This study longitudinally examined the effects of cognitive and sociopsychological individual differences (aptitude, motivation, personality) and the quantity and quality of second language (L2) experience on L2 speech gains in naturalistic settings. We elicited L2 spontaneous speech from 50 Chinese learners of English at the beginning and the end…

Past studies on aptitude for interpreting have investigated the correlation between personal traits and achievement, yet relatively few have singled out students' emotional state as an important aptitude constituent or tracked its developmental patterns. To address this gap, the present study followed 116 Chinese students of interpreting for five…

Pragmatic markers perform important communicative functions, but they can be difficult to learn in a second language because of their multifunctionality and lack of salience during communicative events. This study has two goals: (1) to describe the communicative functions of the pragmatic marker "I mean" in academic discourse; and (2) to…

Children from language minority homes reach school age with variable dual language skills. Cluster analysis identified four bilingual profiles among 126 U.S.-born, 5-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals. The profiles differed on two dimensions: language balance and total language knowledge. Balance varied primarily as a function of indicators of…

Aptitude is a hypernym used in training and practice-based contexts to refer to a person's natural or acquired ability to do something. It tends to be an attribute that is 'forward-looking', i.e. referring to a person's probability of achieving success in the future. This paper adopts a retrospective perspective in looking at the 'success…

High school students' beliefs toward their abilities could be fixed or malleable, and mindset may differ between boys and girls. The aim of this article is three-fold: to examine the beliefs of students as to whether their abilities are fixed or malleable in the context of English language learning, to know if mindsets of boys and girls are…

Ideology can be understood as a guide to action, and therefore, language ideology can be viewed as a link between language ability on the one hand, and language use on the other. In this respect, language ideology plays a central role in the success of language revitalization movements. In an effort to understand how new language ideologies are…

Few adult second language (L2) learners successfully attain high-level proficiency. Although decades of research on beginning to intermediate stages of L2 learning have identified a number of predictors of the rate of acquisition, little research has examined factors relevant to predicting very high levels of L2 proficiency. The current study,…

When two or more languages are part of a child's world, we are presented with a rich opportunity to learn something about language in general and about how the mind works. In this book, Norbert Francis examines the development of bilingual proficiency and the different kinds of competence that come together in making up its component parts. In…

In this study I examine the construct of aptitude in learning Chinese as a second language (L2) to an advanced level. I test 2 hypotheses: first, that L2 aptitude comprises 4 components--working memory, rote memory, grammatical sensitivity, and phonemic coding ability--and second, that L2 aptitude affects learning both directly and indirectly…

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the relationships between working memory (WM) and three commonly used learning strategies or conditions in the nature of proficiency among adult L2 Russian learners. Based on the aptitude-learning condition interaction framework articulated by Robinson (2002b), the study identifies two types of…

Purpose: The present study investigated the effects of selected measures of language experience (parent-reported estimates of frequency of output and language use) and language ability (parent-reported language proficiency and mean length of utterance in words) on the segmental accuracy of Spanish- and English-speaking bilingual children. Method:…

Educators of young children, including speech-language pathologists, are often uncertain as to how to effectively work with children from diverse backgrounds because they do not know enough about cultural and linguistic diversity and its impact on language development. The current study helps to address this gap by examining the validity of parent…

While language aptitude has been investigated actively within second language research, there is a current dearth of research on the effects of aptitude in cases of attrition. The aim of the present investigation was to explore the role of language aptitude for L1 proficiency in speakers who experienced a break with their L1 setting prior to…

A discussion of language testing looks at the relationship between the processes of language learning and language testing, particularly from the point of view of pragmatics theory. It outlines some of the theory of Charles Sanders Pierce and its role in the evolution of linguistic theory, as well as the work of other theorists concerning the…