Narrative skills play an important role in children's reading, communication, and critical thinking. Most studies on narrative skills are based on monolingual children from middle- to upper middle-class populations and few have examined bilingual children's narratives outside of the western context. These factors may impose different sociocultural…

Language-specific (i.e. the ideal L2 self) and plurilingual selves are now at the forefront of scholarly inquiry in L2 motivation research. Yet, there is a lack of empirical studies examining how language learners reframe their sense of self as speakers of an L2. This study draws on a questionnaire (N = 162) and on semi-structured interviews (N =…

The study investigates whether comprehension of derived words in text context requires a complete understanding of word parts. It explores comprehension of derived words as a function of learner proficiency and contextual clues. Ninety English-as-a-foreign-language learners at three proficiency levels participated in three successive tests…

Amid the abundance of studies on translation errors in Thailand, a scarcity remains especially within the multi-linguacultural context of Thailand's Deep South. To address this gap, this study aims to examine Thai-English and English-Thai translation errors encountered by 232 Thai EFL university students studying English in three universities…

The complexity of language contact and intercultural communication has generated various issues in relation to language use and education. As one of the many Chinese dialects ("fangyans"), the Chaoshan dialect ("Teochew") has been affected by the extensive promotion of Putonghua, the key lingua franca across China, and English,…

In recent years, Third Language Acquisition (TLA) in Cross-Linguistic Influence (CLI) research has been debated regarding background languages' impact on learning a target language. While Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research often emphasizes the primary influence of the first language (L1) on the target language, it does not discount the…

The expanding use of social media has the potential to enhance the quality of English as a foreign language (EFL) instruction and learning. The purpose of this online survey-based study was to investigate the mediating effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for reading English social media text among 348 Chinese undergraduate EFL learners.…

Digital divides mean that marginalized groups such as adults who speak English as a second or other language (ESOL) are less likely to have access to online instruction. Higher levels of English proficiency are associated with better health and employment; therefore, access to ESOL classes is essential. We investigated how sociodemographics and…

The research in this volume takes account of the context of policy promoting Chinese as a second language (CSL) in several countries and regions, (Australia, East Asia and South-East Asia), and the wider social context of multilingual and multicultural societies. Furthermore, this book reports results of two research studies which investigated how…

Purpose: An evidence-based approach to improving instructional practices and student outcomes in data use. It is a systematic process of evaluating and analysing learning problems, collecting and transforming various types of data into instructional decisions, and implementing informed actions to improve instruction and student learning. Since…

Spanish and French majors at our small, private, Southern U.S. liberal arts institution must study abroad for an entire semester, yet students embark and return with widely disparate levels of language and intercultural learning. To more fully foster learning-laden semester-long study abroad experiences we changed the curriculum and now majors…

Integrated assessments are often used to measure English language readiness for university. As language assessment contexts are impacted by variables beyond the classroom, and technologised learners are increasingly striving to achieve "differentiated learning goals" (Peng et al., 2020, p. 88), the challenge is to design assessments that…

This study used a meta-analytic structural equation modeling approach to build extended versions of the simple view of reading (SVR) model in second and foreign language (SFL) learning contexts (i.e., SVR-SFL). Based on the correlation coefficients derived from primary studies, we replicated and integrated two previous extended meta-analytic SVR…

Listeners have been shown to judge second language (L2) users more negatively than L1 speakers on measures of language proficiency and even on personal qualities. However, less is known about what factors affect listener judgment which this study seeks to explore. In the study, one first language (L1) English speaker recorded her spontaneous…

Learner corpus research has expanded from focusing primarily on English as a second language (L2) to include languages such as L2 Spanish, reflecting the growing importance of corpus linguistics in second language acquisition (SLA) research. In this context, and because prompts are the means by which learner corpora gather their texts, it has…