A questionnaire was recently developed for the use with the Spanish-speaking, and evidence have been provided about the construct internal validity by means of structural equation modelling. In this paper, two research questions were considered: (i) What new evidence does application of the Rasch model provide regarding the validity of this…

This paper examines the implications of the association patterns in our understanding of the mental lexicon. By applying the principles of graph theory to word association data, we intend to explore which measures tap better into lexical knowledge. To that end, we had different groups of English as Foreign language learners complete a lexical…

The present study analyzes the effects of two variables on the proficiency development of 907 university students of Spanish and French: years of high school experience; and level of initial placement into university language study. A 3-year grant-funded project administered ACTFL proficiency tests in reading, listening, and speaking to students…

Answering calls to map college-level proficiency development (Modern Language Association, 2007) and longitudinally chart language learning (Barkaoui, 2014; Ortega & Byrnes, 2008), we mapped the oral proficiency growth of 1,922 lower-division college students of Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish (in the second, third, or fourth semester of…

The Trait Meta-Mood Scale (TMMS) is an emotional intelligence (EI) assessment originally developed for the U.S. population. This scale measures three EI factors--attention, clarity, and repair--to evaluate how an individual perceives one's own EI skills. Although the TMMS has been adapted for use in several languages and cultures, the structure of…

This 8-year longitudinal case study of Fabiola, a Spanish-English bilingual, investigated her argumentative writing development, focusing on her use of evidence to support and develop arguments over time from high school through university. Data sources included 36 writing samples. Texts across grade levels and course types were analyzed to…

In seeking to both confirm previous conclusions and expand the literature of the field with a different group of participants, McNulty (2012) was (partially) replicated. Three instructional interventions were designed to ascertain which activity type was responsible for learner gains. One treatment group (R) included referential-only practice…

The Spanish writing system has consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPC), rendering it more transparent than English. We compared first-language (L1) orthographic transparency on how monolingual English- and Spanish-readers learned a novel writing system with a 1:1 (LT) and a 1:2 (LO) GPC. Our dependent variables were learning time,…

This paper is a research about the perspectives about Spanglish according to the users. The research was divided in two parts. A total of 50 individuals participated in the first part of the research and a total of 35 in the second part (same participants from the first part) between 15 to 30 years of age, living in Shelbyville, Tennessee. In the…

Intercultural simulations, such as Barnga (Thiagarajan & Steinwachs, 1990), along with the use of critical incidents (Gibson, 2002; Gropper, 1996), have long been a mainstay of intercultural communication courses and have found their way into English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms (Apedaile &…

The 2014 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages took place in St. Louis, Missouri with the cooperation of the Foreign Language Association of Missouri. The 2014 conference focused on ways in which foreign language teachers, "unlock" or help to open up lines of communication between their students and people who…

Following observations and interviews with transnational children that have one or more years of school in the United States and are now in school in Mexico, it was determined that the Mexican public school system has no mechanism in place to offer them the support they need. Therefore, I collaborated with Mexican university students to seek…

When language learners do not know how to say a word in English, they can communicate effectively by using their hands, imitating sounds, inventing new words, or describing what they mean. These ways of communicating are communication strategies (CSs). EFL teachers are not always aware of the importance of teaching communication strategies to…

These proceedings contain the papers and posters of the International Conference on e-Learning (EL) 2019, which was organised by the International Association for Development of the Information Society and co-organised by the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, in Porto, Portugal, July 17-19, 2019. The EL 2019 conference aims to address the…

As a sixth year student of Spanish looking back on her foreign language education, the author believes she has a greater understanding of what attracted her to and maintained her interest in the language. Yet she also recognizes areas in her education that could have benefited from change, including flexibility in creating her own program of study…