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This article examines the process of developing intercultural and linguistic competence among students in pedagogical universities in Kazakhstan. Among the country's rich ethnicities and languages spread across the country, the study examines the multiple challenges and opportunities faced in building cross-cultural understanding among students. The main focus of the research is the development of cross-cultural competence within Kazakhstan's educational field. The article emphasizes the importance of linguistic and cultural diversity as a foundation for development of intercultural sensitivity and dialogue. By exploring the intersection of cultural diversity and educational practices, the study explains key strategies for integrating intercultural competence into Kazakhstan's education system. Through a comprehensive analysis of socio-cultural dynamics and educational initiatives, the article offers insights into the effective development of intercultural competence among students, thus equipping them with essential skills to navigate and succeed in a globally interconnected landscape.

This study aims to 1) explore the listening challenges of high- and low-proficiency EFL accounting undergraduates, 2) compare listening challenges and listening strategies between high- and low-proficiency learners and 3) investigate the effectiveness of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) in developing EFL-listening skills. The participants in this study consisted of 84 fourth-year accounting students from Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna, Chiang Mai, Thailand, who had enrolled in a course called English Listening and Speaking for Business Communication. They were divided into two groups depending on their ability levels (high and low proficiency), based on Kelley's 27% criterion-referenced measurement theory. Each group consisted of 23 participants. The research instruments included 1) a listening-comprehension test used for the pre-test and post-test to determine whether the participants had high or low proficiency and compare the effect of MALL, 2) a questionnaire on listening challenges and the utilisation of listening strategies, 3) a semi-structured interview and 4) a MALL activity plan. Data analysis included the calculation of means, standard deviations, percentages and t-tests. The findings revealed a statistically significant difference between the two groups regarding listening challenges; however, there was no statistically significant difference with regard to listening strategies. Concerning MALL, which was applied to both groups, a statistically significant difference was found in the post-test scores at 0.05. In other words, both high- and low-proficiency learners showed improved performance after the empowering strategies created with MALL.

Throughout the world, schools are visited by students with different native languages. Therefore, the linguistic competencies of the students are diverse. Dealing with this diversity is a great challenge for teachers in general, including in science subjects. To face this challenge, all institutions involved in education should adapt their teaching and learning to linguistic diversity to foster student's language competencies. Non-formal education, such as student laboratories, could enhance formal chemistry education and support students in learning the subject's contents and acquiring language competencies. To this purpose, language-sensitive and language-supportive learning settings for different chemical topics and contexts are developed to enable all students to participate actively and foster language competencies. The learning settings are implemented and evaluated at the Ludwigsburg University of Education (Germany) using a cyclical approach based on Participatory Action Research. Data from 147 students from seven learning groups of various grade levels and school types were collected before and after they experienced the work in student laboratories. The focus was on students' situational interests and their views on offered language-sensitive and language-supportive methods, tools, and activities. The data shows that the approach has a positive effect on students' situational interest. Methods that were especially helpful for the students are filtered. On this basis, implications are drawn for the application to other non-formal education offers

The need for IT professionals with fluency in foreign languages becomes increasingly critical as the Kazakhstani government implements steps to foster IT innovation. However, there are structural, geographical and professional imbalances in the interaction of supply and demand for IT professionals who can speak a foreign language in the modern labour market which is the main problem that is currently hindering the growth of the IT sector in Kazakhstan. The aim of this study was to assess the development of subject communicative language competencies (a) in linguistic or grammatical ability and (b) in discourse ability in first-year students for the proposed author's innovative learning technique in the educational process as well as the appropriate technological and systematic procedures. A mixed-research method was used in this study. The study involved 365 learners in the "Informatics" direction at the International University of Information Technologies in Almaty, Kazakhstan during the school year 2021-2022. According to the findings, the experiment participants did not develop subject-related communicative language competencies. The results show that the degree of capability formation is not satisfactory. 52.8% is the basic level, 41.6% is the production point and only 5.8% is the high level. Positive dynamics shaping learners' subject-related language communication competencies were identified as a result of the implementation of innovative techniques. This paper contributes to the research on teaching IT students in developing countries and highlights the most important factors that contribute to improve the level of subject-related communicative language competencies of IT students.

The planned systematized design of the use of serious games in the classroom is presented as a strategy to optimize learning. In this framework, Learning Analytics represents stealth assessment and follow-up method, and a way to personalize such games by simplifying their application for teachers. The aim of this research was to analyze the impact of the use of serious games on improving linguistic competence in socio-educationally disadvantaged students, with a proposal for a planned systematized intervention. We use two specific games to improve linguistic competence and its learning analytics to achieve the proposed goal. This study carried out was pre-experimental, with pretest and posttest, and the sample consisted of 75 students at 4 primary education centers in Spain (36 boys, 39 girls) aged 9-12 (M = 10.6; SD = 0.7) at risk due to socioeconomic conditions in Primary Education. The results show that (a) the serious games integrated into the curriculum and adjusted to the learning objectives can facilitate the development and acquisition of linguistic competence in students with socio-educational disadvantages; (b) these students can match their peers in performance and competencies with appropriate systematic intervention; (c) the level acquired in a key competence can be evaluated and specific needs identified in students with academic difficulties using learning analytics; (d) learning analytics can contribute to predicting student performance in academic subjects through the scores collected in the analysis of learning integrated into serious games. These findings contribute to filling research gaps in these four aspects.

