This paper reports on students' use of face-to-face synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) for oral language learning. It describes a university English language class designed to prepare students for overseas study in which a Skype-based English conversation school was piloted. The study offers analysis of how students used the CMC…

e-Portfolios have become increasingly popular among educators as learning tools. Some research even shows that e-portfolios can be utilised to facilitate the development of skills for self-directed learning. Such skills include self-assessment of performance, formulation of learning goals, and selection of future tasks. However, it is not yet…

Tasks provide engaging ways to involve learners in meaningful, real-world activities with the foreign language (FL). Yet selecting classroom tasks suitable to learners' linguistic readiness is challenging, and task-based research is exploring the relationship between learners' overall abilities (e.g., reading, grammatical) and the complexity and…

This article is based on part of a case study looking into how sixth form students search for goal related information online for an open-ended task. Qualitative data was gathered through think-aloud protocols; analysis was informed by Afflerbach and Cho's (2009) Hypertext reading strategies. From the perspective of multiple documents literacy and…

Immediacy theory of schizophrenia posits that the behavior of individuals with schizophrenia is controlled to a greater degree by stimuli in the current environment relative to individuals without schizophrenia. Prior research supports this idea by finding that individuals with schizophrenia display steeper rates of delay discounting than those…

The effects of social praise contingent on either usual (conventional) or unusual (unconventional) responses during an object uses task were assessed on measures of generalized creativity in two novel, unrelated tasks. Participants were 20 older adults, ages 63 to 89 years (M = 80.90), who were recruited from a joint skilled nursing and assisted…

This study investigated anger expression during toy removal (TR) in 92 young Chinese children, two to five years of age, and its relations to their persistence in responding to obstacles during two challenging tasks with highly desirable goals [TR and locked box (LB)] and one challenging task with a less desirable goal [impossible perfect circles…

Previous studies suggested that primary somatosensory (SI) neurons in well-trained monkeys participated in the haptic-haptic unimodal delayed matching-to-sample (DMS) task. In this study, 585 SI neurons were recorded in monkeys performing a task that was identical to that in the previous studies but without requiring discrimination and active…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine, using meta-analytical techniques, the differential effects of differing intensities of acute exercise on speed and accuracy of cognition. Overall, exercise demonstrated a small, significant mean effect size (g = 0.14, p less than 0.01) on cognition. Examination of the comparison between speed and…

Maternal protective responses to temperamentally fearful toddlers have previously been found to relate to increased risk for children's development of anxiety-spectrum problems. Not all protective behavior is "overprotective", and not all mothers respond to toddlers' fear with protection. Therefore, the current study aimed to identify conditions…

Can young children, forming expectations about the social world, capture differences among people without falling into the pitfalls of categorization? Categorization often leads to exaggerating differences between groups and minimizing differences within groups, resulting in stereotyping. Six studies with 4-year-old children (N = 214)…

In the present research, we conducted 4 studies designed to examine the hypothesis that perceived competence moderates the relation between performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals. Each study yielded supportive data, indicating that the correlation between the 2 goals is lower when perceived competence is high. This pattern was…

This study examines aspects of the syntax-discourse interface in near-native French. Two cleft structures--"c'est" clefts and "avoir" clefts--are examined in experimental and spontaneous conversational data from 10 adult Anglophone learners of French and ten native speakers of French. "C'est" clefts mark focus, and…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the time-course of meaning activation of different types of ambiguous words. Unbalanced homonymous ("pen"), balanced homonymous ("panel"), metaphorically polysemous ("lip"), and metonymically polysemous words ("rabbit") were used in a visual single-word priming delayed lexical decision task.…

In this article, I examine some of the ideas about task-based language teaching (TBLT) which have emerged over the 17 years of the current editorship of ELTJ, focusing in particular on grammar and vocabulary, and enquiring to what degree these ideas take adequate account of classroom context. Over this period, TBLT scholars have built up a…