To tackle the problem of graduate employability (GE), higher education researchers and practitioners are suggesting the inclusion of employability modules in university curricula. However, the orthodoxy of the major-based undergraduate curriculum (MBUC) has rarely been challenged in the GE literature. Drawing on Clarke's (2018) [Clarke, M. (2018).…

This work provides information about the design, implementation, and assessment of the instructional role of a bilingual (English and Portuguese) web-based board game designed to assist Brazilian Mechanical Engineering undergraduate students in reviewing the content related to thermodynamics, chemical equilibrium, and chemical kinetics. The game…

Recent scholarship reveals how English can be disproportionately privileged in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programming (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Valdés, 1997). Through a program designed to serve Brazilian (im)migrant populations, this study expands the scope of DLBE research. This study took place in the U.S. state of…

This article explores Brazilian immigrant parents' perspectives about a newly established Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program in their community. The analysis of parental answers to a family engagement survey, using the framework of investment, reveals that the Brazilian parents in our sample assembled narratives of gratitude through overt statements…

This study utilizes a qualitative research design to investigate the design experiences of massive open online courses (MOOCs) instructors in South American academic institutions. It reveals that MOOC instructors are primarily motivated to teach MOOCs from their desire to make contributions to society (e.g., providing free and accessible MOOCs on…

To date, most classroom-based research into the learning of a third language (L3) in the US has examined patterns of acquisition among various groups of bilinguals. Situated mainly within the context of "Portuguese for Spanish Speakers" (PSS), studies typically group learners based on the sequence / age of onset of their main background…

Possessive determiners (PDs) "his" and "her" are challenging for L2 learners to acquire, and this difficulty has been attributed to several factors, including negative L1 transfer effects (White et al., 2007). What researchers have not yet considered is how PDs are acquired by learners whose L1 predicts positive transfer…

This article discusses the dynamic nature of childhood bilingualism by analyzing oral speech from returnee heritage speakers (HSs) of Portuguese, who grew up in Germany, but moved to Portugal in childhood/adolescence. The first dataset from 14 speakers showed that the length of exposure to German predicted the rate of (in)accurate production of…

Background: As delays or disorders in early language and communication are the most prevalent symptom in children with disabilities, early screening is crucial to promote prevention, early diagnosis, and intervention. However, to the best of our knowledge, no screening tool is available for the joint assessment of early language and social…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

Computational Thinking (CT) has emerged in recent years as a thematic trend in education in many countries and several initiatives have been developed for its inclusion in school curricula. There are many pedagogical strategies to promote the development of elementary school students' CT skills and knowledge. Unplugged learning tasks, block-based…

In order to assess the accuracy and validity of proficiency diagnostic tests in Second Language (L2), specifically regarding the linguistic (orthographic, semantic, syntactic, lexical) and cognitive (verbal reasoning, lexical decision) components for the immigrant population in Portugal, a study of cut-off points of 6 tests was conducted. This…

This text critically examines traditional methodologies for teaching grammar in the context of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL). It proposes an alternative, eclectic approach, which can be used in any foreign language. Drawing on evidence from research and pedagogical practices, it highlights areas for improvement in current approaches, such…

Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children (N = 99 families) during mealtime across…

A substantial body of research shows that various types of audiovisual (AV) input such as videos and videos with second language (L2) subtitles can facilitate language learning. However, language teachers' day-to-day practices with regard to multimodal input is less understood. To bridge the gap in language education, this study investigates…