The Null Subject Parameter (NSP) has long been considered pertinent to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies, especially when the native language (NL) and target language (TL) have different NSP settings. The study aimed to investigate whether seventy English L2 learners in Puerto Rico who were native Spanish speakers transferred their L1…

The Spanish verbal system offers more evidence for agreement and tense than English, where morphological evidence is less robust. With a focus on the comprehension of verbal agreement morphology by child second (L2) learners of Spanish and English, we extend the Variational Learning account to L2 acquisition to investigate whether the abundance of…

While interest in pedagogical translanguaging has grown, it continues to be an underresearched area of study. The purpose of this study is to better understand student response to the use of strategic and pedagogically informed translanguaging practices in the university-level classroom. This article takes an in-depth look at the coursework and…

This research project sought to explore the influence of English L2 on Spanish L1 in an environment where the L1 (Spanish) is the dominant language. Participants were recruited through voluntary response sampling at the University of Puerto Rico Secondary School (UHS). They completed a language survey on Google Forms that collected general…

This paper documents English teachers' and advanced English students' perspectives on the use of Spanish in the English classroom in Puerto Rico. Using qualitative data collection methods such as interviews and focus group data, the researchers document the ways that many English teachers on the island justify their use of Spanish in the English…

Proficient bilinguals use two languages actively, but the contexts in which they do so may differ dramatically. The present study asked what consequences the contexts of language use hold for the way in which cognitive resources modulate language abilities. Three groups of speakers were compared, all of whom were highly proficient Spanish-English…

This study examines Puerto Rican bilinguals' attitudes towards five speech varieties (Spanish, English, Spanish with English lexical insertions, inter-sentential code-switching, and intra-sentential code-switching). While previous research on language attitudes in Puerto Rico has exclusively employed direct methods (i.e. interviews, surveys,…

This is a longitudinal case study of two groups of students (24 students in total) from the Foreign Languages Department of the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. This research deals with the acquisition of the French adverbial pronouns "en" and "y" through two different teaching approaches, the implicit-inductive teaching…

The purpose of this study is to validate the following hypothesis: First, spoken accents have a major influence and can affect listeners' personal attitudes and second, native Puerto Rican speakers will speak English as a second language without wanting to sound like a North American English speaker. This study will contribute to research on the…

A great deal of research concerning the acquisition of English morphology as a second language has been carried out in order to explain some typical stages in the acquisition of the English-s morphemes and the difficulty confronted by second language learners. According to Siegel (2003), interlanguage and functional transfer both play a crucial…

Detailing the integration of Spanish language teaching in an authentic setting, this article contributes to empirical research on the positive value of community-engaged learning in foreign language pedagogy. "Reading to Play, Playing to Read" is an innovative model for community-engaged teaching that combines learning goals from…

The goal of this paper was to address the question, "Have the austerity measures enacted due to the global economic crisis impacted student enrollments at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez?" as Rodríguez (2011. "Social protest and the future of Higher Education in Puerto Rico." "Academe" 97(4).…

This paper describes the language policies at 38 institutions of higher education on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. As a commonwealth of the US, Spanish and English hold co-official status on Puerto Rico despite the fact that majority of islanders use Spanish as their first language. Given the colonial status of the island, English has held…

Globalization, the Internet, television, and other technological media are all factors that are greatly influencing English learning. Knowing English is no longer considered a luxury, it is even said that whoever does not speak that language would be in a clear situation of disadvantage. Many applications are currently available for users in…

L2 learners' problems with English articles have been linked to learners' L1 and their access to universal semantic features (e.g., definiteness and specificity). Studies suggest that L2 adults rely on their L1 knowledge, while child L2 learners rely more on their access to semantic universals. The present study investigates whether child L2…