This study examines whether children's decontextualized talk-talk about nonpresent events, explanations, or pretend-at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language (AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL proficiency has been identified as an important predictor of adolescent text comprehension. Yet research on precursors to AL proficiency is...

With Grey relational analysis (GRA), the paper examined the sensitivity of eight variables influencing test performance at branch level. The eight variables involved included language proficiency, test anxiety, self-esteem, achievement motivation, achievement goal, English proficiency test anxiety (EPTA), state anxiety and trait anxiety. Results showed that: (a) Besides language proficiency, mo...

According to Oxford (1990), strategies are steps taken by students to enhance their own learning. This research attempted to investigate the impact of teaching vocabulary learning strategies on short-term and long-term retention of vocabulary items. The sample participants included 303 females randomly selected from one all-female governmental Pre-university school (PUC) in Iran. They were then...

This study examined the role of adolescents' and mothers' self-reports of English and heritage language proficiency in youth's academic and emotional adjustment among 444 Chinese American families. Adolescents who were proficient in English tended to exhibit higher reading achievement scores, math achievement scores, and overall GPA. Mothers who were English proficient tended to have children w...

This study investigates whether working memory capacity (WMC) varies across languages and in the course of L2 speech proficiency levels. Following suggestions in Finardi and Weissheimer (2009) and Prebianca (2010), who found that WMC varied as a function of L2 speech proficiency, the present study assessed three proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced) and two languages (L1-Po...

Verbal working memory is recognized as a strong predictor of L2 reading development in the area of learning new vocabulary, reading comprehension, and overall L2 proficiency in alphabetic languages such as English. However, few studies have addressed if the same is true in logographic languages such as Japanese. Previous literature has indicated that phonology plays a weaker role in reading Jap...

For objective evaluation of the second language learner’s translation proficiency, we tested two measures commonly used in statistical machine translation. One is word n-gram probability of a target language to measure likelihood of translated sentences as a target language. The other one is translation probabilities from source language sentences to target language sentences to measure transla...

In 2000 Census microdata, various outcomes of second-generation immigrants are related to their parents' age at arrival to the United States, and in particular whether that age fell within the "critical period" of language acquisition. We interpret this as an effect of the parent's English-language skills and construct an instrumental variable for parental English proficiency. Estimates of the ...