The question going into this action research was, "How can a language teacher encourage more positive attitudes toward language learning while building a learning community?" After incorporating "I Can" statements into the curriculum, more than 100 third grade students were surveyed. The survey asked what they thought they could do in Spanish.…

The Dearborn Public Schools, with 18,300 students, is located in the Detroit urban area with the largest concentration of Arabic-speaking people in the United States. In order to prepare the students for the 21st century skills and global awareness and in response to parents' requests, the author in collaboration with the school principal and…

The research project reported in this chapter consists of three studies in which syntactic complexity, lexical variation and fluency appear as dependent variables. The independent variables are task complexity and proficiency level, as the three studies investigate the effect of task complexity on the written and oral performance of L2 learners of…

Infants often pay special attention to speech sounds, and they appear to detect key features of these sounds. To investigate the neural foundation of speech perception in infants, we measured cortical activation using near-infrared spectroscopy. We presented the following three types of auditory stimuli while 3-month-old infants watched a silent…

Where native speakers supposedly are fluent by default, nonnative speakers often have to strive hard to achieve a nativelike fluency level. However, disfluencies (such as pauses, fillers, repairs, etc.) occur in both native and nonnative speech and it is as yet unclear how fluency raters weigh the fluency characteristics of native and nonnative…

The study compared the effects of two types of form-focused written feedback--direct corrective feedback (DCF) and metalinguistic explanation (ME) given to the whole class--on Japanese university students' accuracy of use of two grammatical structures: indefinite article and the hypothetical conditional. Both types of feedback were given with…

This study investigated the link between low second language performance and difficulties with native language phonological processing. Participants were native Hebrew speakers, 19-31 years of age, who learned English as a second language in a school setting. Individuals with dyslexia performed below high-proficiency second language learners on…

Humans are remarkably sensitive to the statistical structure of language. However, different mechanisms have been proposed to account for such statistical sensitivities. The present study compared adult learning of syntax and the ability of two models of statistical learning to simulate human performance: Simple Recurrent Networks, which learn by…

Although fluency constitutes an essential component of second language (L2) proficiency, there are mixed results and gaps in the literature on how L2 speakers' fluency differs from fluent speech production in a first language (L1). The research reported in this article investigated utterance fluency and cognitive fluency of L1 English…

Young learners of Japanese heritage language (JHL) need a solid foundation of oral language to develop strong literacy skills. Considering the limited hours of instruction at JHL schools, oral language and literacy skills rely on a joint effort between the JHL school and parents. JHL schools that help parents understand the nuances of JHL…

This study examines the effects of learning context and age on second language development by comparing the language gains, measured in terms of oral and written fluency, lexical and syntactic complexity, and accuracy, experienced by four groups of learners of English: children in a study abroad setting, children in their at-home school, adults in…

The range, variety, or diversity of words found in learners' language use is believed to reflect the complexity of their vocabulary knowledge as well as the level of their language proficiency. Many indices of lexical diversity have been proposed, most of which involve statistical relationships between types and tokens, and which ultimately…

The study examined differences in reading achievement and mastery skill development among Grade-6 students with different language background profiles, using cognitive diagnosis modeling applied to large-scale provincial reading test performance data. Our analyses revealed that students residing in various home language environments show different…

This study investigates the development of plural adjective agreement in Hebrew, focusing on the consolidation of Hebrew number/gender morphology in children and adolescents across the school years in comparison with adults. A total of 240 Hebrew-speaking participants in seven consecutive grade levels (kindergarten to sixth grade) plus a group of…

Current evidence demonstrating the importance of language play in second-language (L2) development rests largely on qualitative analyses of L2 discourse. Although these rich descriptions have illustrated a number of important functions of language play, further study of the phenomenon is necessary to understand its potential to facilitate…