Based on qualitative data obtained from 15 South Asian (SA) B.Ed. (EL) (Bachelor of Education in English Language) students, this study reports on SA students' difficulty in mastering Mandarin-based written Chinese and the vernacular Cantonese in Hong Kong. For convenience, SA here also refers to students whose homeland is the Philippines. Since…

Learners' ability to recognize linguistic contrasts in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated using a paired-comparison discrimination task. Minimal pairs containing contrasts in five linguistic categories (i.e., the formational parameters of movement, handshape, orientation, and location in ASL phonology, and a category comprised of…

This study investigated the effects of simultaneous written text on the comprehension of spoken English as a foreign language, when the text is presented with the aid of a personal digital assistant (PDA) as a learning tool. Eighty-seven university students majoring in applied foreign languages were randomly assigned to either listening with…

Compared with reading, writing and listening, there has been a paucity of empirical data documenting learners' experiences of speaking English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) in different learning contexts in spite of the fact that developing the ability to speak in a second or foreign language is widely…

Background: The study deepened our understanding of how students' self-ef?cacy beliefs contribute to the context of teaching English as a foreign language in the framework of cognitive mediational paradigm at a ?ne-tuned task-speci?c level. Aim: The aim was to examine the relationship among task complexity, self-ef?cacy beliefs, domain-related…

The purpose of this study was to explore whether the results of Tree Based Regression (TBR) analyses, informed by a validated cognitive model, would enhance the interpretation of item difficulties in terms of the cognitive processes involved in answering the reading items included in two forms of the Michigan English Language Assessment Battery…

While press materials, are widely used both as an ESP materials resource and as a research source by ESP practitioners, press headlines in English confront the Non Native Speaker (NNS) and to some extent the Native Speaker (NS) with a notorious paradox: headlines are crafted to raise communication potential and yet, rather than communicate, they…

Previous research has shown that learners of English might experience considerable difficulty when giving constructive criticism to peers in instructional settings. Unlike native speakers, they tend to soften their criticism far less frequently while aggravating it far more often, and thus require pedagogical help in this area. The present study…

Recently, the significant role that pronunciation and prosody plays in processing spoken language has been widely recognized and a variety of teaching methodologies of pronunciation/prosody has been implemented in teaching foreign languages. Thus, an analysis of how similarly or differently native and L2 learners of a language use…

Since the mid-1990s, the link between recasts and L2 development has been extensively tested, and the results from those studies have largely demonstrated that recasts have a positive effect on L2 learning. With this firm support from previous empirical evidence, studies have begun to focus on how recasts assist learning and under what conditions…

Publishing graded readers is big business, but there is evidence that the texts themselves are not being read in sufficient quantity to improve language proficiency. This article reports on a study of graded readers, focusing on interviews with some major publishers of graded readers, to investigate their production rationales. The findings…

This study explores the development of multiple dimensions of linguistic complexity in the writing of beginning learners of German both as a group and as individuals. The data come from an annotated, longitudinal learner corpus. The development of lexicogrammatical complexity is explored at 2 intersections: (a) between cross-sectional trendlines…

Research on study-time allocation has largely focused on agenda-based regulation, such as whether learners select items for study that are in their region of proximal learning. In 4 experiments, the authors evaluated the contribution of habitual responding to study-time allocation (e.g., reading from left to right). In Experiments 1 and 2,…

This article reports a study on metaphor comprehension by the international students whose first language is not English, while attending undergraduate lectures at a British university. Study participants identified words or multiword items that they found difficult in extracts from four academic lectures, and they interpreted metaphors from those…

This paper discusses the role of various linguistic sub-disciplines in teaching Finnish and Hungarian. We sketch the profile of the two languages, including difficulties in learning and teaching them, and the context in which they are taught in the UK. Using examples from our own teaching, we argue that a linguistically oriented approach is well…