With the growth of English as an International Language [McKay, S. 2002. "Teaching English as an International Language." Oxford: Oxford University Press], there is a wealth of it now accessible to learners in their out-of-class environments; be these real, virtual, or a mixture of the two. Tomlinson (2008. "EFL Materials in the…

While the need to present food science information effectively is viewed as a critical competency for food scientists by the Institute of Food Technologists, most food scientists may not receive adequate training in this area. Effective presentations combine both scientific content and delivery mechanisms that demonstrate presenter enthusiasm for…

"Reciprocal tutoring," as reported in "Exploring the design of computer supports for reciprocal tutoring" (Chan and Chou 1997), has extended the meaning and scope of "intelligent tutoring" originally implemented in stand alone computers. This research is a follow-up to our studies on a "learning companion…

The idea that task-based learning can be facilitated through negotiated interaction has been a major object of research amongst scholars interested in task-based language teaching for at least 30 years. In this article, I focus largely on one particular type of negotiation--the negotiation of form (hereafter NoF). My purpose is not to cast doubt…

Students' seatwork plays an important part in their learning in their lessons, and very often, students record their private work in the notebooks during seatwork. The students' private work in their notebooks reflects students' learning and thinking, representing explicit learning outcomes. The students' private work in their notebooks of 14…

Native English speakers experience difficulty acquiring Arabic emphatic consonants. Arabic language textbooks have suggested that learners focus on adjacent vowels for cues to these consonants; however, the utility of such a strategy has not been empirically tested. This study investigated the perception of Arabic emphatic-plain contrasts by means…

In this article, we present investigative tasks that concern loci, which integrate the use of dynamic geometry software (DGS) with mathematics for proving the obtained figures. Additional conditions were added to the loci: ellipse, parabola and circle, which result in the emergence of new loci, similar in form to the original loci. The…

Comparisons of literary experts and novices indicate that experts engage in interpretive processes to "get the point" during their reading of literary texts but novices do not. In two studies the reading and interpretive processes of literary novices (undergraduates with no formal training in literature study) were elicited through…

We addressed Deville and Chalhoub-Deville's (2006), Schoonen's (2012), and Xi and Mollaun's (2006) call for research into the contextual features that are considered related to person-by-task interactions in the framework of generalizability theory in two ways. First, we quantitatively synthesized the generalizability studies to determine the…

Tone languages such as Mandarin use voice pitch to signal lexical contrasts, presenting a challenge for second/foreign language (L2) learners whose native languages do not use pitch in this manner. The present study examined components of an aptitude for mastering L2 lexical tone. Native English speakers with no previous tone language experience…

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large-scale picture-naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance…

Using a Chinese Word Associates Test (WAT-C), this study examined the vocabulary depth of second language learners of Chinese and its contribution to the learners' reading comprehension. Results showed no significant effects of word frequency, word class (i.e., adjectives vs. verbs), and type of association relationships (i.e., paradigmatic vs.…

This study investigated the effects of task analytic instruction, systematic prompting and graphic organizers on two students' ability to compose informational text. Participants were provided with information articles from which they identified the key ideas and supporting details. Participants transferred this information to a graphic organizer…

Proving that a given set is indeed a subgroup, one needs to show that it is non-empty, and closed under operation and inverses. This study focuses on the first condition, analysing students' responses to this task. Results suggest that there are three distinct problematic responses: the total absence of proving this condition, the problematic…

Many educational data mining studies have explored methods for discovering cognitive models and have emphasized improving prediction accuracy. Too few studies have "closed the loop" by applying discovered models toward improving instruction and testing whether proposed improvements achieve higher student outcomes. We claim that such…