A critical review of the nature of education as a universal right in peripheral societies, based on the analysis of the social and cultural circumstances that permeate the learning experience of the written Portuguese language in Brazilian schools. The concept of cultural bilingualism is defended as necessary in facing the demand for…

Possessive determiners (PDs) "his" and "her" are challenging for L2 learners to acquire, and this difficulty has been attributed to several factors, including negative L1 transfer effects (White et al., 2007). What researchers have not yet considered is how PDs are acquired by learners whose L1 predicts positive transfer…

This article discusses the dynamic nature of childhood bilingualism by analyzing oral speech from returnee heritage speakers (HSs) of Portuguese, who grew up in Germany, but moved to Portugal in childhood/adolescence. The first dataset from 14 speakers showed that the length of exposure to German predicted the rate of (in)accurate production of…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the…

The importance of phonological awareness for the future learning of written language has been widely recognized, but there is still some debate as to whether syllabic, intrasyllabic, and phonemic awareness are independent skills or manifestations of the same general skill. Consequently, the objective of this study was to test the independence of…

In this study, 118 native speakers of Japanese watched 48 separate video clips in which a teacher provided recasts on phonological or lexical errors to students in Portuguese, a language with which the participants were unfamiliar. In the video clips, six recast characteristics were manipulated: length, segmentation (segmented/whole), prosodic…

Purpose: This study aimed to develop and validate a screening questionnaire for the early identification of language difficulties in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking preschool children. Method: The article is divided into two studies. In the first study, we reported the theoretical principles that guided the development of the Screening for…

Mother-tongue or first language (L1)-based multilingual education programs are necessarily complex and may require a more nonlinear approach to program design. These programs operate within and act upon a range of psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociopolitical issues that include language structure and literacy assessment, language policy…

This article is the first large-scale study to document the speaking proficiency outcomes of intensive programs in less commonly taught languages in US higher education. Speaking proficiency was measured by pre- and postprogram ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interviews (N = 484) in 14 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Hindi, Indonesian,…

Considering the acquisition of past tense uses by L2 Spanish advanced learners with closely related L1s (French, Portuguese), this study attempts to identify factors associated with variability, such as negative transfer or interface integration. We report data on the acquisition, by adult L1 French and Portuguese learners at B2 and C1 CEFR…

Teletandem (Telles, 2009) is a model of telecollaboration in which pairs of foreign language students from different countries meet regularly and virtually to learn each other's languages. Within this context, participants are expected to help their partners learn by providing feedback. The multimodal nature of this type of environment, however,…

Using Swain's (1985) output hypothesis as a basis, this article investigated the effect an immediate repeated oral task had on the performance of participants. Two groups of beginner learners of English as an additional language in Brazil performed a decision-making oral task in groups. Drawing from Lynch and MacLean's (2001) carousel task, the…

This article explores the language of bimodal bilinguals (i.e., hearing children of Deaf parents who are exposed to sign language at home and to spoken language in the surrounding community). In similar bilingual contexts involving pairs of spoken languages, the language used at home, which differs from that of the community, is referred to as the…

This study intends the validation of an instructional design on intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in the beginning levels of German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and English in the Modern Languages program at EAN University in Colombia. The design constituents: language integration, oral production, fieldwork activities, and a…