The present article is concerned with how Swedish students in the last year of comprehensive school make sense and use of educational assessments of their school performance. Based on interviews with 28 students in Year 9, "talk about assessments" is analysed using a discourse analytical approach inspired by Michel Foucault's theories.…

Linguistically and cognitively speaking, functional (extended) projections are more abstract and structurally more complicated than lexical projections. Acquiring functional projections could be problematic for second language learners and thus a crucial issue to be considered by language instructors and curriculum developers. The present study…

Acquisition of verbs and their syntactic and semantic properties can act as the core of any sentence across languages. EFL learners encounter learnability problems in the perception of English verbs' argument structures manifested by different verbs. The current study aimed at investigating and diagnosing the problems Iranian EFL learners face…

This study is designed to explore the role of second language (L2) English learners' working memory (WM), language proficiency, and age in the processing and comprehension of English anaphoric sentences. To this end, 40 EFL learners participated in the study. The proficiency levels of the participants varied from elementary to high-intermediate,…

This review summarizes features of professional development programs that aim to prepare in-service teachers to improve students' academic language proficiency when teaching subject areas. The 38 studies reviewed suggest that all of the profiled interventions were effective to some extent. The programs share many characteristics considered…

Recent development in L2 pragmatics research in a study abroad context has witnessed an emerging line of studies investigating the joint influences of contextual and individual learner factors on second language (L2) pragmatic development. This paper argues for the replication of two representative quantitative studies in this new research…

Although teacher burnout has drawn the attention of many researchers, there is little empirical evidence for the contribution of non-native English language teachers' language proficiency level to their experience of burnout. To address this significant gap, the present study examined the relationship between English as a foreign language (EFL)…

Comprehending a mathematical modelling task is a central prerequisite for the following modelling process. In this study, we investigated the roles that the language proficiency of the students and the linguistic wording of the task play for the comprehension and the successful solving of mathematical modelling tasks. Five mathematical tasks with…

This study is an exploratory study, which was conducted in relation to the study of the proficiency and performance of Iranian Air Traffic Controllers: attitude, work experience, and specific Aviation English courses. Few studies have been conducted in this field. The Aviation English Courses in Iran are very similar to Content-Based Language…

This study reports on the results of a research program carried out to validate the C-Test amongst Afghan EFL learners. One hundred advanced English majors were administered two different language tests namely a language proficiency test (composed of listening, reading, and writing) and a C-Test composed of four different texts to measure the…

As English has become an essential international language, some universities in countries where students learn the language mainly in the classroom have started to send teachers overseas as part of English teacher training. Study abroad (SA) is perceived as one effective way to improve teachers' intercultural communication ability in English…

Native-speakerism has generated much debate in the field of English language teaching, with the general assumption that native English-speaker teachers (NESTs) are better teachers and would be learners' preference over non-native English-speaker teachers (NNESTs) given the choice. Despite challenges against such an assumption in recent decades, it…

Language proficiency is multi-componential in nature and, according to many SLA researchers and L2 practitioners, is best captured by the concepts of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Two of the three studies reported in this paper adopted the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2003) as the means to address the question of whether increasing…

This text comments on the Keynote article 'Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition' by Marit Westergaard, who argues for Full Transfer Potential within the Linguistic Proximity Model in third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary points at some theoretical and methodological issues related…

This article reports a mixed-methods study about using virtual reality (VR) tools (Google Cardboard and Expeditions) for developing students' oral proficiency in learning Chinese as a second language. Twelve students role-played as tour guides for six locations throughout a semester: four of them with VR tools and two without. Data collection…