The present study compared L2 and L3 learners of the same additional language in two parallel case studies framed within a Vygotskyan SCT perspective to examine how foreign language learners' background knowledge impacts on the path of their development. Interactive data were collected on the development of interrogative formation by four Persian…

Blended learning is a combination of traditional and technology-enhanced learning. Social networks services can be used in blended learning settings as they support collaboration, resource sharing, and socialization. Edmodo is an educational social network which can facilitate the development of second or foreign language skills. This study…

This article discusses the interchangeability of three self-report measures for reading anxiety. Despite their differences in target constructs, the three scales have been used for similar lines of research. After computing shared variance between the target scales and examining the behavior of anxiety indexes in relation to the amount of graded…

Internationally, there has been considerable literature on the predictors of academic performance in higher education. However, the empirical findings are still limited in Cambodia; therefore, this paper was conducted to examine the determinants of academic performance of 329 undergraduate students selected from a university in Cambodia. Based on…

The internationalization of higher education and growth of international student mobility make higher education classrooms culturally and linguistically more diverse than ever, especially among postgraduate students (Brown and Holloway 2008; Gu, Schweisfurth, and Day 2009; Yu and Moskal 2019). However, recent research reports a common tendency for…

For native and nonnative English speakers, employment increasingly requires proficiency in communication, given its critical role in employees' ability to successfully carry out work-related activities. Although communicating competently is important for employability, survey findings have suggested that employers believe that colleges are not…

Energy Conservation Theory of Second Language Acquisition (ECT-L2A) (Han, Bao, & Wiita, 2017b), an interdisciplinary theory juxtaposing a physics perspective and an applied linguistics perspective, conceptualizes individuals' ultimate attainment as a function of dynamic transformation of endogenous and exogenous energies throughout the…

An Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) may be evaluated either during the interview procedure (direct-method) or from a tape-made oral interaction (semi-direct method). Such variety in methods of assessment can influence test takers' scores extensively. However, it is not conclusive whether such differences are due to test format or something else.…

Higher education institutions in the United States provide placement essay tests to ensure international students' readiness for college courses. The high-stakes nature of placement tests makes educators and researchers seek significant components of differentiating levels of placement tests. This study investigated the prediction of two levels…

To understand long-term motivations for second language (L2) learning/socialisation, this study analyses the biographical narratives of 30 Hong Kong Chinese who are proficient in Japanese by using ethnographic interviews. From a situated learning perspective, our research findings originate in the participants' transformational episodes and centre…

The process of studying a foreign language in Russian higher education institutions is carried out in a specially organized linguo-didactic language environment which is understood as a methodological framework designed in accordance with the peculiarities of a linguo-cultural community. It is aimed at combining learning methods and techniques to…

To what degree can multilingual students profit from bilingual teaching approaches, even when they lack experience in the academic or technical register in their home languages? This study explores this research question in a mixed methods design for a German/Turkish bilingual intervention aimed at fostering conceptual understanding of fractions…

This paper reports on a classroom-based investigation into a tertiary English-medium instruction (EMI) programme in China, with a focus on subject teachers' perceptions and practices in EMI and students' motivation and needs in English learning. Given a lacuna in existing EMI research, it examined how EMI instruction was delivered by subject…

Investigating the comparability of students' performance on TOEFL writing tasks and actual academic writing tasks is essential to provide backing for the extrapolation inference in the TOEFL validity argument (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008). This study compared 103 international non-native-English-speaking undergraduate students'…

The study focuses on the strategies English as a foreign language (EFL) learners choose to take on in requests without evaluating them against the norm of a native speaker, as the concept of native speaker is ideologically problematic in the time of super-diversity. The study uses cultural scripts proposed in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics…