Modern vocabulary size tests are generally based on the notion that the more frequent a word is in a language, the more likely a learner will know that word. However, this assumption has been seldom questioned in the literature concerning vocabulary size tests. Using the Vocabulary of American-English Size Test (VAST) based on the Corpus of…

A qualitative practitioner research study was conducted with 31 high school students studying religion contemporary Israeli society. The purpose of the study was to understand how using cartoons written and illustrated by the religious Jewish-Israeli settler Shay Charka challenged students to think about religion in Israeli society in new ways and…

How and when do children become aware that speakers have different accents? While adults readily make a variety of subtle social inferences based on speakers' accents, findings from children are more mixed: while one line of research suggests that even infants may be acutely sensitive to accent unfamiliarity, other studies suggest that 5-year-olds…

The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

The many permutations of spoken English have called for an interrogation into the notions of 'standard English' and 'native accents'. Despite their problematic nature, these terms remain commonly used, and familiarity with 'standard', inner-circle varieties of English is typical among L2 English speakers, differences in education and language…

It has become increasingly apparent that incorporating international stories into the classroom is beneficial for young students. The stories provide vicarious experiences from different countries that help nurture a more tolerant and accepting generation of students. Through reading these stories students gain empathy and understanding for other…

Purpose: The aim of the current study was to examine /l/ developmental patterns in young learners of Southern American English, especially in relation to the effect of word position and phonetic contexts. Method: Eighteen children with typically developing speech, aged between 2 and 5 years, produced monosyllabic single words containing singleton…

The global pandemic and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody have rocked the nation and exposed its deep-seated inequalities and racism. The rebellion in the streets is a justified response to health disparities, racism, white supremacy, and police violence. Across the country, students--especially Black students, Indigenous…

Due to the rise of World Englishes, one of the principal challenges of teachers of English today is to keep paced with language variation (Crystal, 2013). Such variation influences their choices on the variety of English in instructional texts that they use in teaching ESL/EFL academic writing. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, this…

Research on families' experiences raising children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is limited in minority ethnic and cultural groups, such as the Arab American community. Twenty Arab American caregivers raising children with ASD completed online questionnaires regarding their experiences with stigma and acculturation. Nine participants…

Purposefully selecting text is a longstanding challenge for teachers of multinational, adult learners enrolled at language schools. International students come from diverse cultural backgrounds, have been educated in different academic systems, are of different ages, and have separate interests; therefore, it is difficult for teachers to…

This study reports on the results of a semester-long Chinese-American telecollaborative exchange via WeChat, in which students from China and the U.S. shared thematically similar songs in their respective languages and discussed relevant cultural topics that were suggested by the students. Various types of qualitative data collected from the…

As opportunities for face-to-face teaching, in-person conference attendance, travel, professional exchanges, digital collaboration, and formal institutional and organizational partnerships have gained traction, English language teaching (ELT) professionals have the chance, once again, to engage in numerous types of collaboration. In this article,…

Aspects like power, dominance or ideology affect our choice of words in addition to other contextual factors (such as settings, participants and so on). The power we enjoy as social actors or the ideology we adhere to concerning any issue in life may play a crucial role in our language production or interpretation. Issuing a certain speech act…

The article provides a comparative analysis of the linguistic and cultural picture of the world of contemporary Russian university students on the basis of surveys of their perceptions of America and the Americans as well as Russia and the Russians. The data that were collected from a free association experiment that was conducted by S.G.…