This book provides an overview of affective individual variables that are considered relevant for second language learning and outlines a novel approach to researching them. In the first part of the book, the most prominent concepts and theories in connection with affective individual variables and tasks are discussed, followed by a literature…

Human behavior is not constant over the hours of the day, and there are considerable individual differences. Some people raise early and go to bed early and have their peek performance early in the day ("larks") while others tend to go to bed late and get up late and have their best performance later in the day ("owls"). In…

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) lays strong emphasis on task-based language teaching (TBLT). However, this approach constitutes a challenge for many foreign language teachers, not so much because they are not familiar with the approach or its benefits, but because of the requirements and practical conditions to be met. Most…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether explicit instruction focusing on metaphorical collocations would promote the incidental noticing of similar phrases by English learners during a subsequent reading task. Noticing was operationalized using the remember-know protocol and learning was measured on a fill-in-the-blanks test. In…

Examines the performance of Hungarian secondary school students on two types of unscripted tasks--an argument task and a narrative task. Focuses on grammatical patterns of learner language, and reports significant differences in the learners' performance. (Author/VWL)