This study explores how vocabulary learning strategy usage and skills in the four language domains relate to participants’ increase in vocabulary size and to the learning of specific vocabulary items over a certain period of time. Sixty-one advanced L1 Arabic L2 learners of English read target words in semi-authentic reading materials and were instructed to either guess the meaning from context or consult a dictionary. Pre- and delayed post-tests assessed vocabulary size and knowledge of the target vocabulary items. Results showed that learning through inferencing, but not learning through dictionary use, depended on learners’ familiarity with the particular learning strategy. Additionally, note taking and reading comprehension influenced lexical knowledge and acquisition in complex ways.

Sentential negation in spoken Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has three possible structures: containing a negative particle only preverbally (NEG1), pre and post verbally (NEG2) or only post-verbally (NEG3). The choice of structure depends on sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors. This study investigates whether these structures also differ in prosodic patterns. NEG3 is of particular interest: since the negative particle occurs after the verb, a NEG3 sentence is initially segmentally indistinguishable from a similar sentence not containing a negative particle (NoNEG). However, prosodic cues may tell the listener whether a given utterance has a NEG3 or NoNEG structure before the post-verbal region is encountered. A production study elicited NEG1, NEG2, NEG3 and NoNEG utterances and found prosodic differences among the utterance types which may enable listeners to anticipate the presence or absence of a post-verbal negative particle.

This study examines whether lexical repetition, syntactic skills, and working memory (WM) affect children's syntactic-priming behavior, i.e. their tendency to adopt previously encountered syntactic structures. Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children were primed with prenominal (e.g. the yellow cup) or relative clause (RC; e.g. the cup that is yellow) structures with or without lexical overlap and performed additional tests of productive syntactic skills and WM capacity. Results revealed a reliable syntactic-priming effect without lexical boost in both groups: SLI and TD children produced more RCs following RC primes than following prenominal primes. Grammaticality requirements influenced RC productions in that SLI children produced fewer grammatical RCs than TD children. Of the additional measures, WM positively affected how frequently children produced dispreferred RC structures, but productive syntactic skills had no effect. The results support an implicit-learning account of syntactic priming and emphasize the importance of WM in syntactic priming tasks.

This article reports on an interview study with six secondary school LX English teachers working in a part of Austria where there is an above-average number of residents–and thus also students–who are multilingual and come from migration backgrounds. It attempts to extend research on deficit perspectives of multilingual learners from migration backgrounds to the area of LX English learning and to provide insights into a language learning context that is underrepresented in international applied linguistics research, which has tended to focus on elite language learning. The article explores teachers’ perceptions of teaching English in this context. We hypothesized that teachers would hold negative beliefs about their students’ multilingual backgrounds and practices. The typological analysis of teachers’ interview data revealed that teachers did hold some dominant deficit perspectives about their students’ multilingualism and language learning; however, it also suggests that teachers are taking on the rudiments of a translanguaging stance that values multilingual practice. The article thus closes by considering how possibility perspectives can be harnessed and extended to foster students’ multilingual and multicultural development, with particular regard to LX English language learning.

This study investigates the effect of different vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) as well as different learner styles on vocabulary size in Saudi Arabic-speaking students in higher education. The goals of this study were to examine which VLS undergraduates used more frequently than postgraduates and vice versa, to determine which VLS related positively and significantly to vocabulary size, and to explore individual learner styles and their relationship to vocabulary size. Participants filled in a VLS questionnaire and completed a vocabulary size test. The results indicated that undergraduates tended to use simpler strategies than postgraduates. The strategies of guessing a word’s meaning from context and watching television related positively with vocabulary size in both groups. Clustering analysis revealed two learner groups which differed in how frequently they used VLS overall, rather than in terms of which VLS they preferred. Those students who used more VLS overall also had larger vocabulary sizes, irrespective of educational level. We thus found no evidence for differences in individual learner styles in the current groups. We conclude that VLS usage should be encouraged overall, but that the need for instructors to cater to individual vocabulary learning styles may not be warranted.

The educational disparities that can be found in the English language learning outcomes of middle school students in Austria have gone relatively unexplored in international research. National studies have tended to attribute lower educational outcomes either to students’ socioeconomic status or their multilingual background. In this article, we use the theory of intersectionality to shed new light on how educational disparities that run along socioeconomic lines are tightly entangled with beliefs about students’ multilingualism, arguing that these two factors must be explored in tandem to understand educational disadvantage in this context. Our study brings together a rich description of the educational context with a quantitative exploration via questionnaire of the beliefs and classroom practices of 56 English teachers at Austrian middle schools. Analyses of the data allow insight into how teachers’ beliefs about their students’ abilities, motivations and access to English outside of school and teachers’ language use in the classroom all relate to the lower outcomes in English at Austrian middle schools. The article closes by considering the importance of the findings for policy and practice in English language education in Austria, including ideas for the transformation of these.