The broad relationship between students' self-efficacy and interest has been highlighted for decades. This, along with the inherently developmental nature of learning, calls for a more thorough examination of the way fluctuations in students' self-efficacy influence their interest in learning within a single course over an academic year and…

Language learning activities involving time-pressured repetition of similar content have been shown to facilitate improvements in fluency. However, concerns have been voiced about whether these gains might be offset by reduced levels of grammatical accuracy. This descriptive study tracked the oral proficiency of 32 Japanese university students…

The notion that digital games can be effectively employed as tools for learning and teaching has steadily been gaining traction among educational theorists and researchers, with numerous empirical studies pointing to the potential benefits of games for skill and knowledge development. However, a solid understanding of learners' attitudes and…

While psychologists often use a combination of physiological and self-reported data to examine the dynamic effects of stress on performance, the impact of affective states on Foreign Language (FL) speaking performance has almost exclusively been assessed using self-report methodology (e.g., questionnaires, interviews). In fact, studies that…

While perennial in the research landscape, empirical work investigating second language (L2) study emotions has proliferated in the past ten years (Dewaele, 2019). Nevertheless, this article argues there is space for more holistic yet detailed, social yet individual perspectives when conducting such research. As one avenue, the paper explores the…

The purpose of this paper is to (a) establish whether meaning recall and meaning recognition item formats test psychometrically distinct constructs of vocabulary knowledge which measure separate skills, and, if so, (b) determine whether each construct possesses unique properties predictive of L2 reading proficiency. Factor analyses and…

Modifying and hedging one's claims appropriately is an important characteristic of academic writing. This study focuses on the three main English modal verbs used to express "epistemic possibility" to avoid making strong statements, viz., "may", "might", and "could". The purpose of this corpus-based study is…

Although several researchers have demonstrated that foreign language (FL) learning experience has a limited effect on the short-term development of second language (L2) fluency, recent studies have suggested that learners can gain long-term (over one year) benefits from FL learning experiences. As a part of the present study, 50 Japanese…

Research has shown that learning a known-and-unknown word combination leads to greater learning than learning an unknown word alone (Kasahara, 2010, 2011). These studies found that attaching a known adjective to an unknown noun can help learners remember the unknown noun. Kasahara (2015) found that a known verb can serve as an effective cue to…

Although proponents of extensive reading (ER) have recommended easy reading material, book difficulty has been poorly defined and operationalized in previous studies. The present study argues for the use of perceived text difficulty for operationalizing book difficulty based on empirical findings (Holster et al., 2017), reading purposes in ER, and…

This comparative case study analysis investigated the effect of a flipped classroom model on college students' foreign language learning, under the Constructivist theoretical framework and Bloom's taxonomy. Flipped classroom model, also called flipped learning, emerged a decade ago in the education system as an innovative instruction method for it…

This study examined the differences in English learning goals and specific actions for goal achievement according to the degree of willingness to communicate (WTC) among Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners through qualitative analysis. This study aimed to ascertain: (1) the characteristics of English learning goals among learners…

The current study examined the extent to which first language (L1) utterance fluency measures can predict second language (L2) fluency and how L2 proficiency moderates the relationship between L1 and L2 fluency. A total of 104 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed different argumentative speech tasks in their L1 and L2. Their speaking…

The development of new media technology facilitates interaction between people of different cultures. However, people from different cultures show different cross-cultural communication behaviors that may influence their communication efficiency, perceived communication experiences, and perceived social presence. This study aimed to explore…

Readers should construct a coherent discourse during reading comprehension. The ability to build coherence has been examined using coherence and cohesion judgment tasks. Although eye-tracking studies have been conducted on building coherence or processing cohesion among native language users, few such studies have been conducted with second…