Hae In Park

Embracing “the political economy turn,” applied linguistics has increasingly examined socioeconomic class as a central construct in language learning. Prior research highlights links between socioeconomic status (SES) and learning outcomes, often contributing to divides such as the English Divide in South Korea. Yet few studies have systematically incorporated perceived SES as a predictor of learners’ language learning choices. Two additional constructs—international posture and initial proficiency—also remain underexplored despite their potential to shape learners’ selection of learning contexts. To address these gaps, this study examines three groups in Korea ( n = 207)—study abroad sojourners, working holidaymakers, and at‐home students—with respect to their perceived SES, initial proficiency, and international posture, using the Douglas Fir Group's three‐level framework. Mixed‐methods data were collected through surveys, elicited imitation tasks, and interviews, and analyzed through a multinomial logistic regression and thematic analysis. The findings revealed that perceived SES, initial proficiency, and posture collectively predicted learners’ choices across micro‐, meso‐, and macro‐levels. This study demonstrates how individual difference variables interact with meso‐level structures and broader macro‐level sociocultural ideologies, ultimately shaping learners’ decision‐making processes and language learning trajectories.

While much discussion has focused on what researchers do and should do in second language proficiency assessment, less attention has been given to why persistent trends continue. This study investigated second language acquisition (SLA) researchers’ beliefs, reported practices, and decision-making rationales regarding proficiency assessment. Using an online survey, we collected responses from 111 SLA researchers. Findings revealed that while researchers generally endorsed recommended methodological standards, practical constraints—such as time, accessibility, and ease of administration—frequently influenced their reported practices. A consistent belief–practice gap emerged across several key areas. Notably, reduced redundancy tests were rated favorably for both validity and practicality, reflecting a growing shift toward efficient, validated tools. These findings suggest that although methodological awareness is high, practical barriers continue to challenge the adoption of more rigorous proficiency assessment practices in SLA research.

While understanding and expressing causal relations are universal aspects of human cognition, language users may differ in their capacity to perceive, interpret, and express events. One source of variation in descriptions of caused motion events is agentivity, which refers to the attribution of a result to the agent's action. Depending on the perspective taken, the same event may be described with agentive or non-agentive interpretations. Does language play a role in how people construe and express caused motion events? The present study investigated the use of agentive vs. non-agentive language by speakers of different languages (i.e., monolingual speakers of English and Korean, and Korean learners of English). All three groups described prototypical causal events similarly, using agentive language (active transitive sentences). However, when it came to non-prototypical causal events (where the agent was not shown in the scene), they diverged in their choice of language: English speakers favored agentive language (passive transitive sentences), whereas Korean speakers preferred non-agentive language (intransitive sentences). Korean learners of English patterned with Korean speakers, demonstrating L1 influence on their use of English. These findings highlight the effects of language on motion event construal.

This study examines a 30-item Spanish elicited imitation task (EIT) as a measure of global language proficiency for heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish. Results from Rasch modeling suggest that, while EIT scores demonstrated excellent reliability, the ability of much of the HL sample far exceeded the difficulty of the items. Differential item functioning analysis revealed that several items functioned differently for the present study’s HL sample than for the second language learners from a prior study. Additionally, although EIT scores were strongly correlated with another proficiency measure for the present HL sample (e.g., the Diploma de español como lengua extranjera or DELE), common-person equating suggested that the EIT and the DELE may measure different latent variables. Overall, the results provide evidence of the EIT’s utility as a proficiency assessment tool for research on HL learners, however, with limitations and the need for additional analyses discussed.

Given that 10 years have passed since the publication of the most recent synthesis of proficiency assessment standards, the present review revisits proficiency assessment practices in research on second language acquisition (SLA), with the goal of examining whether the way in which scholars measure and report proficiency has changed. Our sample included 500 studies from five major SLA‐related journals published between 2012 and 2019. The findings indicate that whereas over 90% of the studies assessed and reported second language proficiency in some way, only 42% of them did so with an independent measure. In line with previous surveys, the most popular assessment technique was institutional status, suggesting that relatively little change has taken place over time. Use or not of an independent measure of proficiency was also found to differ by certain study characteristics (e.g., learner population, research context), providing insight into areas of focus for future improvement.

While an elicited imitation test (EIT) has been widely used as a measure of oral proficiency in second language acquisition (SLA) research, it is still unclear the extent to which memory capacity impacts EIT performance. In light of this gap, the present study sought to clarify the nature of elicited imitation by examining the relative contributions of language ability and phonological short‐term memory (PSTM) to EIT performance. Seventy‐eight second language (L2) learners of Spanish, who were grouped into 3 Spanish experience levels, took a Spanish EIT, an L2 oral narrative task, and a nonword repetition (NWR) task in their first language. Results demonstrated that learners’ EIT performance was primarily predicted by complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) measures extracted from the oral narrative task rather than NWR scores, which served as an index for PSTM capacity. Furthermore, the present study provided suggestive evidence that PSTM capacity may differentially mediate EIT performance depending on the extent of learners’ proficiency in and experience with Spanish. While facilitative effects for PSTM capacity were observed for less experienced learners, no effects were found for more experienced learners.

The present study compared both linguistic and non-linguistic representations of motion events in Korean–English sequential bilinguals sampled at varying proficiency levels (N = 80) against each other and against those of Korean and English monolinguals (N = 15 each). The bilinguals' L2 descriptions of motion events showed that their encoding patterns were influenced by both the first language (L1) and second language (L2) and also displayed unique behaviors that were not found in either monolingual norm. The non-verbal results on a triads-matching task demonstrated that bilinguals' categorization patterns followed L1-based patterns rather than L2-based patterns. The extent to which these bilinguals employed L2 encoding patterns in their motion event descriptions was largely modulated by L2 proficiency, whereas length of immersion experience in an L2-speaking country emerged as the only predictor of their non-verbal categorization patterns. These findings suggest that the bilinguals' verbal behavior seems more susceptible to change than their non-verbal behavior.