Over the past 15 years, the percentage of children in the United States who speak a language other than English at home has been increasing. As of 2013, this was almost one in four children (KIDS COUNT Data Center, 2014). With the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, schools have felt added pressure to ensure that children learn academic…[Read more]

Research on written corrective feedback (WCF) in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) has been giving its feedback on this practice for more than 30 years now. The topic has been extensively researched and there is a better understanding of the issue than before; however, it continues to be debated (see Evans et al., 2010; Ferris, 2006;…[Read more]

This research study investigated the learning and use of English by Nepali immigrant women from two theoretical perspectives: investment and translingualism. The research questions addressed what sort of investment the participants were making to learn English and to see how they used different translingual practices to co-construct their identity…[Read more]

Reading Explorer is a six-level series of intensive reading texts and Reading Explorer 2 is one level in that series. It uses articles from National Geographic Magazine to promote reading comprehension and to develop the vocabulary skills of ESL young adults and adult learners. The length of the reading passages, vocabulary presented, level of…[Read more]

LEAP: Learning English for Academic Purposes (Reading and Writing) is one book in Pearson’s series of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) for highintermediate and advanced learners. The book has eight chapters which cover topics in different fields, for example education, psychology, business, and biology. Each chapter deals with both reading a…[Read more]

Luke Plonsky is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. His research interests include instructed second language acquisition, quantitative research methods with a specific focus on study designs, the use of statistics, research synthesis, and meta-analysis. He gave the keynote address at the Second Language…[Read more]

Kim McDonough is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at Concordia University. She earned her M.A. in TESOL from Michigan State University and her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Georgetown University. Her research interests include psycholinguistic approaches to second language acquisition, classroom-based acquisition research,…[Read more]

Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis (1990, 1994, 1995, 2001), which proposes that the process of noticing enables the conversion of input to intake, has been hugely influential and is now “regarded as a mainstream SLA construct” (Yoshioka, Frota, & Bergsleithner, 2013, p. 7). Early studies on noticing mainly involved the issue of whether attention or aw…[Read more]

According to Barzegar (2013), the way we arrange words in different positions of the clause is essential to communicate in any language. In other words, word order is highly important when creating meaning. Second language learners usually aim to have a clear understanding of how and where to place words, so they can achieve successful…[Read more]

The recent increase in studies using the L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei, 2005) to investigate language teachers’ engagement (or lack thereof) in professional development (e.g., Hiver, 2013; Kubanyiova 2009; Kumazava, 2013) shows the increasing interest in bridging the research gap between language teacher education and teacher motivation. Wi…[Read more]

The goal for this study was to examine participants’ familiarity with specific accents, whether participants were able to identify if a speaker was a native speaker (NS) or a non-native speaker (NNS), and what accent the speaker had. I also examined how the participants rated speakers on four Likert-scales of comprehensibility, intelligibility, a…[Read more]

Second language (L2) testing is often stressful for test takers, especially when they take high-stakes tests such as the TOEFL. On the iBT TOEFL independent speaking questions, for example, test takers are given 15 seconds to prepare to respond to a prompt (Educational Testing Service, 2008) and have only one chance to record their answer, which…[Read more]

There is great interest in the role of task planning on learner performance and L2 development (for a review, see Ellis, 2009). In this line of research, the question of whether or not repetition of the same oral/written task—repeating as a type of task planning— is pedagogically useful for second language (L2) learning is an intriguing one bot…[Read more]

The goal of this book is to combine data-driven findings in the area of Arabic language acquisition with a focus on the order of acquisition, developmental stages and learning patterns of linguistic structures of Arabic. The author starts with research questions on the variables involved in learning Arabic including the developmental path, the…[Read more]

The rationale for content-based instruction is that the content is often academic subject matter (Brinton, Snow, & Wesche 2003). Academic Encounters Listening and Speaking: Human Behavior is a contentbased textbook dealing with the topic of human behavior related to psychology and communication. The book contains four units: Health, development…[Read more]