This study aims to identify which factors predict psychological distress among international college students attending American universities. International students experience unique stressors, as well as bring with them their own enculturation: culture of origin identity, language, and competence when acculturating. To get a comprehensive picture, we collected survey data on demographics, acculturation, stress, anxiety, depression, and symptomatology from N = 146 college students (n = 51 international students; n = 95 U.S. citizens) from three universities in the southeastern United States. For international students, increased acculturation to the U.S. (English proficiency and culture competence) is related to decreased symptomatology and anxiety. Additionally, international students' competencies in culture of origin are significantly associated with competencies in U.S. acculturation. Regression analyses indicated that among international students, higher U.S. acculturation and lower stress, significantly predicted less anxiety; lower stress significantly predicted less symptomatology. Implications for higher education and future research are discussed.

Focusing on the relationship between linguistic, cognitive, socioemotional factors in writing English for academic purposes (EAP), this study investigated whether topic familiarity as an important cognitive factor of task complexity influences different levels of emotionality and linguistic complexity in EAP writing and whether there are relationships between emotionality and linguistic complexity. To do so, 64 international graduate learners enrolled in EAP writing courses participated in the present study. Each wrote on familiar and unfamiliar topics determined via a questionnaire at the onset of the study. Their writings were then measured for textual emotionality and linguistic complexity using automatic assessment tools. Results showed that EAP writings differed systematically in terms of both emotionality and linguistic complexity due to the influence of topic familiarity. Unfamiliar topics led to writing performance with a significantly higher level of emotional negativity and significantly lower linguistic complexity levels as compared to familiar topics. A follow-up correlation analysis also revealed significant relationships between emotionality and linguistic complexity measures, indicating complex interactions between linguistic and socioemotional factors. Implications of these findings are discussed relative to deploying writing topics with varied levels of cognitive complexity for encouraging classroom engagement and improving L2 learners' writing performance by effective task sequencing.

This study examined the cognitive-linguistic and literacy-related correlates of dyslexia in three Chinese cities and the English word reading and mathematics performances of Chinese children with dyslexia. Chinese children with/without dyslexia were measured with an equivalent test battery of literacy and mathematics in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei. Univariate analysis results suggested that phonological sensitivity distinguished those with and without dyslexia across all three cities in group comparisons. In Taipei and Hong Kong, morphological awareness, delayed copying, and spelling also distinguished the groups. Logistic regression analyses demonstrated that Chinese character reading, as directly compared to Chinese word reading, also distinguished the groups particularly well. In addition, in Beijing and Hong Kong, children with dyslexia performed significantly less well in English word reading than those without dyslexia. In Hong Kong and Taipei, children with dyslexia also had difficulties in mathematics performance. Findings highlight the fundamental importance of some cognitive-linguistic skills for explaining Chinese dyslexia across cultures, the utility of recognizing the individual Chinese character as a foundational unit of analysis in Chinese across cultures, and the generalizability of the comorbidity of both English as a second language (L2) and mathematics with dyslexia in Chinese children in both Beijing and Hong Kong.

This article traces the intellectual roots and developments of the notion of competence in second language (L2) teaching and research. Since L2 teaching and research invariably concern competence of some sort (linguistic, communicative, interactional, or otherwise), there have been countless attempts to define competence from diverse theoretical perspectives, resulting in a plethora of definitions as well as debates, confusions, and tensions. As global mobility and technological advancements prompt us to question traditional assumptions in our field, it is high time to take stock of how the notion of competence has been dealt with in L2 teaching and research. With a particular focus on interactional discourse, this short article offers a glimpse into the conceptual diversity regarding competence and facilitate further exploration of how it may be researched and fostered in view of modern-day complexities. The article concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications and controversies.

This research employed a case study to examine motivational factors which influenced two learners' participation in course-adjunct English activities. The first participant was a high-motivation learner who joined many of the activities, while the second one was a low-motivation learner who rarely attended the activities. An in-depth interview was conducted with each of them to investigate the cases, and the interviews were described narratively. Three main motivational factors based on self-determination theory: autonomy, competency, and relatedness, were used as the framework for the analysis. The findings revealed that the high-motivation learner was clearly driven by intrinsic motivation, a sense of autonomy, mastery experiences in improving her own English proficiency, and feelings of relatedness in the learning context. The low-motivation learner, on the other hand, did not show a sense of autonomy. For him, scores were the main motive for completing the activities. If they had not been compulsory, he would not have joined the activities as he did not experience feelings of relatedness in the learning context. The findings implied that the two learners' motivational factors played a crucial role in their decision of whether or not to participate in course-adjunct English activities.

