Previous research has shown that studying orientations are important factors in determining academic performance. The main purpose of this study was to investigate how Greek students' approaches to studying in combination with gender, academic discipline, and professional degree in English affect performance on verbal fluency tasks in English as a…

Unexpected interruptions introduced during the execution phase of simple Tower of London problems incurred a time cost when the interrupted goal was retrieved, and this cost was exacerbated the longer the goal was suspended. Furthermore, time taken to retrieve goals was greater following a more complex interruption, indicating the processing…

This study investigated the effects of second language (L2) proficiency differences in pairs and patterns of interaction on L2 learning, making use of both qualitative and quantitative data. We designed the study in such a way that four different "core" participants interacted with higher and lower proficiency "non-core"…

In the Singlish-"Good" English debate, the use of Singlish (SCE) is viewed as an obstacle to the development of students' literacy skills in standard English (SSE) and so the practice of classroom codeswitching between the two varieties is strongly discouraged. Yet the presence of the vernacular in the classroom continues to be robust.…

This study examined development of pragmatic comprehension ability across time. Twenty native speakers and 92 Japanese college students of English completed a computerized listening task measuring ability to comprehend two types of implied meaning in dialogues: indirect refusals (k = 24) and indirect opinions (k = 24). The participants'…

In general terms automaticity could be defined as the subconscious condition wherein "we perform a complex series of tasks very quickly and efficiently, without having to think about the various components and subcomponents of action involved" (DeKeyser 2001: 125). For language learning, Segalowitz (2003) characterised automaticity as a…

Two components of teaching are tasksetting behavior and optimizing behavior. The former is the actions of the teacher to achieve the goals of teaching a specific curriculum; the latter is the actions of the teacher to improve or accelerate the pupil's learning. Reading and physical education teachers were studied to investigate the relationship…

We present in this paper five case studies of instrumental genesis of number-theoretic concepts and techniques involving multiples, divisors, and numerical decomposition. The pupils, who were 12 to 15 years old, used the multi-line screen display of the graphing calculator to explore numerical tasks related to the "Five steps to zero"…

This paper summarizes the thinking of 84 middle school mathematics students' about variability in three stochastics tasks that involve repeated trial. Differences in students' acknowledgment of variability were found, depending on whether the task was from a sampling environment, or a probability environment. Students tended to neglect variability…

The process of forming practical abilities and skills in training situations through the control of the assimilation process is described, and an experimental application of this process for the instruction of machine operators is reported. Six references are included. (CHC)

Examines what opportunities test takers have to display their knowledge of managing conversations in the second language in two types of tasks: nonscripted interviews and guided role-play activities. Data consists of 30 interviews and 30 role-play activities between near-native examiners and intermediate learners used in language exams in Hungary.…

Reports on a conference workshop that addressed Visual Information Retrieval Interfaces (VIRIs). Topics include evaluation methods; task dimension for evaluating VIRIs; efforts to fund European development of VIRIs; metrics, including cosine vector; navigation among documents; and interactions with users. (LRW)

In two experiments, poor and normal Dutch readers, matched for reading age, were presented with visual matching tasks on a computer screen. In the first experiment, word and pseudoword letter strings were used. Poor readers needed more time to decode uppercase/lowercase pairs, especially when the pairs consisted of pseudowords. Experiment 2…

Examines the impact of interaction enhancement (IE) on the learning of English articles. IE is a treatment that guides learners to focus on form by providing interactional modifications and leads learners to produce modified output within a problem-solving task (strategic interaction). (Author/VWL)

Investigates control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system in visual word recognition. Used a visual lexical decision task to explore control processes in proficient German-English bilinguals. Critical stimuli were interlingual homographs such as the low-frequency English word "tag," which means day in German. Overall, participants…