In an increasingly globalised and multilingual world, the use of different scripts in the same semiotic landscape is an increasingly frequent and widespread phenomenon. For this reason, it is vital to conduct research focusing on multiscriptality in order to better understand the linguistic and semiotic functions of the use of multiple scripts…

Background: The ability to understand the mental state of others (social cognition), as well as language, is crucial for children to have good social adaptation. Social cognition (SC) has been shown to be a hierarchical model of three factors (Cognitive, intermediate and affective SC) interrelated with linguistic processes. Children on the autism…

In an era of internationalisation and globalisation, many institutional and national governments' higher education policies have embraced neoliberal agendas that encourage the use of English as a medium of instruction (EMI). Due to the postcolonial struggles of the Global South, it is important to critically examine the entanglement of EMI with…

The current study set out to examine to what degree age of acquisition (AOA), defined as a learner's first intensive exposure to a second language (L2) environment, mediates the final state of postpubertal, spoken vocabulary attainment. In Study 1, spontaneous speech samples were elicited from experienced Japanese users of English (n = 41) using…

In a series of sentence-picture verification studies we contrasted, for example, "… choose the balloon with "… inflate the balloon" and "… the inflated balloon" to examine the degree to which different representational components of event representation (specifically, the different object states entailed by the inflating…

Organizing effective instruction is a characteristic of classroom management, which minimizes time wasting and keeps students moving at a good pace. The primary purpose of this study is to explore the current practice of instruction-giving strategies being utilized in EFL classrooms in a Vietnamese public university. To achieve this goal, both…

We examined the naturalistic pronunciation development of two groups of L2 speakers over 10 years. Initially, 50 beginner ESL students participated in production tasks; despite attrition, the tasks were administered eight more times. Here we report listener judgements of accentedness, comprehensibility and fluency for the remaining six Mandarin…

Humans are born storytellers as they use oral narratives as a vehicle to share their experiences. This study aimed to study how female Egyptian speakers formulate their personal experiences in oral narratives in the English Language. A need of this study was felt because not much is known how Arab EFL speakers build their oral narratives when its…

The present study examined the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender in 22 bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 13;5 years; Med=9;4 years; STD=2.3) who were born and raised in the United States and acquired Spanish as heritage speakers--that is, they learned Spanish, the minority language, in a home setting (Valdes, 2001). Each of the child…

In the assessment of second language oral communication, the video-call speaking test has received increasing attention as a test method with higher practicality than its in-person counterpart, but still with broad coverage of the test construct. Previous studies into video-call assessment have focussed on the individual (as opposed to paired or…

This study explores Vietnamese marriage-migrant mothers' changing attitudes toward heritage language (HL) education in South Korea through narratives collected in an interview setting over a period of four years. The findings show that while the mothers placed some value on HL education, they initially prioritized Korean at home because they…

This study examines the relationship between English Language Learners' (ELLs) English proficiency and standardized test performance. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, it incorporates quantitative data from test scores and qualitative data from teacher surveys and interviews. Findings indicate a significant correlation between ELLs' proficiency…

Research over the past two decades has reported a robust relationship between relative social status and first-person singular (FPS) pronoun use in English. For my dissertation study, I wanted to test the replicability of those findings using American Sign Language (ASL) data that I collected for this purpose. In alignment with previous work, I…

Taking into account the peculiarities of the Georgian language and integrating them into the teaching process remains an important task. Georgian is an agglutinative language, which means the existence of grammatical markers in word-forms related to certain semantic features. The system of the Georgian verb is unique in that it is based on…

This study investigates the enhancement of spoken English proficiency among students at Taiwan's technological and vocational education (TVE) universities. The focus is on the significant impact of positive learning attitudes and effective methodologies, using questionnaires and in-depth interviews to assess students' confidence and perceptions of…