Although core in the teaching of academic language skills, little research to date has investigated what makes video-recorded lectures difficult for language learners. As part of a larger program to develop automated videotext complexity measures, this study reports on selected dimensions of linguistic complexity to understand how they contribute…

Children's vocabulary ability at school entry is highly variable and predictive of later language and literacy outcomes. Sleep is potentially useful in understanding and explaining that variability, with sleep patterns being predictive of global trajectories of language acquisition. Here, we looked to replicate and extend these findings. Data from…

Multisyllabic words constitute a large portion of children's vocabulary. However, the relationship between phonological neighborhood density and English multisyllabic word learning is poorly understood. We examine this link in three, four and six year old children using a corpus-based approach. While we were able to replicate the well-accepted…

Research on the second language (L2) acquisition of the Spanish copulas has been central to our understanding of key concepts and issues in the field of SLA such as stages of development and variability in L2s. However, this research has focused nearly exclusively on native English-speaking learners. The present study examined native…

Students must use oral and written explanations to demonstrate their grasp of academic content, but little is known about the progression of elementary students' explanatory language, particularly oral language. The current study of 512 explanations produced by 128 third- through sixth-grade students examines whether children's oral explanations…

This article traces the various ways that 'languages at risk' in the Yukon Territory, Canada, are imagined and managed across a range of 'stakeholders.' Predicated on a history of oppression and the management of risk in the U.S. and Canada, aboriginal language endangerment has arisen from insecurities about communicative diversity. Conversely…

This study explored the potential of adopting speech-to-text recognition (STR) technology for English as a foreign language (EFL) oral training in class at the university level. An action study method was set to investigate the effects of implementing STR app tasks for EFL oral training with 27 students in one class for one semester at a…

Despite having different semantic profiles, near synonyms are usually presented in dictionaries as being contextually interchangeable, which may lead EFL learners to assume their contextual interchangeability. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies on how near synonyms are similar or different in their semantic and grammatical preferences.…

The practice of narrow listening was introduced almost 30 years ago (Krashen, 1996), but has not received enough attention from English language teachers and researchers. Past research has placed a focus on the combination of this method and narrow reading, or the use of this method in teaching languages other than English. This study explored…

Finding affordable textbooks is a challenge within many educational contexts, including English as a foreign language (EFL) settings and English as a second language (ESL) settings, such as universities and Intensive English Programs (often referred to as IEPs) in the United States. As educators, we know it is a struggle for many of our students…

In the current study, we examined the role of first-language (L1) influence on the additional-language development of grammatical gender marking in Spanish. The participants were L1 speakers of English or French (N = 215), who were learning Spanish and who were at three instructional levels. The data came from their use of gender marking in…

The article offers an in-depth lexical analysis of the listening sub-test of the famous International English Language Testing System (IELTS). The vocabulary profile of 239 listening transcripts from 60 IELTS official practice tests were analyzed. The results showed that, 3,000 most frequent word families in the British National Corpus/Corpus of…

The present study investigated effective techniques of teaching vocabulary in an Afghan EFL setting. It also attempts to determine the impacts of the participants' demographic profile ((i.e., gender, age, first language, and teaching experiences) on their responses. The data were collected from 93 randomly selected English teachers through a…

National language planning and family language planning may converge or diverge. As 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the new China, we examined language planning at both the national level and the family level in China. We first revisited language policy and planning in China over the last seventy years through a policy…

The medium of instruction (MOI) has been a contested issue in multilingual polities globally, as English medium of instruction (EMI) has seen unprecedented growth, threatening the use and sometimes very survival of local/indigenous and even national languages. While the struggles to address related issues have been well researched, how and why…