English orthography differs from that of other European languages in terms of complexity and regularity. This difference may impact the development of accurate spelling in English, especially when it is learned as a foreign language in school. In this study we wanted to explore spelling development patterns of Spanish speaking children learning…

Analytical writing serves to learn and communicate learning. Our goal was to determine the impact of students' bilingual profile, defined by self-evaluated bilingual competence, use of language(s) for mental operations and language(s) use across different contexts, on their developing analytical writing abilities. Catalan/Spanish bilinguals -- in…

This study investigates how previous exposure to a foreign language and culture influences student performance in online knowledge-building tasks. As knowledge-building tasks allow students to share and distribute their knowledge; this study examines whether foreign language and culture knowledge is also distributed amongst the group. The study…

Background: Strategy-focused writing instruction trains students both to set explicit product goals and to adopt specific procedural strategies, particularly for planning text. A number of studies have demonstrated that strategy-focused writing instruction is effective in developing writing performance. Aim: This study aimed to determine whether…

This study focuses on the degree of influence of one individual factor, namely gender, on the level of English competence attained in two different groups of intermediate-level Catalan Spanish adolescent learners of English as a foreign language: the first group (Group A) is 1 year younger and follows formal instruction (FI) and in parallel…