This study analyses the production of French /y/ and /u/ by 42 native English learners of French (ELoF) at the start and end of a Residence Abroad (RA) in a French-speaking country. As an approximation of both phonological and phonetic development, categorical change is teased apart from gradient change using k-medoid clustering of acoustic data…

American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses "wh"-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien,…

With the rise of different English varieties, scholars argued for reconceptualizing teaching pedagogies to acknowledge and incorporate diverse Global English (GE) varieties into the classroom (Rose & Galloway, 2019). However, very few studies explored the effectiveness of such innovative pedagogy on language skills. This study investigated the…

This study examined how seven American undergraduate students leveraged multiple modes to reflect on language, culture, and identity while learning French in a study abroad program. Grounded in the social semiotic framework of multimodality, this qualitative study applied open, axial, and selective coding to analyze students' interviews and…

Despite the fact that pronunciation is a vital aspect of language learning, previous research has shown that its instruction is limited in the classroom in terms of time and attention, due in part to the time constraints inherent in any curriculum. It then becomes essential for instructors to be strategic about the pronunciation features they…

The Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) has synthesized key data on English learners (ELs) into two-page sheets on a variety of subjects. This fact sheet focuses on: (1) Most Common Languages Spoken by English Learners (Excluding Spanish and English): Fall 2020; (2) Number of Reported Arabic-Speaking English Learners: 2008 through 2020;…

This study analyzes four English synonyms -- clear, obvious, apparent, and evident -- concentrating on meanings, distribution across genre, collocations, and semantic preference and prosody. The data were drawn from learner's dictionaries and the Corpus of the Contemporary American English (COCA). It was discovered that the four synonyms share the…

The Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) approach plays an essential role in English as a lingua franca. Previous GELT studies only examined the influence of Global English exposure on learners' attitudes in the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles. This study added explicit instruction on phonological features in addition to a variety of…

Native English speakers' accents are generally regarded as ideal models of English accents. However, in real-world communication, where English is used as a lingua franca for intercultural communication among people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, English users inevitably encounter a wide variety of accents. This paper presents…

Foreign language teachers' recognition of their identity is essential to their professional development. Drawing on bicultural theories, this study investigated two American teachers who recounted their experiences of teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at a university in China. This study leverages the Two-directional Extension Model as…

This empirical investigation rigorously evaluated the teaching potential of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) for enhancing the ability of learners to apply 30 near-synonymous change-of-state verbs in two EFL Freshman English courses in a college setting across two semesters. In the study, 32 participants in the experimental group and 22 in the control…

This study examines the identity negotiation of Muslim female international students in ESL classrooms in the mid-southern United States, where linguistic adaptation and cultural integration pressures intersect. Drawing on intersectionality, postcolonial feminism, and Kim's International Student Identity Model, this research highlights how these…

Research finds that going far from home has many positive psychological outcomes such as enhanced creative thinking, and research on creativity reveals that nonconformity can be a useful tool to stimulate innovation. Merging these findings, we theorise that foreign experiences increase nonconformist attitudes and behaviours. In Studies 1 and 2,…

Following WWII, the English language became the global Lingua Franca, meaning that it is the primary language used to communicate between people who speak different languages. With the development of English as the Lingua Franca, Americans are generally less exposed to foreign languages than most other nationalities. Some researchers believe that…

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and…