Social media use has become increasingly embedded in everyday life. Among various social media, Facebook is a highly interactive virtual social communication tool and it has become increasingly popular on college campuses. Research results have indicated that Facebook could be an effective platform for informal learning. However, most of current…

Building on previous studies of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) on SLA, and principled criteria for confirming its existence in L2 data, an empirical study was run on 74 Arab learners of English (ALEs). A detailed analysis was made of interlanguage stages of the simple past tense forms in 222 written texts produced by ALEs in the classroom…

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…

A limitation of extensive reading programmes is the time required for progress in vocabulary acquisition. This paper reports on a qualitative exploration of student perceptions of the value of non-compulsory comic books in ESL elementary and upper-intermediate level courses at a tertiary institution. We aimed to develop supplementary materials…

This article presents the findings of an action research study on developing learner autonomy through project work in an English for Specific Purposes class. The study was conducted at a Colombian regional and public university with environmental engineering undergraduates. The instruments for data collection were field notes, semi-structured…

Based on Bailey's washback model, in respect of participants, process and products, the present empirical study was conducted to find the actual washback effects of the internet-based College English Test Band 4 (IB CET-4). The methods adopted are questionnaires, class observation, interview and the analysis of both the CET-4 teaching and testing…

This study examines the beliefs of Chinese junior high school English teachers about foreign language teaching and influencing contextual factors in a time when curriculum innovation is confronting deep-rooted cultural traditions and complex teaching realities. Drawing upon data collected by means of questionnaires and interviews, this study…

This paper reports on the effect of a Moodle-supported strategy instruction on both reading comprehension and strategy use among EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students. Specific reading strategy training was first integrated into a Moodle system, which included reading exercises on problem identification, monitoring comprehension,…

The Writing Pal (W-Pal) is an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) designed to provide students with explicit writing strategy instruction and practice. W-Pal includes a suite of educational games developed to increase writing engagement and provide opportunities to practice writing strategies. In this study, first (L1) (n = 26) and second (L2)…

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of a new coding system that incorporates the various types of metatalk that occurred during paired learners' engagement in a consciousness-raising task. On the basis of previous studies, metalanguage (e.g. with or without terminology), knowledge sources (e.g. intuition), and verbalisation strategies…

Delivering high-quality reading instruction to English language learners (ELLs) in the early grades is one of the most challenging issues facing schools. The report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth (NLP; August & Shanahan, 2006) defined "English language learners" as students who come from language backgrounds…

The article is a reflection on the various areas of cognitive linguistic research on metonymy that are of potential relevance for SLA. Three of them are particularly relevant: (1) research on metonymy-guided inferencing; (2) research on metonymy-based lexical polysemy, and (3) research on metonymy-based grammatical constructions. Of the three main…

Problem Statement: Teaching a language with the help of computers and the Internet has attracted the attention of many practitioners and researchers in the last 20 years, so the number of studies that investigate whether computers and the Internet promote language learning continues to increase. These studies have focused on exploring the beliefs…

Language learning process works through the learners' own reflection on how they learn and it makes learners active in the sense that they learn to analyze their learning strategies. So they start making decisions, e.g., whether to improve them or not, and in which way. Generally, this trait is missing in traditional language teaching process and…

This research study investigated the influence of learners' mother tongue on their acquisition of English collocations. Having drawn the linguistic data from two groups of Thai EFL learners differing in English proficiency level, the researcher found that the native language (L1) plays a significant role in the participants' collocation learning…