Language proficiency testing has long played a role as both facilitator and barrier in global migration. This paper outlines how Canada and other traditional migrant destination countries use English-language proficiency testing for immigration, asylum and resettlement, and citizenship. It identifies commonalities between these three related areas…

Linguistic risks are situations in which learners are pushed out of their comfort zone to use the target language in meaningful and authentic settings. This article outlines a novel pedagogical and research approach to language learning through linguistic risk-taking. I review the construct of linguistic risk from interdisciplinary perspectives…

This study aims to examine the relationship between the productive knowledge of some lexical and phraseological indices and the quality of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' writing. A sample of 120 expository essays, written by semesters 1 and 5 university students in a less proficient EFL context, are rated by human evaluators and…

Elitism has been an issue in Canadian French immersion since its inception. This study examines how two racially diverse Ontarian school boards and Ontario French immersion policy, curricula, and other related documents construct and support an elite student within the immersion program. The elite student who emerged from immersion documents is a…

Recent years have witnessed major development in plurilingual pedagogies which support the use of learners' repertoire of languages in language learning contexts (Payant & Galante, 2022; Piccardo, 2013). However, little research has been undertaken to examine adult plurilingual learners' perceptions towards the use of their languages during…

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) has increasingly served to examine the content of textbooks. Given momentum by critical social inquiry pertaining to textbook content, this study looks at peer-reviewed literature drawn from three scholarly databases (JSTOR, ERIC, and SAGE; cross-referenced with searches on Google Scholar) that use CDS for those…

Research on the acquisition order of inflectional morphemes in English has shown that third-person singular "-s" (3SG"-s") is challenging to acquire and acquired later than "be" copula by both L1 and L2 learners of English. In a departure from the usual practice of controlled elicitation, the current study…

Despite writing and speaking being related activities, their end-products are entirely different. However, previous studies have not shown consistency in terms of grammar use in these two modes. Accordingly, in the present study, I aim to define the syntactic characteristics in these two modes with large-scale data and organized research designs.…

This study investigated the lexical demands of English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) and general-audience podcasts and their potential for incidental vocabulary learning. Two corpora (i.e., one EAL and one general-audience) comprising 1,188,512 tokens were analyzed to determine the necessary vocabulary knowledge to reach 90% and 95% coverage.…

Implicit theory (Dweck, 2000) suggests that learners' theories about the malleability of their individual traits (learning style, here) determine the extent to which they can stretch their learning style (Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014; Young, 2010) and benefit from the instruction that mismatches their preferred styles. The present study aimed…

In linguistically diverse contexts, language repertoires include various literacy skills in multiple languages across different modes of representation (multiliteracies), where multilingual writing can be conceptualized as a synthesized competence that includes all languages in a person's repertoire and is continuously evolving. We respond to the…

Deliberate vocabulary study has mostly been studied within a strictly experimental framework of learning and memorization. More ecologically valid investigations embedded in existing study contexts have been rare. This study fits into the latter paradigm, investigating how students attempted to learn 90 English words over a period of three weeks…

This paper reports on a quasi-experimental study that explored the differential effects of input- and output-based tasks on L2 vocabulary learning. The study adopted a pretest-posttest within-participants design, with sixty Vietnamese EFL university students. Participants in the experimental group completed four input and four output tasks in an…

A collection of cognitive, linguistic, and spelling measures were administered to third-grade English L1 and L2 learners. To capture formative assessments of children's developing mental graphemic representations (MGRs), spelling errors in isolation were subjected to analysis across three metrics: (1) Phonological constrained; (2)…

An underexplored question, and one with potentially far-reaching implications for the practice of written corrective feedback (WCF), is whether to mark a wide range of errors (comprehensive feedback) or to focus on a few error types (focused feedback) in learners' L2 writing. Despite limited evidence, it is argued that comprehensive WCF is…