. To this effect, data…