The objective of this study was to validate a bilingual Spanish-English version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) considering its potential use as a discriminator between learners in terms of language competence. This version was designed based on the two forms available on one of the creators' websites as well as considering practices recommended regarding the elimination of cognates and loans. A one-way ANOVA test was used to confirm the test's capacity to discriminate among learners of different linguistic competence. Additionally, Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) was conducted to revise the existence of only one underlying variable. As a result of this study, a VST version for Spanish speakers consisting of 9 vocabulary frequency levels is shared. This version is in line with validation standards put forward in previous research. It is expected that this instrument will help future studies that seek to measure Spanish speakers' competence in English as a foreign or second language without having to deal with the interference of other intervening factors.

In this paper the role of language competence and thematic competence in translation and post-editing was studied. The sample included 49 translation students who translated part of a copyright agreement from English into Hungarian under two different conditions, from-scratch human translation and post-editing. Our findings indicated that there was no difference between from-scratch human translation and post-editing in terms of quality and speed, and that time spent on task was only loosely connected to achievement. We also found that thematic (legal) knowledge, as assessed by our multiple-choice test, did not correlate with from-scratch human translation/post-editing performance. Perhaps the most important finding of the study is that source language (SL) reading plays a key role in translation students' performance, whether it is traditional from-scratch human translation or post-editing. It was also highlighted that SL reading was even more important in post-editing than in from-scratch human translation, and that weaknesses in reading competence may lead to different types of errors in the two working conditions.

Guided by the framework of internationalization at home (IaH), this study employed a mixed-methods approach investigating the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) among a group of tertiary English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan, facilitated through the means of telecollaboration. The telecollaboration incorporated 30 EFL learners and 30 learners of Chinese from Australia and New Zealand. Data collection encompassed EFL learners' responses to a self-assessment questionnaire, their reflective essays, alongside instructors' reflective journals. The findings showed that EFL learners held positive perceptions regarding their telecollaboration experience and reported substantial growth in ICC across three dimensions: cognitive, affective and behavioral. In applying various multimodal communication strategies, EFL learners realized and valued cultural similarities and differences. Their reflective accounts exhibited evidence of enhanced linguistic and cultural competences. The telecollaboration enabled them to increase their confidence in utilizing English, hone their digital literacy skills for effective communications, and establish conducive environments for their relational and emotional development with their teammates and instructors. The latter provided indispensable emotion in varying contingent situations. Incorporating the insights drawn from the instructors' reflective journals, the study argues that telecollaboration as a pedagogical practice is the significant essence of effective IaH curriculum design and implementation.

Work placement is an important aspect of higher education studies and career preparation. Effective preparation is crucial for students to succeed in placements, yet little is known about international students' placement preparation, particularly regarding their sensemaking. This qualitative study, guided by an integrative theoretical framework, examined international health science (HSc) undergraduate students' sensemaking behaviors as they prepare for in-person placements in a host country. Data were gathered through 36 semi-structured interviews with 12 international HSc undergraduate students (three with each student). Findings unravel complicated psychological and interpersonal processes undergone by student participants during pre-placement sensemaking. These insights can inform institutional strategies to support international students in building sensemaking capacities to effectively prepare for placements and post-study work transitions.

This research tries to investigate the importance of mobile translation apps when carrying out translation activities in the classroom. Specifically, this is a semester-long study which attempts to see how beneficial it is to allow translation students enrolled in the translation program at the Department of Languages and Translation at Birzeit University full freedom to use mobile translation apps when rendering in-class assignments from Arabic into English. To this end, two divisions of journalistic translation (334) were used as the subjects of the study, one serving as a control group and the other serving as an experimental group. Throughout the course, six assignments were given to both groups to translate from Arabic into English. The control group was given full freedom to use mobile translation apps like Google Translate, while the experimental group was not allowed to use mobile translation apps and was instead furnished with the needed glossary. The final assignment was administered to both groups under the same conditions: no mobiles were allowed and the needed glossary was supplied. Upon analysis of students' mistakes and averages in the final exam, it has become evident that an absolute reliance on mobile translation apps such as Google Translate inside the classroom has a detrimental impact on translation students' linguistic competence and thus their translation performance. Therefore, the researchers strongly recommend translation trainers at tertiary level to allow translation students a very limited use of mobile translation apps especially when students study English at an EFL setting like our case at Birzeit University.

The article is devoted to the problems of foreign language education in linguistic universities, namely to promoting the students' linguistic competence, which has been the most urgent in mastering the language as a means of communication. The research prompts the standards to progress the grammatical competence. In the current study, we make a hypothesis that, in contrast to traditional teaching approach, the communicative approach is supposed to be more effective in teaching grammar and helps students to master the language and upgrade their linguistic competence in comprehending and processing spoken and written texts and become professionals after graduating the University. In the experiment two groups of students were involved: one using traditional approach to learning grammar at the classes and the other practising communicative language teaching approach. In total 79 bachelor's degree students of Kyiv National Linguistic University (Ukraine) took a tentative course in grammar. The current study testifies the effectiveness of the communicative approach to studying grammar structures as a way to develop the linguistic competence of students and to help them to acquire proficiency level for achieving success in real communication.

