Abstracts archive

I report on questionnaire and interview-based research soliciting the views of three parties on proofreading: (i) UK university lecturers; (ii) English language tutors; and (ii) undergraduate and postgraduate students. There are highly differing views of the ethical appropriacy of different forms of...

Debate holds promise as a conducive mechanism for second language writing development. We will present the findings of a longitudinal study that we conducted in three secondary schools in which we explored the potential of L2 debating tasks for developing L2 writing skills.

Primary schools are increasingly adopting a CLIL approach to language teaching, at a time that the linguistic diversity of pupils has increased significantly. We report on research that integrates expertise from EAL and early-English teachers in the UK and Netherlands to inform our understanding of ...

In FIFA men’s football, two ideologies clash: the practices of fans as celebration of local identity and big business. We explore the role of new media and digital technology in these competing discourses with regard to (re-)namings of stadia (e.g. St. James Park to Sports Direct Arena in Newcastl...

This paper interrogates the concept of (inter)disciplinarity and explores its role in thesis writing in a context of institutional mergers, internationalisation, and the use of English as a medium of instruction (EMI).

All children in Denmark has the option of studying French in (public) elementary school and later in highschool, which includes various immigrant backgrounds. Whether their French teachers adopt inclusive approaches to teaching culture and the pupils see themselves reflected in the French curriculum...

Gestures can facilitate comprehension and specific gestural forms/timings are associated with negation, including the ambiguities arising from negation+quantification in English. Analyses of L1/L2 English comprehension of ambiguous sentences among 66 L2 learners and 10 NS of English revealed moderat...

The present study examines L2 peer interaction in an EFL context. The aim of the current study is to reconsider the role of peer interaction and L1 use for L2 development. The findings show speakers' use of L1 linguistic repertoires and L1 cultural knowledge in L2 interaction. 

This contribution will present the different lexical phenomena that occur across different types of hate speech. In a second step, these insights will be extended to the field of automatic hate speech detection to discuss the role that lexical approaches can have for the development of detection sys...

A new multilingual education policy, driven by research, is being promoted in Israel. Results of two studies and their contribution to the new policy are addressed in this presentation, emphasizing the essential role of empirical studies in shaping valid language policies.

This study examines the phraseology of the linking adverbial “besides” to unravel why, unlike similar-meaning transitions such as “in addition,” it sounds unnatural in some contexts. Analysis of written English corpora and grammar reference materials suggests that its natural use is regulate...

In the case of a contested language, there is often disagreement over the naming of the vernacular. I analyze language portraits by pupils participating minority language education to explore how they label different languages at school. The naming practices of such pupils seem to display less fixed...

The presenter reports on a professional development project that helped language teachers in Japan gain knowledge about conducting quantitative research. Teachers conducted a small-scale study on engagement in an extensive reading activity in their own classrooms and collaborated throughout the proc...

The aim of this study is to investigate the linguistic landscape, on-line and off-line, used by particular Russian-speaking families in Cyprus/Estonia/Sweden, and to compare the positions and the preferences of the minority and dominant languages, exclusion and/or imposition as a reflection of power...

In highly textualized societies, individuals with low alphabetic literacy are at risk of being left out. This paper reports findings from a European project which explored coaching to promote independence in alphabetically low literate learners acquiring a second language. Findings suggest that coac...

This ERP study shows how L2 elicited emotional detachment affects the appreciation of L2 humour by Chinese L2 users of English.

This study analyses the potential role of video viewing and language aptitude on the learning of L2 vocabulary by young beginner learners who were regularly exposed to L1 subtitled TV series during one academic year. Results are discussed in the light of the mediating role of type of exposure and in...

In this quasi-experimental research, the moderating role of Language Aptitude (LA) was assessed in relation to timing of Form-Focused Instruction within a task cycle (before, during or after the task) and level of proficiency of learners. Results show that different components of LA are associated w...

The study investigated the relationship between cognitive fluency and utterance fluency-what linguistic knowledge is essential for L2 learners to speak fluently-in the context of 128 Japanese learners of English. An SEM analysis showed that breakdown fluency is associated with linguistic resources a...

This study investigates the academic socialization experience of eight multilingual students studying abroad in China. It addresses how social networks are constructed and negotiated by L2 learners and examines their impacts on academic socialization in the local community.

In this talk, I outline the potential and limitations of taking a case study approach to researching pedagogies aimed at supporting the scholarly research writing of plurilingual scientists living outside centres of knowledge production.

Catalan, Spanish and English coexist in universities from Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. The presence of the regional language in higher education differs in both regions. Focus groups with students were carried out to understand the roles that these three languages have in each region.

This paper explores how randomness is to be defined. It then relates the relationship of intra-individual linguistic variation to the recognizability of the connections between variables, to cross-varietal influence and to acquisitional trajectories. It asks whether, in the light of these factors, i...

This talk will shed light on the relationship between extramural English and productive English-as-a-foreign-language vocabulary knowledge in young learners who have not yet received any formal instruction in English. Audio-visual input without subtitles and video games were found to contribute to l...

This contribution focuses on the role of crosslinguistic awareness in the L3 transfer of tense-aspect systems in Romance languages. Crosslinguistic awareness will be shown to play a major role in enhancing the learners’ ability to deploy language-specific strategies in order to avoid negative tran...

Our study explores how emotions, motivation, and self-efficacy beliefs about English classes in general and language tasks in particular shape secondary school students' task performance on a written narrative task. Results suggest that links can be established between emotions, engagement/flow and ...

Learner-initiated engagement with English through leisure activities is common amongst many learners globally. The present study explores Greek adolescent learners and the effect of their informal second language learning in their use of discourse markers in spoken production.

This study compares English (L2) development in two different study abroad (SA) contexts: traditional SA and English as a lingua franca study abroad. Results show that the two contexts are comparable regarding L2 reading, vocabulary and proficiency development, and that individual variables have a s...

This study investigates L2 learners’ language developmental patterns in oral and written modalities on the basis of processability theory. Similarities and differences in L2 learners’ oral and written production were analyzed in terms of the emergence and accuracy of morphosyntactic structures.

The paper outlines the potential effects of streaming on inequity in the context of bilingual education in Madrid. The study presents ethnographic data gathered mainly from interviews with key stakeholders on students’ transition from primary to secondary and their placement in one of two CLIL str...