Motivation plays a role in nearly all human decision-making processes. Regardless of the situation, little may be achieved without the appropriate harnessing of motivation. The same is true in the music classroom. Research appears to indicate that motivation plays a crucial role in human development and achievement. The achievement motivation…

There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition" was published and its…

This book represents the first collection of studies on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) which brings together a range of perspectives through which CLIL has been investigated within Applied Linguistics. The book aims to show how the four perspectives of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL),…

This paper reports findings of a pilot study examining the feasibility of a research design to investigate how achievement goals relate to the construct of math anxiety. In addition, we also consider how other important achievement-related behaviors, like self-efficacy, help-seeking, and self-regulation, might also relate to students' math…

New media are commonplace in children's lives. Speech and language therapists (SLTs), educational psychologists and teachers are sometimes called upon by caregivers to provide advice on whether or how children and young people with language impairments should be encouraged to use these media. This article aims to illuminate some of the key…

In this article, the authors argue that at the center of every English language learning moment lies desire: desire for the language; for the identities that English represents; for capital, power, and images that are associated with English; for what is believed to lie beyond the doors that English unlocks. However, despite its centrality within…

Within the context of English as a foreign language (EFL), using blogs has emerged as a language learning tool. However, how teachers effectively incorporate blogs within the confines of an instructional framework and what the current research shows about using blogs as a learning tool remain unsolved issues. Thus, the current paper presents a…

Speech therapy homework is a key component of a successful speech therapy program, increasing carryover of learned speech sounds. Poor return rate of homework assigned, with a lack of parental involvement, is a problem. The purpose of this project study was to examine what may increase parental participation in speech therapy homework. Guided by…

This study stemmed from a concern that homework instruction, verbal and print oriented, did not reflect a 21st century learning strategy for kindergarten students due to their reading levels and their abilities to consistently follow written instructions to complete tasks. The study examined 18 kindergarten students' perceptions of using…

Within the media and the literature the need is often expressed for the establishment of a culture of learning within South African schools. The contrasting view tends to be one of dysfunctional schools that have come into being, giving rise to significant learner behaviour problems and poor pass rates being encountered in practice. This paper is…

This paper claims that the current theories of Self-regulated learning (SRL) are short-sighted. The author provides a comprehensive, but brief, overview of SRL which addresses such issues as (a) SRL processes, (b) SRL strategies, (c) compartments of SRL, (d) theories of SRL, (e) agency in SRL, and (f) models of SRL. He then presents a new model…

For e-learning initiatives to succeed, they must be designed to support a variety of trainees, methods, and content. Two important considerations in the design of any learning environment are the complexity of the tasks being learned and the socialization and connections of the trainees. Therefore, the goal of this research was to investigate how…

In this diary study, the author draws from journals written over the course of 8 years working as an English instructor at a Japanese university, with the aim of documenting the influences on her desire to invest effort in the self-study of Japanese (what she refers to as the "ecology of effort"). An ecological perspective reveals the…

This study examined the mediator and moderator roles of self-regulation and motivation constructs in the relationship between learning experience and academic success. Self-reported measures of learning experience, self-regulation and motivation were obtained from 384 undergraduate students from a university in Hong Kong. Structural equation…

We synthesize ideas from the foregoing articles in this special issue and from the broader literature on transfer to explore several themes. In many ordinary life circumstances, transfer proceeds easily, but formal learning often shows much less transfer than educators would like, making failure to transfer a focus of investigation. Transfer, like…