Foreign language teaching in the Slovenian educational context begins in the first grade (age 6). Many studies report a lack of qualified teachers at this stage of learning around the world and numerous authors emphasise the misconception that basic linguistic and didactic knowledge of teachers is sufficient for teaching children. All three Slovenian public universities are aware of this problem and offer pre-service and in-service programmes for (student) teachers who want to specialise in teaching English to young learners. In the present article, we focus on the subject-specific teacher competences for teaching English in the first three years of primary education; namely, linguistic, subject didactic and intercultural competences. We explore teachers' self-assessment of these competences and their perception of certain elements pertaining to them. The study seeks to answer the following research questions: (1) What subject-specific competences do teachers consider essential for teaching English in the first cycle of primary education? (2) To what extent do teachers believe they have developed certain subject-specific competences? (3) What are teachers' attitudes toward certain subject-specific competences that the teacher needs for teaching English in the first cycle of primary education? The results of the quantitative survey, in which 100 teachers participated, show that teachers perceive their subject didactic competence to be the most developed and their intercultural competence to be the least developed. Moreover, they consider that a basic level of English is not sufficient for teaching English in the first grades.

Chinese language teaching and learning in Cameroon has developed rapidly. Teaching Chinese as a foreign language in secondary schools in Cameroon requires teachers' professional training. Due to the complexity and challenges of the Chinese language teaching, teachers need to be equipped with the necessary linguistic, didactic, communicative, and cultural competencies. Based on a critical and in-depth analysis of documents, statistical analysis and interviews, this study has analysed the current situation of the initial teacher training (ITT) model for secondary school Chinese language teachers in Cameroon in various aspects, including the training objective, duration, curriculum methods and lecturers. The results of this study show that the initial teacher training of secondary school Chinese language teachers in Cameroon has undergone many steps in its development. At the same time, it faces some challenges such as, the limited number of Chinese language lecturers, outdated training curriculum and insufficient practical courses. To address these issues, the authors made some practical recommendations such as the urgent need to recruit and train more cameroonian lecturers, strengthen and diversify cooperation with other international higher education institutions, follow up on cameroonian students who are studying in China, set up a system which will encourages graduates to come back home after their studies to participate in the country's development, enrich the training curriculum by revising the current programme, focus more on practical courses and cultural animations and finally set up a micro-teaching programme.

This exploratory study builds upon extant reading development studies by identifying discrete groups based on reading comprehension trajectories across first grade. The main goal of this study was to enhance the field's understanding of early reading comprehension development and its underlying subcomponent skills, with the intent of better understanding the development of comprehension in students who display risk for reading difficulties and disabilities. A sample of first-grade readers (N = 314) were assessed at three timepoints across the first-grade year. These data were utilized to derive empirical latent classes based on reading comprehension performance across the first-grade year. Reading subcomponent skill assessments (phonological awareness, word reading, decoding, linguistic comprehension, and reading fluency), measured in the fall of first grade, were compared across latent classes to examine how they related to growth across the first-grade year. Results suggest that there were four distinct latent classes with differential reading comprehension development, each of which could also be distinguished by the subskill assessments. These findings are presented within the context of the broader reading research base, and implications for practice are discussed.

This study is aimed at investigating the perceptions of inservice English-medium instruction (EMI) teachers towards CLIL and CLIL teachers' target language and intercultural competences. The participants were 59 Thai/local and international native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) and non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) at EMI schools in Thailand. The participants attended the one-day CLIL teacher training workshop used as the research context of the study. Questionnaire and audio recordings of the workshop were used as instruments in collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. Results indicated that Thai teachers generally perceived their CLIL knowledge and competences as the lowest in all areas. International NNESTs, by contrast, ranked themselves the highest in most areas, except for overall target language competence, where their perceived competence was slightly lower than international NESTs. These results can raise question of whether NESTs are more competent in EMI classrooms. Through thematic analysis, it was found that opportunities to learn and share about CLIL, to use English in intercultural settings, and to learn about intercultural awareness can contribute to EMI/CLIL teacher competences. Recommendations are provided regarding CLIL teachers' professional development for local and international teachers in the Thai EMI school contexts and alike.

Existing studies on L2 motivation have established a significant association between ideal self, learning engagement, and academic achievement, but few have examined the internal relationships between these variables in the L2 writing domain. In addition, students' linguistic competence, a fundamental element of writing achievement, remains underrepresented in most research on L2 integrated writing (IW). Considering that learner motivation and engagement may vary across different tasks, this study invited 589 Chinese secondary school students to complete tasks of story continuation (as an IW task) and linguistic competence, as well as a questionnaire relating to ideal writing self and engagement. Structural equation modeling results showed that: (1) linguistic competence was a significant direct predictor not only of students' writing achievement but also of their ideal L2 writing selves; and (2) despite the significant contribution of ideal L2 writing selves to the three kinds of learning engagement, only behavioral engagement was a distinctive and unique mediator that materialized students' inner psychological drive towards writing performance. The pedagogical implications are discussed.

