Student interest is associated with persistence in STEM courses of study (Maltese, Melki, & Wiebke, 2014). If peers decide, of their own accord, to discuss knowledge among each other outside of the classroom context, the behavior is indicative of deepening interest in the information being shared (Renninger & Hidi, 2002). Understanding…

Encouraged by previous studies which recommended incorporating insights from Conversation Analysis (CA) into English conversation teaching to improve EFL students' oral proficiency, this paper reports on the findings from Phase I of a longitudinal study designed to investigate the impact of employing a CA-informed teaching (CA-T) model to improve…

Because English is widely used as a lingua franca, language testers have started to consider the introduction of non-native accents into English listening tests. This study investigates how accents influence test-takers' performance, and also elicits test-takers' subjective perception of accents. Eighty adolescent L1-Mandarin test takers were…

This study reports the findings from an exploration of K-12 administrators in a rural state about how they can more effectively engage and involve families of English language learners (ELLs). The guiding questions for this study are: (1) How does the role of administrators influence the engagement and involvement of ELL parents within K-12…

Previous scholarship has demonstrated the value of high-impact practices of community engagement, inquiry-based pedagogy, and collaborative learning for engagement and learning in sociology courses, especially undergraduate research methods and statistics. This article explores the changes made to an upper-division undergraduate course focused on…

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students' performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and…

In an era of continuous technological advancement and severe financial crisis, the cloud computing paradigm has become one of the most prominent and influential developments in information technology since the emergence of the Internet. This chapter describes the second phase of an action research study, which aimed at addressing the problem of…

This study examined the effects of task demand and familiarity on students' perception and processing of spatial information upon viewing visuospatial representations. Participants in South Korea were told that they would travel through an area, either drawing a map or observing the scenery depicted in photographs. The level of familiarity in the…

The present study aims to explore English as a Foreign Language (hereafter EFL) instructors? recognition of count-mass distinction regarding the concept of individuation and judgment of quantity. Accordingly, fifteen EFL instructors recruited from different public universities in Turkey were asked to write the plural forms of a sum of fifty count…

The purpose of this study is to determine the factors affecting the intercultural sensitivity perception levels of Psychological Counseling and Guidance students. This study was conducted in Pamukkale University which is located in the western part of Turkey. Data were gathered from 524 freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior students who are…

This article investigates the effect of different accents on high- and low-proficiency second language (L2) learners. It begins with testing the English listening proficiency of Chinese students and then compares the influence of three accented English (a British accent, an Australian accent and an Indian accent) on their listening scores.…

This study aims to examine preservice teachers' sentiments toward students with special needs, attitudes, and concerns about inclusive education in terms of a number of demographic variables. These demographics included major area, grade level, gender, interaction with disabled people, training for inclusive education, self-confidence for teaching…

The emergence of videoconferencing tools in the 1990s provided language learners with opportunities to carry out speaking practice anytime and anywhere. However, the presence of Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) in this interactional setting can hinder such ubiquitous benefits as FLA inhibits learning and communication in the Foreign Language (FL)…

Purpose: The capacity of 6-month-old infants to discriminate a voicing contrast (/aba/--/apa/) on the basis of "amplitude modulation (AM) cues" and "frequency modulation (FM) cues" was evaluated. Method: Several vocoded speech conditions were designed to either degrade FM cues in 4 or 32 bands or degrade AM in 32 bands. Infants…

Two age groups of children, 5- and 6-year-olds (n = 30) and 8- and 9-year-olds (n = 26), made judgments about which of two items a character should choose: a gender-typical item or a gender-atypical item that was preferred by the character. Judgments were made about situations where the character was (a) in a familiar public setting and (b) in a…