Turkish Armed Forces have been participating in joint missions together with other nations for decades. Since English is the medium of instruction in these missions, participating members should have NATO Standards in terms of language proficiency levels in four skills. Therefore, this study aims to specify personnel's views and their language…

Research suggests that listener perceptions of a speaker's oral language use, or a speaker's "comprehensibility," may be influenced by a variety of speaker-, listener-, and context-related factors. Primary speaker factors include aspects of the speaker's proficiency in the target language such as pronunciation and…

This volume is a collection of selected refereed papers presented at the Association of Teachers of Japanese Annual Spring Conference held at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in March of 2011. It not only covers several important topics on teaching and learning spoken and written Japanese and culture in and beyond classroom settings, but also…

The evaluation of minority children for special education by law should be nondiscriminatory. To be in compliance with federal mandates such as the Individuals with Disability Education Act (IDEA), No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and Public Law 94-142, minority children who are also English language learners (ELLs) should be assessed in their native…

The Migrant Education Program (MEP) is authorized under Title I of the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" (NCLB). Title I states that the purpose of the MEP is to assist states in efforts to meet the special needs of migrant students. The purpose of this report was to evaluate Houston Independent School District's (HISD) Title I Migrant…

This study investigated the application of the speeded lexical decision task to L2 aural processing efficiency. One-hundred and twenty Japanese university students completed an aural word/nonword task. When the variation of lexical decision time (CV) was correlated with reaction time (RT), the results suggested that the single-word recognition…

Knowing how to use sources effectively often poses considerable challenges for first year undergraduate students for whom English is a second language (L2). In this longitudinal case study we investigated the selection and self-reported use of source materials by thirteen first year L2 undergraduate students from a range of disciplines enrolled at…

This study examined the impact of a 15-min daily explicit vocabulary intervention in Spanish on expressive and receptive vocabulary knowledge and oral reading fluency in Spanish, and on language proficiency in English. Fifty Spanish-speaking English learners who received 90 min of Spanish reading instruction in an early transition model were…

Each state education agency (SEA) must address all required elements of the consolidated State plan. Although the information an SEA provides for each requirement will reflect that particular requirement, an SEA is encouraged to consider whether particular descriptions or strategies meet multiple requirements or goals. In developing its…

The English language proficiency levels of students in Australian higher education who have English as an additional language (EAL) has become an increasingly prominent issue, particularly as it relates to international students. In 2009 this resulted in the publication of a set of good practice principles for the sector. This paper argues that…

This essay interrogates the concept of "clarity" that has become an imperative of effective student writing. I show that clarity is neither axiomatic nor transparent, and that the clear/unclear binary that informs the identification of clarity as a goal of effective student writing is itself unstable precisely because of the ideological baggage…

This article presents the authors' response on the two commentators' (Fred Davidson and Charles Alderson) reviews of the 2009 Special Issue of "Language Assessment Quarterly" on "Cognitive Diagnosis and Q-matrices in Language Assessment." The Special Issue represents several years of research work on cognitive diagnosis approaches (CDA) carried…

In South Africa, foundation programmes are a well-established alternative access route to tertiary science study for educationally disadvantaged students. Student access to, and performance in, one such foundation programme has been researched by the authors seeking opportunities to improve student retention. The biology module in particular has…

Increasingly students want to go abroad to study--to further their knowledge of English, experience a new culture and cultivate skills. Universities have been actively courting these students, sometimes without regard to their impact on responsibilities of heads of department, secretaries and support staff. Much is written on the intercultural…

Background: In exploring how emergent bilingual learners' prior knowledge from home and play contexts might influence their scientific reasoning, this study drew upon two distinct research traditions: (a) experimental research from the developmental and cognitive psychology tradition, and (b) research on culturally and linguistically diverse…