Recent research has shown that a distinct variety of American Sign Language, known as Black ASL, developed in the segregated schools for deaf African Americans in the US South during the pre-civil rights era. Research has also shown that in some respects Black ASL is closer than most white varieties to the standard taught in ASL classes and found…

In order to design learning environments that foster students' research skills, one can draw on instructional design models for complex learning, such as the 4C/ID model (in: van Merriënboer and Kirschner, Ten steps to complex learning, Routledge, London, 2018). However, few attempts have been undertaken to foster students' "motivation"…

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…

As a spoken word unfolds over time, similar sounding words ("cap" and "cat") compete until one word "wins". Lexical competition becomes more efficient from infancy through adolescence. We examined one potential mechanism underlying this development: lexical inhibition, by which activated candidates suppress…

University students, especially language learners, have increasingly been using machine translation (MT) systems in the last decade and for all kinds of texts, including homework, assignments and exams. This ubiquity does not translate into visibility as few teachers address the subject in class. Several researchers have shown that MT systems,…

The use of interactional metadiscourse markers in opinion paragraphs written by A2-level English learners was investigated in this research. Although metadiscourse is commonly studied in discourse analysis, pragmatics, and language teaching, there has been limited attention given to the writing of beginner-level language learners. Metadiscourse is…

This study sets out to investigate possible effects of previously learned languages on the acquisition of English as a third language by examining six prepositions (in, on, at, behind, over, to) when they denote spatial relations. Two picture description tasks were employed to find out which of the two known languages (L1 and/or L2) is the major…

A large amount of literature exists on how native speakers derive and process pragmatic inferences, yet few studies have examined the issue in second language learners, despite a controversial debate of second language (L2) ultimate attainment of phenomena situated at external interfaces. This study contributes to the debate on the integration of…

Despite the important role emotions play in affecting second/foreign language (L2) learners' cognition, such as their learning processes, few empirical studies have tried to find out how emotions affect the four main skills (i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing). In order to fill this gap, the present study aims to investigate the…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate if following data-driven learning (DDL) to raise the learners' awareness of discourse organizers through concordancing improves their comprehension of English academic lectures. To address this issue, the current study adopted a quasi-experimental (comparison group, pretest-posttest) design. 96…

English learners (ELs) comprise approximately 10% of kindergarten to Grade 12 students in US public schools, with about 15% of ELs identified as having disabilities. English language proficiency (ELP) assessments must adhere to universal design principles and incorporate universal tools, designed to increase accessibility for all ELs, including…

Teaching vocabularies to young children is critical as vocabulary is related to long-term language, literacy, and academic skills. The current study used a multiple probe design to examine the effects of enhanced milieu teaching with book reading on the use of word approximations in four 2- to 4-year-old females with language delay. The first…

This research investigated six established areas for quality (Ortega-Martín et al., 2018) in the implementation of CLIL programmes in a Spanish monolingual autonomous community from the perspective of its teachers, in particular focusing on possible differences of opinion between content and English language teachers, an understudied area. Both…

This study presents the validation process of a listening test based on a communicative language test proposed by Bachman (Fundamental considerations in language testing, 1990). It was administered to third-grade high school students by the sixteen Korean Provincial Offices of Education for Curriculum and Evaluation in September 2012 to assess…

Many adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience challenges in social competence. Evidence suggests that specialized summer camps with social skills training may have positive outcomes on social competence development in adolescents with ADHD. This article reports on a pilot study of a therapeutic summer camp…