This meta-analysis aimed to systematically investigate the cognitive and linguistic correlates of both word decoding and reading comprehension among children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) across orthographies. Based on data from 26 studies of 1.92- to 18.92-year-old children with ASD, we found that (1) intelligence, theory of mind, and executive function exhibited modest associations (rs = 0.41, 0.46, and 0.39, respectively) with reading; (2) phonological awareness, semantic skills, and syntax skills also showed modest associations (rs = 0.53, 0.50, and 0.53, respectively) with reading; (3) cognitive and linguistic skills showed comparable contributions to word decoding and reading comprehension, when both skills were analyzed in the same model with meta-analytic structural equation modeling; (4) age, language type, publication type, sample type, and reading measures did not moderate the relations. Taken together, these findings suggested that although children with ASD exhibit language weaknesses, their linguistic skills still made important contributions to reading development beyond cognitive skills. Further, cognitive skills may compensate for language deficits in children with ASD's reading development. Implications for reading interventions in children with ASD were also discussed.

Vulnerability of morphosyntactic production, including grammatical aspect, has been identified in at least some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to typologically different languages. However, Tovar et al. (2015) found strengths in comprehending grammatical aspect in English-exposed children with ASD, suggesting that the challenges in production are pragmatically based. Using the eye-movement measures of Intermodal Preferential Looking, this study further explored whether Mandarin-exposed preschoolers with ASD were able to map aspect morphemes onto their distinct meanings in comprehension, despite their apparent impairments in aspect production. The results revealed that a diverse sample of 2-6-year-old Mandarin-exposed children with ASD demonstrated similar patterns of comprehending the perfective morpheme "le" and the progressive morpheme "zai" as younger 1-3-year-old TD children, even though the children with ASD's vocabulary production scores were dramatically delayed. Specifically, both groups of children associated the perfective morpheme "le" with the completed action and the progressive morpheme "zai" with the ongoing action. Our findings suggest that despite their apparent deficits of using/producing grammatical aspect, comprehension of grammatical aspect is a strength in children with ASD across languages. Moreover, grammatical aspect appears to be preserved in children with ASD, despite their pragmatic deficits and vocabulary disadvantages. The experimental findings shed light on the sharp contrast between linguistic competence versus linguistic performance in autistic grammatical acquisition. Furthermore, the results highlight the dissociation between the grammatical vs. the pragmatic and lexical language modules in children with ASD.

This article reports on a critical policy study on refugee education in two states of Australia, which involved an analysis of policy documents and interviews with policy developers. The findings show that policy development for students from refugee backgrounds is affected by structures including ways of knowing refugees, desires to measure their linguistic 'performance' and the internal structures of the organisations in which policies are developed. These structures shape and are shaped by the actions of individual policy makers as agents. Without awareness of these structures in policy making, they can inadvertently reinforce deficit framings of student groups such as refugees.

In this paper, I argue for expanding language socialization research on the academic discourse socialization of speakers of English as an additional language to less-commonly researched settings outside of English-dominant countries. Following an overview of some theoretical and methodological issues involved in conducting such research, I lay out a research agenda, focusing on several topics and issues that have the potential to illuminate issues of interest in both language socialization and second language acquisition regarding how competence and community are defined in a globalized, multilingual world. These include: (a) closer investigation of presumed 'cultural differences' between 'Western' and 'Asian' academic discourse practices, (b) the effect of social categories such as ethnicity and 'nonnative speaker' status on the construction of 'expert' and 'novice' identities in these settings, (c) the role of socializing agents outside of the classroom, and (d) the extent to which students in these settings are being socialized into practices and ideologies that promote multicompetence.

The "purpose" of the study is to identify how the speech production component of the linguistic competence, which seems to be a deficiency of using the Moodle LMS in the language training, can be enhanced through the use of the voice-administered language tests. Ten Moodle-based voice-administered language tests were designed, piloted, and employed to influence the stages of speech production component and English language proficiency level both seen as an approach to enhancing the linguistic competence of students majoring in foreign language Philology. The tests assessed the components of linguistic competence such as cohesion and coherence, vocabulary (lexical resource), along with grammar, and accuracy. The course satisfaction survey was used to study the experimental group students' perceptions towards the use of voice-administered language tests to develop linguistic competence. It was found that the designed Moodle-based voice-administered language tests could be considered a feasible and reliable option to enhance the linguistic competence in the students majoring in Foreign Language Philology. The tests had influenced the stages of the speech production component and English language proficiency level, in general. They also improve students' cohesion and coherence, vocabulary (lexical resource), grammar, and accuracy that are seen as components of linguistic competence. Due to the intervention, there was a considerable shift in the EG students' English vocabulary profile. There was a movement to higher levels of proficiency in the use of vocabulary compared to the CG students whose growth was marginal, mostly in the B1 level. It was also found that the EG students were generally satisfied with the intervention, the design and content of the tests, and the effectiveness of the tests in developing linguistic competence.

