Californians often take for granted a split between ethnic and linguistic identities, expecting immigrants to maintain strong ethnic identities while becoming monolingual in English. However, recent immigration has led to increasing diversity at California universities, with no majority ethnic group and many students bilingual. This study explores…

As stated by Valero-Garcés (2006, p. 38), the new scenario including public service providers and users who are not fluent in the language used by the former has opened up new ways of linguistic and cultural mediation in current multicultural and multilingual societies. As a consequence, there is an ever increasing need for translators and…

Currently there is a general uncertainty about what makes collocations (i.e., fixed word combinations with specific, not easily interpreted relations between their components) hard for ESL learners to master, and about how to improve collocation recognition and learning process. This study explored and designed a comparative classification of…

Revolutions can happen in different ways. About six years ago, a very particular type of revolution began in a cluster of rooms on the main campus of Gallaudet University. There, a handful of individuals began a "quiet revolution" guided by an overarching passionate mission to conduct groundbreaking science that would have widespread…

There is a general assumption that a more controlled or more focused attentional state is beneficial for most cognitive tasks. However, there has been a growing realization that creative problem solving tasks, such as the Remote Associates Task (RAT), may benefit from a less controlled solution approach. To test this hypothesis, in a 2x2 design,…

Bilingualism can have widespread cognitive effects. In this article we investigate whether bilingualism might have an effect on adults' abilities to reason about other people's beliefs. In particular, we tested whether bilingual adults might have an advantage over monolingual adults in false-belief reasoning analogous to the advantage that has…

Recent literature on language teaching has questioned the established view that a language is most effectively taught monolingually, arguing instead that the student's own language has an important role to play, and this view is now widely accepted. While this literature draws attention to the extremism of some monolingual approaches, and…

This paper aims to study new techniques in second language learning involving the active use of the mother tongue in classroom situations. Several teaching methods will be discussed such as The Alternating Approach, The New Concurrent Method, and Community Language Learning method. These methods of employing the first language recognise the link…

This study examines the development and evaluation of a bilingual Vocabulary Size Test (VST, Nation, 2006). A bilingual (English-Russian) test was developed and administered to 121 intermediate proficiency EFL learners (native speakers of Russian), alongside the original monolingual (English-only) version of the test. A comparison of the bilingual…

In fields such as sociolinguistics and composition and rhetoric, communication is increasingly understood as translingual, that is, as negotiated socially across languages. Those of us engaged in community literacy can and should recognize the deeply multilingual nature of the communities in which we work, and we should understand, embrace, and…

A number of studies have suggested the possible benefits of using concordancers in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing. To date, however, there is still limited understanding of how EFL writers may make use of such tools along with dictionaries when engaging in a writing task. To better understand the question, this study investigated a…

Although English language learners (ELLs) are currently the fastest-growing group among the school-age population in the United States, there is surprisingly little information on their participation in postsecondary education. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), a nationally representative sample of eighth graders…

Some researchers argue that linguistic knowledge of one's native language facilitates the acquisition of additional languages (see, for example, Cenoz & Valencia, 1994; Grenfell & Harris, 2006; Hakuta, 1990; Keshavarz & Astaneh, 2004). To contribute to this line of research, the present study investigated the probability of significant…

In an event-related potential (ERP) study we investigated the role of age of acquisition (AoA) on the use of second language rhythmic properties during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Syntactically ambiguous sentences embedded in rhythmically regular and irregular contexts were presented to Turkish early and late second language (L2) learners of…

Bilingual prospective teachers of color may possess experiences and knowledge particularly suitable for teaching linguistically diverse students but may need guidance and support to leverage such resources for teaching. In a class of 76 undergraduates, with a focus on bilingual students of color intending to teach, this study used self-reflexive…