This study aims to measure the longitudinal impact of a 60-hour adjunct instruction course, involving L2 content-based teaching with a systematic focus on form, on students' grammatical and lexical knowledge and on their receptive skills (i.e. reading and listening) in a foreign language higher education context. The participants were 52…

This study examined the receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical developmental patterns of the 3000 most frequent words among 953 university L2 learners of Spanish at different stages in their language studies, taking into consideration the effect of high school instruction on high-frequency vocabulary knowledge. Results confirm that even…

Recent literature in the field of L2 vocabulary assessment has advocated for the development of written receptive vocabulary tests such as Vocabulary Levels Tests (VLTs) that use: (a) meaning-recall item formats, (b) a minimum of 40 item counts per 1,000-frequency band to improve level estimates, and (c) lemmas (not word-families) as the lexical…

This study examined linguistic development among both intermediate and advanced college-level second language (L2) learners during short-term study abroad summer programs in Spain. Participants completed a measure of overall proficiency, as well as assessments of receptive grammatical (morphosyntactic) and lexical (semantic) abilities at the…

This pilot study identifies some lexical aspects of the emerging writing skills in Spanish among receptive English/Spanish bilingual students with little or no exposure to formal study of the home language upon entering a Spanish Heritage Language Program at a large public university in the Southwestern United States. The 200+ essays analyzed in…

According to the Dual-Coding Theory (Paivio & Desrochers, 1980), words that are associated with rich visual imagery are more easily learned than abstract words due to what is termed the concreteness effect (Altarriba & Bauer, 2004; de Groot, 1992, de Groot et al., 1994; ter Doest & Semin, 2005). The present study examined the effects of attaching…

The purpose of this article is to briefly describe the design and piloting of a branched, online placement and credit examination that measures receptive as well as productive and creative language abilities in the heritage language of college students entering the Spanish for Heritage Learners Program at the University of Houston, a major…

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and…