Although several studies underline the importance of a successful opening of a school lesson to spur students' interest and facilitate learning, we have limited knowledge about how openings are enacted in classrooms. This study contributes to the sparse research by asking: "What characterizes the openings of 58 reading lessons in Norwegian…

This study investigated what features undergraduate EFL learners perceive as affecting the difficulty of model paragraphs. Four hundred and seventy-five Vietnamese undergraduates participated in a partial least squares structural equation model design. They ranked five paragraphs from easiest to most difficult and responded to a 10-point Likert…

Applying a mixed-methods design, this study aims to generate knowledge regarding decreasing study abroad involvement amongst Japanese students. Based on data collected from a group of first-year Japanese university students, the authors propose six qualities of a predominantly willing, or self-selecting, group of study abroad participants,…

Answering calls to map college-level proficiency development (Modern Language Association, 2007) and longitudinally chart language learning (Barkaoui, 2014; Ortega & Byrnes, 2008), we mapped the oral proficiency growth of 1,922 lower-division college students of Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish (in the second, third, or fourth semester of…

Writing to report research writing may be a daunting task since it requires motivation, interest, background knowledge and hard work from the part of students. This paper focused on the major obstacles faced by the English foreign language learners in research writing at Belhadj Bouchaib University, Algeria, in addition to the teachers' attitudes…

Over the last decades, attempts at empowering student voice have captured, cross-culturally, the attention of educators as a means for improving educational landscapes. Hence, students have been repositioned as invaluable resources in schooling, research, and reform movements. To this aim, this study is to capture how the Iranian MA TEFL students'…

Difficulties establishing support for English speakers taking second language electives in postsecondary education in Ireland led to research on how language classes could be more accessible, multicultural, plurilingual and relevant for students in a university language centre. It is important to try and discover why students choose a foreign…

This study investigated the impact of topic interest, alongside L2 proficiency and gender, on L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading. A repeated-measures design was used with 135 Korean EFL students. Control variables included topic familiarity, prior target-word knowledge, and target-word difficulty (word length, class, and concreteness).…

This article aims to provide an extensive review of web-based instruction (WBI), implemented within the realm of English language teaching (ELT). WBI is a teaching method that utilizes computer technology to promote learning experiences by leveraging the internet and web applications. It is suggested that educators carefully consider the related…

This study investigates the effects of topic interest and prior knowledge on text recall and annotation use of second language learners engaged in reading a hypermedia text. The participants were proficient learners of English enrolled in an undergraduate English Language Teaching programme. They were asked to read a hypermedia text that…

Separates the effects of prior knowledge and topic interest on second language reading comprehension. English-as-a-Second-Language students in an English for academic purposes program read passages and took multiple-choice comprehension tests on topics for which they had all four possible combinations of high and low topic interest and high and…

Investigated the effects of readers' gender, topic familiarity, enjoyment, and interest on second language reading. University students of Spanish completed a reading passage each day, a written recall comprehension task, and a questionnaire. Findings suggest that in addition to linguistic factors, other variables such as gender, passage content,…