Amid growing controversy about the oft-cited "30-million-word gap," this investigation uses language data from five American communities across the socioeconomic spectrum to test, for the first time, Hart and Risley's (1995) claim that poor children hear 30 million fewer words than their middle-class counterparts during the early years…

Many college students set out on Study Abroad Programs to other countries in which the variant of the foreign language spoken in the region differs from the variant to which learners have been exposed. This study explores the perception of L2 Western Andalusian Spanish aspiration of word-final /s/ by L1 American English listeners, in relation to…

This study examined the relationship between negative pragmatic transfer and language proficiency with reference to the refusal speech acts as realized by Yemeni learners of English as a Foreign Language (henceforth referred to as YLEs). Forty Yemeni learners of English (20 of low proficiency level and 20 of high proficiency level) and 2 baseline…

Approaching Christian education in light of Charles Sanders Peirce's Classical Pragmatism can help catechists make Christian tradition more intelligible to present-day North Americans; it can provide them with a rich framework for pedagogical practices; and it can help them offer a compelling vision of deeper participation in the Trinitarian life…

Study Abroad (SA) has often been referred as the ideal means to learn a second language due to the unique opportunities it brings to the learners. SA provides learners access to both formal and communicative learning contexts where they can interact with the members of the target language community. Existing studies identified various contextual…

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters -- their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters -- relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three…

Globalized English offers interaction platforms, including cyber-based settings, for linguistically and culturally diverse speakers, particularly in the English as a second language/English as a foreign language context. Thus, it requires developing the intercultural competence of the parties involved. English users' different perspectives may…

Despite the decline of rituals in North America, contemporary grief literature emphasises the healing potential of these practices. After my father's death, and due to my cultural hybridity as an Indo-Canadian, once the short-term western ways of mourning concluded, long-term Indian rituals offered meaningful and sustaining ways to honour my…

The current study is motivated by the dearth of studies regarding English translation students' grammatical and sociocultural competencies and their relationship with their Grade Point Averages (GPAs). To fill this gap, this study sought to find if there is a statistically significant relationship between the respondents' GPAs and their levels of…

The involvement of a native English speaker teacher (NEST, henceforth) in teaching English is a new phenomenon in Sumbawa Besar. SMAN 2 Sumbawa Besar involved a NEST sent by the American Indonesian Exchange Foundation (AMINEF) through the Fulbright English Teaching Assistants (ETA) program. This study aims at describing the roles of a NEST on the…

The general question this research investigates concerns the difference between the use of lexical bundles in a corpus of abstracts for theses in the liberal arts written by Chinese undergraduate students and a corpus of abstracts written by American master's degree students. The undergraduate abstracts were first written in Chinese and then…

In response to calls for improving the quality of DCTs as data-gathering instruments, this study investigates the effectiveness of technology-enhanced discourse completion tasks (TE-DCTs) as a method for eliciting nonverbal speaker data. We used a mobile application to administer four TE-DCTs to native speakers (L1) and intermediate and advanced…

English phrasal verbs (PVs) are ubiquitous and often polysemous. These lexical items are thus very important, but also challenging for ESL/EFL learners. Substantial research that can inform instructional approaches to PVs has already been conducted. One strand of this research has focused on identifying PVs that merit prioritization in learning.…

This paper traces 120 student teachers' professional identity transformation during practicums in China and US. By eliciting the participants' 240 written metaphors at the start and the end of the teaching practicums respectively, this study reveals the change of the embodied metaphors revolving around four arenas: (1) from idealistic expectations…

Recent language attitude research has attended to the processes involved in identifying and evaluating spoken language varieties. This article investigates the ability of second-language learners of English in Spain (N = 71) to identify Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GenAm) speech and their perceptions of linguistic variation…