Although listening is key to communication, it remains the least studied skill compared to other skills, both at the national and international levels, among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). There is also often a lack of awareness among scholars and teachers of how listening takes place, how it is best taught, and how it can be…

This paper intends to provide an Optimality-theoretic analysis of word-stress learnability among Moroccan learners of English. Language acquisition, from an Optimality Theory perspective, is a process of reordering the constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. To account for stress…

The present study addresses a significant but neglected aspect of vocabulary teaching in general and teaching collocations, in particular, which is color term collocations. A significant number of idioms involve use color terms such as blue blood, black death, red tape, black sheep, and yellow press that are significant to study in the context of…

This study applied Edmodo as a supplementary environment for additional language practice in a semi-technical English course in an EFL context, with a quasi-experimental between-subjects (control versus experimental group) design. In addition to conventional classroom instruction and practice, the experimental group practiced additional language…

The present study employed a mixed methods quasi-experimental design to investigate the effectiveness of applying motivational strategies and mental imagery (i.e. visionary techniques) to facilitate second language (L2) vocabulary learning. Four treatment sessions were integrated into a six-week language course offered to 150 intermediate students…

This study investigates the effects of adding stem preview to an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) multiple-choice listening assessment. In stem preview, listeners may view the item stems, but not response options, before listening. Previous research indicates that adding preview to an exam typically decreases difficulty, but raises concerns…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

This study investigated incidental learning of single-word items and collocations through listening to teacher talk. Although there are several studies that have investigated incidental vocabulary learning through listening, no intervention studies have explicitly investigated the extent to which listening to teachers in a classroom context might…

Spanish learners engaged in two-way interaction gap tasks where, through social interaction, they identified and defined low-frequency vocabulary. Participants (referred to as actors to differentiate them from task partners) completed two such tasks. Each time, they collaborated with different partners of varying degrees of Spanish proficiency and…

In this study the validity of partial dictation as a measure of overall language proficiency was examined. Two partial dictation tests along with a C-Test, a cloze test, and a reading comprehension test, as criterion measures, were administered to a group of Iranian EFL learners. The coefficients of correlation between partial dictation and…

With multiple options to choose from, there is always a chance of lucky guessing by examinees on multiple-choice (MC) items, thereby potentially introducing bias in item difficulty estimates. Correct responses by random guessing thus pose threats to the validity of claims made from test performance on an MC test. Under the Rasch framework, the…

Despite the increasing number of U.S. born Latinos, placing heritage and native speakers in the Spanish curriculum is still a challenge (MacGregor-Mendoza & Moreno, 2020). The present article: (1) addresses the unique needs of heritage speakers in the Spanish curriculum; (2) problematizes traditional grammar-based placement exams; and (3)…

This study investigated the effects of captions on the listening comprehension of vlogs. A total of 96 EFL learners watched three vlogs under one of three conditions: L2 captions, L1 captions, and no captions. Each group included low-, mid-, and high-level proficiency learners. The vlogs differed in the pictorial support of the audio, with Vlog 1…

Missing data is a common problem in datasets that are obtained by administration of educational and psychological tests. It is widely known that existence of missing observations in data can lead to serious problems such as biased parameter estimates and inflation of standard errors. Most of the missing data imputation methods are focused on…

This exploratory study examines the role of foreign and second language contexts in the acquisition of conventional expressions. A group of 21 ESL learners was compared to 25 EFL learners randomly selected from a larger pool. Both groups completed an aural multiple-choice discourse completion task (MC-DCT), which was developed from a previously…