Education outcomes for L2 students in academic preparation programs, undergraduate studies, and graduate work are directly influenced by the learning and use of academic vocabulary. Among 15 Saudi graduate students studying in New Zealand, this study investigated at their perspectives with academic vocabulary learning. Students in Saudi Arabia who…

Many language learners lack the motivation to read complex texts. Because high-immersion Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly reported to be highly motivating, the goal of our study was to compare English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' (N=79) motivation while reading a story with subtitles in VR (experimental group) versus reading the same…

Learning vocabulary in any foreign language including English is vital, since it plays a central role in language learning. However, when compared to other skills, it is undoubtedly the most time-consuming skill to be mastered by learners and users of English due to various reasons. While learners exert much effort to memorise, store, and retrieve…

Writing is widely regarded as one of the most important parts in the field of second language learning and teaching. The main assessment elements of L2 writing can be divided into accuracy, fluency and complexity. The evaluation of writing, accuracy, fluency and complexity can not only measure the writing achievement of L2 writers, but also…

Studies from various disciplines have reported that spatial location of options in relation to processing order impacts the ultimate choice of the option. A large number of studies have found a primacy effect, that is, the tendency to prefer the first option. In this paper we report on evidence that position of the key in four-option…

Research Findings: The aim of this study was to construct and validate "English Picture Vocabulary Test (EPVT)" that aimed to assess the very young learners' (VYLs) receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge for specific content areas in English as a foreign language (EFL). In this context, EPVT was created in several stages. One of…

The purpose of this research is to investigate the variable production of English Object-Experiencer (OE) psych predicates among 80 L1 Thai EFL first-year university students. Psych verbs are notable for posing difficulty for learners due to a unique property that violates Grimshaw's (1990) Thematic Hierarchy. The participants were given a cloze…

This paper presents IdiomsTube (https://www.idiomstube.com), the first-ever computer-assisted language learning tool for facilitating the learning of English idiomatic expressions from YouTube videos. The web-based tool is designed to automatically (1) assess the speech rate and lexical difficulty level of any learner-chosen English-captioned…

English argumentative writing is difficult in second language writing for ESL students. Although there has been a lot of research on English argumentative writings, empirical research focusing on claims in argumentative writing is very scarce. Based on the Toulmin model, this paper studied the relationship between the claims and English…

This paper studies the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies for optimizing the sequencing of online learning materials to students. Our approach provides an end to end pipeline for automatically deriving and evaluating robust representations of students' interactions and policies for content sequencing in online educational settings. We…

Mandarin Chinese verbs are composed of one to four characters that function together as a conceptual unit. However, in modern spoken Chinese, most of these verbs are two-character compounds. This dissertation is focused on adult second language (L2) learners' acquisition of these two-character verb compounds. Specifically, the acquisition of a…

This paper is a quantitative study about learners' engagement and self-efficacy within a Virtual Reality (VR) learning environment while studying vocabulary in English in a classroom implementing a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach. VR was used as a tool for students to learn and better understand specific concepts studied…

This study explored the effects of increasing the number of elements and the degree of reasoning on second language (L2) writing and also examined the relationship between writing motivational beliefs and anxiety and L2 writing in simple versus complex tasks. Sixty upper-intermediate L2 learners were invited to write simple and complex…

The incidental or implicit learning of vocabulary has long been a topic of interest in various disciplines. In studies on foreign language acquisition, reading is often the activity that researchers use to generate their findings. "Reading in a Foreign Language" has maintained its position at the forefront of this research, consistently…

The Multiple-choice (MC) item format is commonly used in educational assessments due to its economy and effectiveness across a variety of content domains. However, numerous studies have examined the quality of MC items in high-stakes and higher-education assessments and found many flawed items, especially in terms of distractors. These faulty…