Research on first language (L1) reading has long since established the link between the proficiency of the reader and their efficiency in oculomotor control. More proficient readers make longer saccades and land closer to the word's center, which is a word's optimal viewing position, and make fewer refixations. Eye-tracking studies of second…

The aim of this project was to identify factors contributing to cross-language semantic preview benefits. In Experiment 1, Russian-English bilinguals read English sentences with Russian words presented as parafoveal previews. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to present sentences. Critical previews were cognate translations of the…

This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to determine whether bilingual and monolingual…

In past years, translation education has shifted from a "transmissionist approach" to the unchallenged use of collaborative learning, with extensive recourse to teamwork and Project-based Learning. Students are encouraged to develop their translation and interpersonal skills in collaborative environments, focusing on translation as a…

This study examines the role of cross-linguistic transfer versus general processing strategy in two groups of heritage speakers (n = 28 per group) with the same heritage language -- Russian -- and typologically different dominant languages: English and Estonian. A group of homeland Russian speakers (n = 36) is tested to provide baseline…

The concepts in English and Russian dictionary sources of various types are used in the study to help teachers. The aim is to investigate the educating methods, not only for foreign students but also native speakers of the Russian language to acquaint themselves with the ideas of interpretation of individual images by the representatives of a…

The aim of the present study is twofold. One, we will show that Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) motion typology that groups Russian and English together as satellite-framed languages may be justified on linguistic grounds but is inadequate from a psycholinguistic point of view. Two, we will argue that the shortcomings of the typology may account…

The current study investigated whether Russian--English bilinguals activate knowledge of Russian when reading English sentences. Russian and English share only a few letters, but there are some interlingual homographs (e.g., POT, which means "mouth" in Russian). Critical sentences were written such that the Russian meaning of the…

Currently there is a general uncertainty about what makes collocations (i.e., fixed word combinations with specific, not easily interpreted relations between their components) hard for ESL learners to master, and about how to improve collocation recognition and learning process. This study explored and designed a comparative classification of…

This study examines the development and evaluation of a bilingual Vocabulary Size Test (VST, Nation, 2006). A bilingual (English-Russian) test was developed and administered to 121 intermediate proficiency EFL learners (native speakers of Russian), alongside the original monolingual (English-only) version of the test. A comparison of the bilingual…

Confronted with many challenges to improving the quality of U.S. public K-12 education, many policymakers have viewed the study of a second language as a useful but nonessential ingredient of a world-class education system. However, others point out that dual-language education can be a powerful intervention for closing the achievement gap for…

This dissertation compares the knowledge of Russian Verbal Aspect in two types of learners enrolled in college level Russian courses: foreign language learners of Russian whose native language is English and heritage language speakers of Russian whose dominant language at the time of study is English. Russian Aspect is known to be problematic both…

The study argues that, in addition to advantages in conscious attention-demanding processing, bilinguals may also exhibit enhanced unconscious divergent thinking. To investigate this issue, the performance of Russian-English bilingual immigrants and English monolingual native speakers was compared on the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults, which…

This study introduces a typological model of the "conceptual language-specific approach" to the L2 research on the acquisition of tense-aspect. The model is based on the typological notion of prominence, classifying languages into tense-prominent and aspect-prominent (Bhat 1999) and the L1 research proposal that language-specific…

All languages encode aspects of culture and every culture has its own specificities to be proud of and to be transmitted. The papers in this book explore aspects of this relationship between language and culture, considering issues related to the processes of internationalization and localization of the English language. The volume is divided into…