The study conducted a questionnaire survey of university students, the purpose of which was to determine how students do their independent work while learning a foreign language and to reveal the difficulties in this process .The whole learning process of a structured in such a way as to arouse students' interest in those materials on the language…

Educational video games (EVGs) offer instructors a myriad of opportunities to motivate and engage students in the learning process. Nevertheless, instructors can be influenced by barriers that prevent them from using EVGs in their courses (e.g. lack of expertise with EVGs). Instructors can also be influenced by different drivers that might…

This paper argues for bringing insights from linguistics into the world language classroom. At any level of study, such insights can add intellectual interest to the study of a target language (TL), and can also help students accept and acquire aspects of the TL that are different from their first language or that are inherently challenging. As a…

In formal education, the teaching of natural sciences begins when children are about 12 years old. Teachers justify this with the difficulty and abstraction of concepts in these sciences, and they refer to the theory of child development by Piaget. However, numerous examples from everyday life, from non-formal education, analysis of the…

This research aimed to explore the upper-secondary school chemistry teachers' and students' conceptual structures of atomic structure by using multidimensional scaling. Atomic structure is considered to be one of the most difficult concepts in upper-secondary school chemistry course so that the conceptual structure regarding atomic structure held…

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

This study investigates the effects of adding stem preview to an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) multiple-choice listening assessment. In stem preview, listeners may view the item stems, but not response options, before listening. Previous research indicates that adding preview to an exam typically decreases difficulty, but raises concerns…

This article uses systems and complexity theory to illustrate key characteristics of writing as a complex system. This illustration reveals how writing works on multiple levels of scale, and adds to the body of theoretical knowledge that can be taught within the discipline of writing studies. In so doing, it shows how a complex systems writing…

Instruction in second language (L2) English phoneme pronunciation almost invariably includes a focus on improving the learners' use of their articulatory organs to pronounce the relevant sounds. However, the pronunciation of many English sounds also relies on effort from the abdominal region, and under-utilization of this region can often…

This work analyses students' failure in the 2019 Nationwide Chemistry Examination in Greece, which concerns secondary education graduates, competing for admission to higher education Greek institutions. The distinction of thinking skills into higher and lower order (HOTS and LOTS) is used as a theoretical tool for this analysis. The examination…

Momentum is a foundational concept in physics. Although it is often taught in introductory mechanics courses, there are a limited number of studies on this topic in the literature. The results from these studies have consistently shown that students have difficulties in understanding momentum, especially the connections between net force, time,…

In this study, we analyzed the imprecise (i.e., less mathematically precise) responses that 148 third- to fifth-grade Chinese students made on selected-response problems that were part of a spontaneous mathematical focusing task, the Quantitative Relations Test for Chinese Children (QRTC[superscript 2]). The purpose for this analysis was to…

Language in chemistry is highly specialized, and for students, transitions in language complexity from high school to university can be extremely challenging. With an increasingly diverse cohort of students enrolled in UK chemistry degree programs, better understanding the linguistic challenges students face is becoming a greater pedagogical…

The purpose of this study is to identify in which stage/stages of the Process Writing Approach students have difficulties most. This posttest-experimental study was applied to the 50 first-year students studying English Translation and Interpreting. The students were expected to produce an essay with the help of the Process Writing Approach at the…

Listening has long been recognized as a challenging skill for teachers, students, and researchers working within the English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Moreover, up until the recent past, it was the least researched of the four language skills in second language acquisition studies. One of the issues…