Learning to read and write the Japanese language is not an easy task. For the non-Japanese speaker this can be a struggle and a challenge. Some schools in Western Australia offer children the opportunity to learn Japanese as a foreign language. Consequently, Japanese as a foreign language unit is offered to all undergraduate students in Education.…

The aim of this article is to show that the use of Spanish grammatical aspect is biased by inherent aspect depending on the learner's first language (L1). It considers both the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH; Andersen, 1986, and his followers) and the L1 Transfer Hypothesis (Izquierdo & Collins, 2008; McManus, 2015), and it compares the use of…

Two groups of freshman students, enrolled in a Vocabulary I and Reading I courses, participated in the study. Before instruction, both groups took a recognition (vocabulary) and a production (oral reading) pre-test. Comparisons of the pre-test scores showed no significant differences between the experimental and control group in decoding skills…

With anglophone countries now experiencing unprecedented levels of ethnic and linguistic diversity, it is considered increasingly important that young people learn to communicate in ways which are effective for the multilingual and intercultural contexts they live in, will work in and will travel to. One of the key vehicles for promoting and…

Despite calls for engaging assessments targeting young language learners (YLLs) between 8 and 13 years old, what makes assessment tasks engaging and how such task characteristics affect measurement quality have not been well studied empirically. Furthermore, there has been a dearth of validity research about technology-enhanced speaking tests for…

This chapter introduces three applications of Bayesian inference to common and novel issues in second language research. After a review of the critiques of conventional hypothesis testing, our focus centers on ways Bayesian inference can be used for dealing with missing data, for testing theory-driven substantive hypotheses without a default null…

When learning English, learners might face a challenging task in mastering pronunciation due to differences in both languages such as sound-to-letter correspondence, size of phoneme inventory, allophonic realization of sounds, place and manner of articulation, among others. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to review both theoretical and…

Cognitive complexity is traditionally used for describing human cognition along a simplicity-complexity axis in tests like TOFEL IBT and GRE where text creation and rhetorical organization are quintessentially important. Accordingly, this study sought to investigate the impact of mentor text modelling on cognitive complexity of academic writing…

This article draws on an approach that conceptualizes L2 learning difficulty in terms of implicit and explicit knowledge. In a study with first language Mexican Spanish university-level learners (n = 30), their teachers (n = 11), and applied linguistics experts (n = 3), we investigated the relationship between (a) these groups' difficulty…

This study explored the usefulness of dual-task methodology, self-ratings, and expert judgments in assessing task-generated cognitive demands as a way to provide validity evidence for manipulations of task complexity. The participants were 96 students and 61 English as a second language (ESL) teachers. The students, 48 English native speakers and…

This study aims to identify which communication strategies (CSs) are most frequently used by Thai engineering students at Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology (TNI), Thailand and to investigate the relationship between CS use and exposure to oral communication in English. An adapted Metcalfe and Noom-Ura's Oral Communication Strategy Inventory…

The study aims to explore how 18 M.A. TESOL students, who are prospective or experienced ESL/EFL teachers, perceive poetry writing in a second language. A qualitative interview-based design was utilized. Following Iida's (2012a) analytical framework in examining EFL students' perceptions toward writing haiku in English, this current study…

English writing is regarded as the most difficult task by Chinese EFL learners. Due to the existing problems in present college English writing instruction, teachers fail to provide effective guidance in students' writing process and students report a low level of motivation and confidence in writing tasks. Through purposeful reading discussions…

Working with Korean university-level learners of English, this study provides a detailed analytical comparison of 2 task work groups that were video-recorded, with 1 group scoring very high and the other relatively low based on the results of a Group Work Dynamic (GWD) measuring instrument. Adopting a complexity theory (CT) perspective and…

Some metacognitive mental activities were explored on chemical reading activities as specific judgments called metacognitive judgments. A think-aloud protocol was carried out to fifteen chemistry teacher candidates to express their judgments on chemical reading activities for question posing. Two chemical articles were designed to stimulate these…