Background: The purported reciprocity between motivation and academic achievement in education has largely been supported by correlational data. Aims: Our first aim was to determine experimentally whether motivation and achievement are reciprocally related. The second objective was to investigate a potential behavioural mediation pathway between…

Background: Previous studies have indicated that encouraging learners to teach to their peers has been proven effective in second language learning. However, to date, no research has focused on how learners teaching to peers of varying proficiency levels impacts video learning performance and the cognitive neuroscience mechanisms of learners.…

Despite the well-established role of lexis in proficiency in the four skills, a great deal of research has focused on the importance of vocabulary breadth and depth in reading. Therefore, the neglect of productive skills has motivated recent calls to inspect the impact of lexical dimensions on writing ability. Using Partial Least Squares…

Extensive reading (ER) has been found to have an assortment of positive effects on various aspects of second/foreign language learning. However, few studies have investigated its impacts on learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL), especially early beginning learners. To address this gap, this study reports an intervention of extensive…

Motivated by the increasing popularity of service-provider virtual exchanges (SPVEs), in which native speakers (NS) are trained, supervised, and paid by a third-party company to converse about cultural topics with second language (L2) learners, this study examines the potential of L2-NS videoconferencing conversations to foster negotiation of…

Background/purpose: This study examines how well EFL students perform in English language learning using Kagan's Cooperative Learning Approach (KCLA). Conventional teaching approaches frequently fail to actively involve students, which lowers achievement. With an emphasis on teamwork and active engagement, this study seeks to ascertain whether…

This study explores student-initiated translanguaging in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context, particularly with AI translation tools, an area largely overlooked in favor of teacher-led approaches. Using a sequential explanatory mixed-method design, the research examined how 69 undergraduates at a Thai university, across various…

Mobile apps have surged in popularity, enhancing the effectiveness of more traditional second or foreign language (L2) teaching and enabling independent L2 learning. Drawing on control-value theory, the present research examined the role of students' control-value appraisals in enhancing behavioral engagement via enjoyment and boredom in specific…

The current study investigates whether vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, and vocabulary fluency contribute differentially to L2 reading and listening comprehension. One hundred and thirty-eight EFL learners first took three vocabulary knowledge tests that measured vocabulary fluency, vocabulary breadth, and vocabulary depth. Subsequently, they…

Vocabulary plays a significant role in the learning process of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, especially undergraduates who need to read academic materials and listen to specialized lectures in English. However, retaining lexical items is still a challenging task for many EFL learners. The current study seeks to examine the…

Copying words by writing and typing are two effective methods in traditional learning, but their merits for learning L2 words have seldom been compared. Because of technological advances and the growing popularity of utilising smart mobile products to acquire L2 vocabulary, this study investigated the effectiveness of writing and typing techniques…

The use of mobile technologies has increasingly changed how students learn in the digital age. This study examined the effectiveness of using a mobile application called Shanbay Dan-Ci (SBDC) for acquiring new English vocabulary. Participants included 70 Chinese undergraduate L2 learners. Following a quasi-experimental design, two groups of L2…

This study investigates the use of formulaic sequences (FS) in academic writings of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language across different levels of studies at a public university in China. Frequency-based formulas were retrieved from a corpus of student academic texts written at five time points between Year 1 and Year 3. The…

Although teachers have access to a great deal of scholarship on teaching academic vocabulary (AV), much less is known about the experiences and perceptions of English language learners regarding AV. To address this gap, we used an online metaphor elicitation survey and follow-up interviews to collect data from 432 undergraduates at a Hong Kong…

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),…