This study analyses variation sets in a sample of child-directed speech (CDS) in Turkish in terms of their structure and effect on child speech. The term "variation set" was first introduced to describe the sequences of repetitions, in which the intention behind expressions stays the same throughout the whole conversation while the form shows constant variation. This occurs in various ways such as lexical substitution, rephrasing and so on. This study attempts to investigate the speech of a child aged 1;8 in various conversations with a Turkish native speaker parent who engages in daily activities with her son. As a longitudinal study, the data was collected through video recordings for a period of three months covering the child's developmental stages from the age 1;8 to 1;10. The videos were recorded by the mother on a regular basis during day-time activities in play, meal and leisure times each week. Initially, the recorded data was transcribed and variation sets were identified. Later, they were analysed by looking at their structure and functions in the speech. Finally, the findings were compared with each other (in three sets) for the changes in frequency, structure and functions between the ages of 1;8 to 1;10. The data provide ample evidence on how variation sets in CDS are modified for a successful interaction without a communication breakdown in line with the child's linguistic competence.

ICT tools have gained particular importance in the English as a foreign language classroom in order to promote students' interaction, exchange of opinions, negotiation of meaning, or digital competence. Technological development and the impact of multimedia and virtual spaces on students' lives make educational institutions and teachers explore new tools and strategies to learn the target language. Podcasts present content available on the Internet and can become an influential teaching strategy that may improve the teaching-learning process of EFL. This study aims to investigate the effect of audio podcasts, which deal with social inequality issues, on secondary education students' EFL linguistic competence. A sample of seventy-eight students was randomly distributed into a control and an experimental group during a term in a high school in Madrid (Spain). As instruments for data collection, the grades obtained in the different skills in the pre and post-tests and the different task performance scores were analysed in both groups. The methodological framework is defined as a quasi-experimental design that provides quantitative data. The results confirm the hypothesis that the creation and use of podcasts are beneficial for improving EFL linguistic competence, especially speaking and listening skills. Practical implications aimed at organising English classes to improve EFL proficiency are discussed.

The Home Learning Environment (HLE) focuses on everyday learning habits in families to support the development of children's early cognitive competencies. A growing number of studies have assessed the HLE by using different conceptual approaches and various assessment methods, often focusing on either the home literacy environment or the home numeracy environment. However, it is still unclear whether the 2 dimensions of the HLE are separable constructs and which assessment method is best suited for assessing the HLE, making it difficult to interpret and compare different study results. In the current study, we used multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analyses to compare 3 common methods for assessing the HLE and their relations to various outcomes of kindergarten children. Our sample consisted of 2 independent cohorts of children (N[subscript 1] = 190, N[subscript 2] = 310) with an average age of 61 months (SD = 4.6). In both cohorts, the MTMM matrix showed a substantial effect of common methods and indicated a 1-dimensional HLE construct indicated most strongly by the children's book title recognition test (TRT-VS). Even when controlling for child and family characteristics (i.e., intelligence and socioeconomic status), the HLE was statistically significantly related to both the mathematical competencies and the linguistic competencies of the child in a structural equation model. This pattern of results was found consistently across both cohorts. We discuss the significance of a 1-dimensional HLE construct and its different assessment methods in the light of implications for future research and interventional approaches.

The paper discussed in detail the process of language development and the process of language acquisition in early childhood. It also gave a brief overview of the theoretical frame of reference of language development. The paper included an in depth explanation of the importance and impact of overexposure for early second language acquisition and it answered the question of whether language learning could turn into a language acquisition after what Noam Chomsky referred to as the "critical period". The paper concluded that even after the Chomskian critical period learners who got overexposed to the target language can acquire the language and it can be equivalent to their first language. The paper discussed two major kinds of motivations at play in the process of second language acquisition: (1) Curiosity: A desire to better understand a group of people and their way of life , and (2) Empathy: Upon repeated exposure, one might come to the conclusion that this group of people has a more sensible handle on things, and thus identifies with them.

Since Ure (1971) and Halliday (1985), different measures have been proposed in the research literature as a proxy for investigating lexicon advances. They are called lexical richness measures and are an important tool in assessing advance of the lexicon (Johansson, 2009). This article evaluates three lexical richness measures of progress in the acquisition of Hebrew by Arab students in Israel: level of abstractness, lexical diversity, and density lexical. The corpus consisted of sixty essays written in Hebrew by 9th and 11th graders. The quantitative analysis reveals several findings. First, abstractness increases with subjects' age, as expected. The density test, however, did not show the expected increase in density with age. A likely reason for this is relatively high density in younger pupils' essays, indicating lack of cohesion rather than high linguistic competence. The national high school language curriculum for eleventh graders focuses on connectivity, which causes a decrease in density. Third, the diversity test also did not yield statistically significant findings, probably because this test is influenced by text length, which in the ninth grade still does not enable a reliable test. In conclusion, the lexical measures can be divided into two types: basic tests, that can be applied at any level of competence; and advanced tests, which require a high level of competence. Level of abstractness is of the first type: it is effective as a measure of progress in L2 acquisition even in the initial stages of acquisition, while diversity and density require a higher competence level.

