Collaboration among students in the course of learning plays an important role in developing communication skills. In particular, it helps for team building and brainstorming on solutions of complex problems. While an effective group organization is critical for the success of such collaborative learning, many instructors would make arbitrary…

This study follows four English language learners as they make their way across their first year of pre-kindergarten in an English-medium school in the United States. It investigates, first, how each student participated, and was positioned, in the classroom network of practice, and, second, what kinds of English growth each student experienced…

Background: The underperformance of South African learners in literacy and numeracy is a source of concern, especially when learners move from Grade 3 to Grade 4. Aim: This article reflects on the reading and comprehension challenges of English language learners (ELLs) in the Grade 4 2013 mathematics Annual National Assessments (ANAs). Setting:…

Background: We used two principles of implicit learning, variability and complexity, to train mental orthographic representations in refugee English learners to improve spelling. Methods: Twenty-eight refugees enrolled in a 10-week English class were trained on classroom words using stimuli designed to encourage implicit learning. We contrasted…

How do native Chinese-speaking (CS) and non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) children learn to read and write in Chinese? In the present study, 29 CS and 34 NCS second and third graders aged 76 to 122 months (M = 93.65) participated in an experiment where they were taught 16 new Chinese characters in one of four conditions--copy, radical, phonological and…

This paper shows the need to triangulate different approaches in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research to fully understand late bilinguals' interlanguage grammars. Methodologically, we show how experimental and corpus data can be (and should be) triangulated by reporting on a corpus study (Lozano and Mendikoetxea in…

The variable success in learning a second language (L2) may be best explained by varying degrees of motivation. This study investigated whether individual differences in appraisal dimensions of motivation explained explicit and implicit syntactic knowledge. Participants learned three syntactic structures under implicit and explicit training…

This article has two main goals. The first is to summarize and comment on the current state of affairs of generative approaches to SLA (GenSLA), 35 years into its history. This discussion brings the readership of SSLA up to date on the questions driving GenSLA agendas and clears up misconceptions about what GenSLA does and does not endeavor to…

Why do adults seem to struggle more than children in learning a second language, despite being better at a range of other cognitive skills? The source of L1-L2 differences in language learning is one of the most debated topics in the study of language. One hypothesis is that L1-L2 differences are primarily experience-based, with language learning…

As the parameters of the field of educational assessment have extended past testing into learning, assessment concepts have evolved and become ever more nuanced. It is frequently lamented in the English language literature that there is insufficient conformity and clarity in the way they are defined and used. This paper offers a survey of the…

The current study aims to investigate Iranian EFL learners' cognitive styles and their explanations of conceptual metaphors, offering a possible range of individual differences in metaphor processing. 71 participants were asked to explain some established conceptual metaphors that are commonly used in English. Then, their cognitive styles were…

Learning Japanese has become very common amongst Taiwanese high school and university students, ranking the second most sought for language. A concise study of the likeable activities in a typical language class for the Taiwanese students seems to be quite useful. Therefore, the present study has concentrated on the senior high school students'…

Frequentist methods have long dominated data analysis in quantitative second language (L2) research. Recently, however, several empirical fields have begun to embrace alternatives known as Bayesian methods. Using an open-source approach, we provide an applied, nontechnical rationale for Bayesian methods in L2 research. First, we compare the…

This article applies the perspective of "boundary work," an approach originating in science studies, to relations between the disciplines of Second Language Writing (SLW) and rhetoric and composition (R&C), especially to controversies surrounding the concept of translingualism. Boundaries both separate and connect, a dual potential…

This article reports the first attempt to test the relevance of buoyancy--the capacity to overcome the setbacks, challenges, and pressures that are part of the ordinary course of school life--for instructed second language (L2) learning. Questionnaire data from 787 college-level L2 learners in South Korea assessed their academic buoyancy and a set…