It might sound like a no-brainer that being bilingual or multilingual helps students planning engineering and just about any other career. But it is certainly true and is becoming more important as the economies of nations become more intertwined. What's more, being able to go beyond mere language ability and understand cultural distinctions are…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 11th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2014), October 25-27, 2014, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) and endorsed by the Japanese Society for Information and Systems in…

The major purpose of the study was to determine the construct validity of the Spanish version of the Emotional Skills Assessment Process (ESAP) in a targeted population of agriculture college students in Mexico. The ESAP is a self assessment approach that helps students to identify and understand emotional intelligence skills relevant for…

This study offers a small, highly contextualized counter-example to several recent large-scale analyses depicting Latino underachievement in higher education (R. Fry, 2002; J. Immerwahr, 2003; S. Miller & E. Garcia, 2004; W. Swail, A. Cabrera, & C. Lee, 2004; W. S. Swail, K. E. Redd, & L. W. Perna, 2003). The purpose is to analyze…

This paper describes early language development in a deaf Spanish child fitted with a cochlear implant (CI) when she was 1 year 6 months old. The girl had been exposed to Cued Speech (CS) since that age. The main aim of the research was to identify potential areas of slow language development as well as the potential benefit of CI and CS. At the…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between foreign language learning and verbal ability in English as measured by the verbal section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) Reasoning Test. Comparing foreign language students to nonforeign language students in this study, the effect of taking a foreign language on SAT verbal…

This article addresses the situation of lower-proficiency heritage language learners of Spanish in terms of their linguistic similarities to second language learners. The analysis highlights grammatical and lexical features in the oral discourse of Spanish heritage and second language learners at intermediate and advanced levels of study,…

This study investigates whether L2 instruction on the Spanish aspectual system containing a recognition task of the learners' L1 (Dutch) aspectual system helps the learner to understand and interiorise the L2 system. Second year Dutch university students (N = 20) took part in the experiment. In weekly groups of two to four, the students received…

Long known as a college-football powerhouse, the University of Alabama (UA) is now considered a model for institutions seeking to maintain or boost their academic quality even as enrollments increase and budgets are squeezed. According to Carol Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), which has been a significant…

The aim of this work is to analyse how Spanish readers react to English discourse markers in a text. We carry out an empirical study in which we ask three research question: (a) if there is any relationship between presence of discourse markers or absence of discourse markers and reading comprehension in English as a foreign language, (b) if there…

Service-learning has been primarily explored in world language education at the intermediate- or advanced-levels. Although a more advanced-level of language proficiency allows students in service-learning classes to participate in a wide array of projects, connecting beginning language students with the community may help serve to break-down…

After the harmonization process carried out in Spanish higher education following the Bologna Declaration, many universities have decided to introduce English as the language of instruction for some studies. From 2010, the new study programmes have been implemented, and there is an urgency to define what is meant by "teaching in…

Content-Based Instruction (CBI) may result in improved proficiency in language skills due to the meaningful combination of subject matter and foreign language as a means of communication. This paper shows how university students improved their level of English by means of a content methodology as they attended a course called Topics in Molecular…

This volume builds on Fortune and Tedick's 2008 Pathways to Multilingualism: Evolving Perspectives on Immersion Education and showcases the practice and promise of immersion education through in-depth investigations of program design, implementation practices, and policies in one-way, two-way and indigenous programs. Contributors present new…

Presented at the Annual National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in New York in March 2008. This presentation explores how different item weighting can affect the effective weights, validity coefficents and test reliability of composite scores among test takers.