Oral language competence (skill in everyday talking and listening) is critical in the early years of school in two key respects: it underpins the transition to literacy in the early years, and is the means by which children form and maintain interpersonal relationships in the school setting. In this paper, the role of oral language competence with…

This article presents a case study incorporating English teachers' perspectives into the development of a large-scale international English assessment, the recently developed "TOEFL Junior"® Comprehensive test. It discusses how stakeholder feedback gathered during test development supports the validity argument for score interpretation…

What are the effects of experience on subsequent learning? We explored the effects of language-specific word order knowledge on the acquisition of sequential conditional information. Korean and English adults were engaged in a sequence learning task involving three different sets of stimuli: auditory linguistic (nonsense syllables), visual…

Spanish-English bilingual lexical organization was investigated using masked cognate and non-cognate priming with the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, three groups of bilinguals (Spanish dominant, English dominant and Balanced) and a single group of beginning bilinguals (Spanish) were tested with Spanish and English targets primed by…

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we neuroimaged deaf adults as they performed two linguistic tasks with sentences in American Sign Language, grammatical judgment and phonemic-hand judgment. Participants' age-onset of sign language acquisition ranged from birth to 14 years; length of sign language experience was substantial and…

Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate what linguistic variables best predict bilingual recognition of acoustically degraded sentences and how to identify bilingual individuals who might have more difficulty than their monolingual counterparts on such tasks. Method: Four hundred English speech-perception-in-noise (SPIN) sentences…

This article reviews the issue of compulsory English in the Asia-Pacific region and examines the English component of a single-site exploratory study of multilingualism in a disadvantaged ethnic minority (DEM) community of Northeast Thailand. The concept of ethnolinguistic vitality was used as a framework for an analysis of community language…

A. Karmiloff-Smith's (1990) task of drawing a nonexistent object is considered to be a measure of cognitive flexibility. The notion of earlier emergence of cognitive flexibility in bilingual children motivated the current researchers to request 4- and 5-year-old English-Hebrew and Arabic-Hebrew bilingual children and their monolingual peers to…

Scholars who work with Latino/as in the USA have long been calling for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of the US-based Latino population. Two-way Immersion (TWI) bilingual education programmes are an interesting context in which to examine the Latino parent communities in the USA. Overall, the language enrichment nature of TWI…

The development of native-like memory traces for foreign phonemes can be measured by using the Mismatch Negativity (MMN), a component of the auditory event-related potential. Previous studies have shown that the MMN is sensitive to changes in neural organization depending on language experience. Here we measured the MMN response in 5-6 year-old…

This article presents an overview of action research conducted in an EFL university context, regarding primarily the relationship between individual possible self-images, socially constructed possible self-images, and language-learning motivation. The study used three cycles of action research over the course of one 15-week university semester,…

This study investigated the relationship between out-of-class L2 use and proficiency gains in learners of English as a second language (ESL) in an intensive English language program. In contrast to previous studies on this topic, which have found weak, non-existent or even inverse relationships between out-of-class language experience and L2…

With the rapid onset of globalization and increasing demand from business, government, and schools for fluency in another language, the author decided to learn Spanish. Driven by a desire to acquire functional language abilities in Spanish, he has embarked on this "better late than never" opportunity to learn the language, and in this…

Studies of spoken and signed language processing reliably show involvement of the posterior superior temporal cortex. This region is also reliably activated by observation of meaningless oral and manual actions. In this study we directly compared the extent to which activation in posterior superior temporal cortex is modulated by linguistic…

This study investigated receptive vocabulary delay in deaf children with cochlear implants. Participants were 23 children with profound hearing loss, ages 6-14 years, who received a cochlear implant between ages 1.4 and 6 years. Duration of cochlear implant use ranged from 3.7 to 11.8 years. "Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third…