Recent research on rater effects in performance assessments has increasingly focused on rater centrality, the tendency to assign scores clustering around the rating scale's middle categories. In the present paper, we adopted Jin and Wang's (2018) extended facets modeling approach and constructed a centrality continuum, ranging from raters…

This study explores whether middle-school students can exploit explicitly addressed crosslinguistic lexical similarities between German and English to learn vocabulary more efficiently. Across six weeks, 260 Swiss German learners of English as a foreign language (17 classes) completed three vocabulary learning tests (T1, T2 and T3). Additionally,…

Language teachers cannot help their students develop high levels of metalinguistic knowledge and language aptitude if they themselves are found lacking in these abilities. This article reports on a study that utilised a descriptive correlational mixed-methods research design to gather data from 89 multilingual teachers of English, Chinese, French,…

Previous and current research identify Metalinguistic Awareness (MLA) as a possible cause of the positive effects of bilingualism on cognitive development and Third Language Acquisition (TLA). Although it has been acknowledged that MLA is strongly affected by literacy and grammar-related activities, only a few studies have focused on the context…

Background: Many empirical investigations focus on how personality traits and academic motivation are related to academic achievement. Regarding the personality traits described in the five-factor model, prior research has shown associations between openness to experience and language achievement in particular. Following the principle of trait…

We analyze whether non-native speakers in the classroom affect students' educational achievement and social integration. In contrast to previous studies, which mainly examine the effect of the share of immigrant pupils, we focus on language heterogeneity by using a novel measure of the degree of linguistic diversity in the classroom. Conditional…

Sleep plays a role in the consolidation of various aspects of language learning. In this study, we investigated the extent to which sleep-dependent memory consolidation contributes to second language (L2) rule generalization and enhancement of L2 explicit knowledge. One hundred native English speakers were engaged in a meaning-focused training of…

Ofsted's 2021 Curriculum Research Review outlines a language pedagogy predicated on an exclusively cognitivist approach to language learning, which relies on three 'pillars of progression': phonics, vocabulary and grammar. The review makes a brief acknowledgement of the importance of motivational factors, including 'pupils' positive views of…

In German Switzerland the learning and assessment of Swiss German Sign Language ("Deutschschweizerische Gebärdensprache," DSGS) takes place in different contexts, for example, in tertiary education or in continuous education courses. By way of the still ongoing implementation of the Common European Framework of Reference for DSGS,…

To comprehend a text, one needs to understand the relationship of various elements in it. The skill that helps connect the non-textual components to the textual ones is making inferences. This research aims to reveal different types of inferences made by the students with German-language proficiency of level B1. A qualitative research approach was…

The Bottleneck Hypothesis argues that properties of inflectional morphology explain why second-language learners may face persistent difficulties in articulating meaning in target-language forms. In particular, the acquisition task proves even harder when first and second languages differ in the way they organize the mapping of functional features…

Can early childhood education (ECE) support the societal language development of children from linguistically diverse backgrounds? This study examined how existing variation in classroom interaction quality (CLASS Pre-K), classroom composition (percentages of children from low-income backgrounds and dual language learners [DLLs]), and duration of…

Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax-discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax-discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are…

This paper investigates the relationship between multilingualism, code-switching, target language contact and pragmatic and grammatical awareness in learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Participants (N = 144) were university students enrolled in English language courses at a German university. The study employed a cross-sectional…

The present study examines the influence of ambiguity tolerance on the performance of Iranian GFL-learners (Note 1) at level B1 in the processing of gap-filling-text tests. It is assumed that learners with more tolerance of ambiguity achieve better results in the reading comprehension or in the contextual guessing of the omitted words. 34 GFL…