This mixed-methods case study investigates learner engagement during pair work, focusing on four key aspects--behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and social engagement--and how these relate to task performance. The study included 60 university students (34 females, 26 males) learning English as a second language, who collaborated in pairs on a…

Researchers, parents, and policymakers from previous generations have recently expressed concern about the inevitable exposure of youngsters to digital media and its potentially detrimental effects on their development. Private speech is the overt audible self-talk people produce when engaged with challenging problem-solving tasks and is believed…

Event segmentation tests have shown substantial overlaps in how adults recognize starts and endpoints as events unfold. However, far less is known about what role different language systems play in the process. Variations in grammatical aspect have been shown to influence event processing. We tested how closely first language (L1) speakers of…

This study examines how post-reading continuation task designs affect Chinese high school students' English creative writing skills. Using stratified sampling and quasi-experimental design, 120 first-year students from three school types participated in a 10-week intervention (pre-test, intervention, post-test). The experimental group completed…

In response to calls for an assessment tool that provides a separate performance dimension from the linguistic quality-oriented measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) and guided by systemic functional linguistic (SFL) theories, this study introduces a set of fine-grained objective measures of communication/content/function…

In this paper, we report a longitudinal study of the effects of procedural task repetition on learners' task performance (i.e., syntactic complexity in relation to lexical complexity). We investigated how task repetition results in differences at the group and individual level across each task interval (T = 7). Intermediate-level Saudi learners of…

This study examines the effects of the continuation task and the model-as-feedback writing task (MAFW) on English as a foreign language (EFL) vocabulary learning. Three classes of intermediate-level Chinese EFL learners were randomly assigned to a continuation group, a MAFW group, and a control group. Three aspects of vocabulary knowledge --…

This book provides a groundbreaking exploration of how task-based language teaching (TBLT) can effectively develop second language (L2) pragmatic competence in young learners. Bridging the gap between TBLT and L2 pragmatics, this volume addresses critical issues in language education, offering insights into teaching key speech acts. Specifically,…

In Canada, the federally funded Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program follows a task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach using the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB). Aligned with other communicative language approaches, TBLT de-emphasizes systematic instruction of the morpho-syntactic elements of language. Although TBLT…

The interactions among cognitive, affective, and linguistic factors have received scant attention in task-based writing research. To address this gap, this study aims to examine the relationships among task complexity, task motivation, task engagement, and syntactic complexity in second language (L2) writing. One hundred L2 learners enrolled in an…

Few studies aimed to disentangle different aspects of vocabulary depth (VD) knowledge and examine their contribution to second-language (L2) reading comprehension. To fill this gap, this study distinguished between two VD aspects, that is, semantic network knowledge and polysemous knowledge; and tested how they, together with vocabulary size (VS),…

In this task-repetition intervention study, L2 learners' reuse of linguistic constructions was analyzed to investigate to what extent recurring reliance on specific constructions during the same task repetition predicts fluency development. English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners performed oral narrative tasks three times per day under two…

The present study adopts the four-step framework of course development processes proposed by Graves (1996) to develop a writing course for EFL Vietnamese undergraduates. A total of 60 students were asked to take a writing test and a survey about writing problems to identify their "objective needs". Then "subjective needs" were…

Previous research has shown that task repetition can positively affect L2 oral performance. However, few studies have explored the effects of task repetition on young EFL learners' production. Also, task repetition research has paid little attention to effects of "spacing" examined through longer time intervals between the two occasions…

The current study examines the digital behaviors of 124 university students enrolled in a blended learning class in Korea. The students were divided into two groups (upper and lower) based on their scores on a self-regulated learning questionnaire. Their digital behaviors were compared across four areas: (a) task completion scores; (b) strategy…