At some UK universities, non-credit bearing courses for the general public are offered in a wide range of languages, often taught by hourly paid staff. Ensuring similar, high quality learning experiences and learning outcomes across languages can be a challenge. This study inquired into the viability and value of a consciousness-raising approach,…

Purpose -- In this study, the writing needs of postgraduate research students are explored, so that support structures that enable successful completion rates and student satisfaction can be identified. Postgraduate education is expanding in Malaysian public and private higher education institutions; yet research tends to focus on public…

The study of the individual learner differences including learner effectiveness has been a genuine concern for second language researchers. The present study strove to examine the impact of learner effectiveness on the language learners' learning strategy use. According to this purpose, first, the researchers developed the two-part 40-item…

Metadiscourse, as an important analytic tool, was rarely used to explore the generic structure of Ph.D. dissertation acknowledgments, and within this genre, the role of gender has been unexplored. This study employs interactional resources within the metadiscourse framework (Hyland, 2005) to investigate gender differences in 120 dissertation…

"Serious Games [SGs] are applications combining educational content with gameplay by integrating learning objectives into a game-like environment" (Thillainathan & Leimeister, 2014, p. 1). However, they have not been used much in language teacher education and training (Ulicsak, 2010). This paper describes the design of…

Although intercultural communication competence can be developed through cross-cultural experiences and dialogues (Jin, Cooper & Golding, 2016) and involving interactions (Rodenborg & Boisen, 2013), studies show that Chinese graduate students considered advanced English speakers continuously report difficulties in engaging in…

Across the globe, the emergence of COVID-19 led to widespread, sudden suspension of in-person instruction, displacing more than 1.5 billion learners (Capilla et al., 2020). Addressing the gap in research on emergency remote teaching (ERT), this empirical study draws on insights from semi-structured interviews with 10 in-service and five…

The lack of exchange between international students and host nationals in Japan has long been a pressing issue, yet very little progress has been made to rectify this situation. In this study, we examined this issue by focusing on how international students in Japan perceive cultural contact with their host and home culture members during their…

Students and teachers from different language backgrounds are at risk of becoming victims of conflicting trends and conventions when writing in English. This study compares conventions of English academic writing at several European universities with what is taught in English-speaking countries. Data were collected with questionnaires and by…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have come to stay supported by the development of educational technologies, and within them, Language MOOCs (LMOOCs) are a phenomenon that has risen in expectations but also shown their limitations. This study aims at comparing students' preferences from two universities (UCO, Spain, and ULS, Poland) regarding…

The perfective aspect marker in Chinese is partly functionally similar to inflectional suffixes in Indo-European languages but is non-inflectional and lexical in nature, lying thus at the semantics-syntax interface. This provides us with the opportunity to compare directly the syntactic and semantic constraints during second language (L2) sentence…

"Open Doors"® is the only long-standing, comprehensive information resource on international students and scholars in the United States and on U.S. students studying abroad for academic credit. "Open Doors" features graphic displays, data tables, and analyses and is the essential resource for those concerned with U.S.…

This qualitative study investigates the lived experiences of interculturality among international students enrolled in a top-rated comprehensive university in Shanghai and a key provincial university in China's hinterland. Based on an analysis of narrative interviews with 20 international students from different sociocultural backgrounds, the…

Studies examining decontextualized associative vocabulary learning have shown that long spacing between encounters with an item facilitates learning more than short or no spacing, a phenomenon known as distributed practice effect. However, the effect of spacing on learning words in context is less researched and the results, so far, are…

The present study investigated the production of the speech act of disagreement among Tunisian non-native students of English and American native speakers of English. Discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit disagreement strategies by the informants. Non-native informants produced a total of 376 acts and native informants produced 395…