This paper takes a sociolinguistic perspective in understanding the international student's experiences in a multilingual university context. Drawing on a narrative inquiry approach, the present qualitative case study investigates a Brazilian Chinese international student's lived experiences of studying in a Hong Kong university, with particular attention to his identity construction in both in-class and out-of-class contexts and the role of language in shaping his dynamic identity construction. The findings suggest that the international student's language (in)competence appears to be closely intertwined with his identity construction in situated contexts, intersecting with his inclusion/exclusion and empowerment/marginalisation. The findings also reveal that multiple language ideologies mediate the impact of the international student's language (in)competence on his identity construction in various situated contexts. Taken together, the findings call attention to the complex and dynamic interaction between identity construction, language (in)competence and language ideology in advancing our understanding of the international student's experiences in a multilingual university context.

A growing body of work suggests that speaker-race influences how infants and toddlers interpret the meanings of words. In two experiments, we explored the role of speaker-race on whether newly learned word-object pairs are generalized to new speakers. Seventy-two 20-month-olds were taught two word-object pairs from a familiar race speaker, and two different word-object pairs from an unfamiliar race speaker (four new pairs total). Using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, their interpretation of these new word-object pairs was tested using an unpictured novel speaker. We found that toddlers did not generalize word meanings taught by an unfamiliar race speaker to a new speaker (Experiment 1), unless given evidence that the unfamiliar race speaker was a member of the child's linguistic community through affiliative behaviour and linguistic competence (Experiment 2). In both experiments, generalization was observed for the word-object pairs taught by the familiar race speaker. These experiments indicate that children attend to speakers' non-linguistic properties, and this, in turn, can influence the perceived relevance of speakers' labels.

This article investigates whether explicit instruction can affect second language (L2) competence in the domain of English quantifier scope. An intervention study was conducted with L1-Mandarin L2-English learners in order to examine (1) whether these learners can learn inverse scope for the structure on which they are instructed (double-quantifier configuration: "A dog scared every man"; quantifier-negation configuration: "Every sheep did not jump over the fence"); (2) whether they can correctly generalize availability of inverse scope from the configuration on which they are instructed to one on which they are not instructed; and (3) whether learners overgeneralize inverse scope to a superficially similar configuration that does not allow inverse scope. Following Schwartz (1993), generalization is taken to be a hallmark of true acquisition (= changes to linguistic competence) as opposed to learning. The results show that learners successfully learn inverse scope for the configuration on which they are instructed, but do not generalize availability of inverse scope to the other configuration. Moreover, learners instructed on double-quantifier configurations overgeneralize availability of inverse scope to island configurations such as "There is one dog which scared every man." The findings indicate that in this domain, explicit instruction does not affect linguistic competence.

Effective communication requires social and cultural norms in addition to linguistic competence. This study explores the challenges that people who studied English in Burundi face when communicating in English. It, also, seeks to determine the causes of these challenges. To this end, people who often participate in meetings, conferences, or workshops where the working language is English were identified and given a questionnaire made of open-ended and multiple-choice questions. Results indicate that respondents do not know which elements of the language are essential for communication. They consider that the linguistic competence alone is enough for being able to communicate. For example, learners consider that being able to pronounce correctly the language and knowing the technical terms may be enough for them to communicate their ideas. It is also found out that the causes of this lack of effective communication may lie in the inadequate teaching methods adopted in Burundi.

Higher education focuses on promoting the training of autonomous, critical professionals who adapt to the ever-more demanding labor market. To achieve these objectives, it is necessary to rethink teaching practices in order to allow the student to be the main actor and modeler for their learning process. Previous studies based on Vygotsky's sociocultural theory have shown that learning should be treated as a socio-cultural activity. Indeed, according to this approach, individual knowledge is firstly constructed at a social level. Peer review, for its part, is a learning tool based on the sociocultural approach. It allows students to achieve higher levels of autonomy and critical thinking. This research's aim is, on the one hand, to analyze the effect of peer review on the quality of academic essays and, on the other, to examine the way in which linguistic and communicative competence in academic writing are affected. This experimental study was carried out with 68 level B1 + students (32 men and 36 women) in a private university in Ecuador during one academic year. After the statistical analysis, it is concluded that peer review has a positive impact on academic writing. However, the impact is higher in the communicative competence than in the linguistic competence. This result is aligned with previous research, which shows that students tend to prioritize message over form. Future research should investigate peer review's long-term impact upon students and their ability to transfer skills acquired in English class to other subjects, or even to professional contexts.

To increase knowledge of international students' psychological well-being at U.S. universities, we examined the degree to which demographic factors, perceived language competence, and domestic student social support were associated with Ryff's (1989a, 1989b) six aspects of psychological well-being. Participants (n = 216) were undergraduate and graduate students from one mid-sized private university in the Southeast. Analyses revealed differential psychological well-being scores based on demographics. Perceived language competence and domestic student social support were associated positively with multiple aspects of psychological well-being. The novel findings of this case study provide initial evidence of a potentially useful new approach toward international student adjustment and well-being. The authors provide initial recommendations for researchers, practitioners, and international students.

The successful acquisition of a heritage language (HL) has been the focus of much of the research on early bi-, tri- and multilingualism in the last years, since it is this language which is generally delimited within the family environment and finds less continuity outside this context once the multilingual child starts socialising in the community (language). Our study contributes to this research by analyzing Spanish and German as HL or majority languages (MaL) and the children's (receptive) linguistic competence from 86 multilingual children recruited in Germany and Spain (mean age 57.5 months). With the aid of a linguistic background questionnaire, Family Language Policies (FLP), presence/absence of HL in the family, institution and community for 50 of these children were examined. Our study shows that, in early multilingual acquisition, Spanish and German are acquired similarly when enjoying community support, on the one hand, or when being acquired as heritage languages, on the one hand. In these early years, the chosen FLP seems to have an impact on HL-competence, yet up to age 5;0. Other factors, such as the presence of the HL in the institution, act as useful pillars for promoting HL-competence, yet its presence in the family becomes decisive.

Some students are unable to fully comprehend lecture content delivered in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) because of their low linguistic competence. This negatively impacts their academic emotions and learning satisfaction. Speech-enabled language translation (SELT) technology was applied in this study to simultaneously translate lecture content from English into native language of students and show translated text to students. This study investigated the effectiveness of a SELT application on perceived academic emotions and learning satisfaction of students attending lectures in EMI. Thirty-three university students participated, and perceived academic emotions and learning satisfaction were measured and compared across two groups of students: low language ability (LLA), and high language ability (HLA). The level of perceived academic emotions of LLA students was low before lectures but high during and after lectures. HLA students perceived high levels of academic emotions before lectures and low during and after lectures. LLA students' level of learning satisfaction was much better in comparison to HLA students. The results suggest that SELT technology is beneficial for learning for LLA students. Therefore, educators and researchers may apply SELT technology to EMI lectures in order to facilitate LLA students levels of perceived academic emotions and learning satisfaction.

As working life across the world is increasingly multilingual, multicultural and multidisciplinary, higher education language teaching is faced with a challenge of how to prepare students for it. Many universities have recently developed multilingual pedagogies but central to their success is learners' perceptions of these practices. To fill this gap, this article explores first year university students' language learner biographies to gain insight into how learners construct their linguistic realities. The biographies were studied with discourse analytical methods to examine the participants' beliefs about language learning and their sense of agency in it. The results reveal that participants tend not to portray themselves as agentive learners but rather position agency as an outside factor affecting their language learning. In addition, the participants' discourses differed in terms of languages, which adds to previous studies noting the complexity of learner beliefs. Understanding these dynamics can help teachers address students' beliefs in the classroom and accordingly support learners to create meaning in their language learning. The findings further suggest that beliefs should be studied from multilingual perspectives also in the future.

This study looks into the affective factors influencing students' experiences in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) at the beginning of bilingual secondary education (at the age of 11-12), when being streamed into two strands with a different degree of exposure to CLIL, depending on their linguistic competence. Results were drawn from 10 structured interviews with students spotted as salient cases in 157 validated questionnaires. Students' responses to the interviews were analyzed following Grounded Theory. The categories emerging from the analysis are related to students' values, attitudes and beliefs towards bilingual education, their motivation, perceptions on learning and degree of satisfaction with their strand. Our findings indicate that instrumental motivation plays an important role in these students' views, which vary depending on the strand: i.e., students in the high-exposure strand seem to see themselves more at ease and in control of their choices, whereas low-exposure strand students experience more ambivalence over the transition.

Computer-supported collaborative learning facilitates the extension of second language acquisition into social practice. Studies on its achievement effects speak directly to the pedagogical notion of treating communicative practice in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC): real-time communication that takes place between human beings via the instrumentality of computers in forms of text, audio and video communication, such as live chat and chatrooms as socially-oriented meaning construction. This review begins by considering the adoption of social interactionist views to identify key paradigms and supportive principles of computer-supported collaborative learning. A special focus on two components of communicative competence is then presented to explore interactional variables in synchronous computer-mediated communication along with a review of research. There follows a discussion on a synthesis of interactional variables in negotiated interaction and co-construction of knowledge from psycholinguistic and social cohesion perspectives. This review reveals both possibilities and disparities of language socialization in promoting intersubjective learning and diversifying the salient use of interactively creative language in computer-supported collaborative learning environments in service of communicative competence.