Task-based language teaching (TBLT) has been at the center of the debates on which approaches are most effective for structuring, planning, and implementing language courses. Several articles have focused on its effectiveness (Bryfonsky & McKay, 2017; Long, 2016; González-Lloret & Nielson, 2015), but few have shared specific implementation…

The present study investigates the effect of task repetition and individual differences on Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' lexical use and fluency in oral task performance. The study adopts a within-subjects design with forty students performing the same narrative task twice. Students also completed two prior vocabulary…

Reading engagement is crucial to motivating EFL learners in reading classes. Recent research has attempted to explore the effect of affective engagement on reading comprehension, but there exists little empirical research regarding the effect of a text-driven approach to task design and development that draws on second language acquisition…

Previous and current research identify Metalinguistic Awareness (MLA) as a possible cause of the positive effects of bilingualism on cognitive development and Third Language Acquisition (TLA). Although it has been acknowledged that MLA is strongly affected by literacy and grammar-related activities, only a few studies have focused on the context…

This document reports on a research study carried out in a rural public school in Colombia. The aim of the study was to identify the impact of a task-based teacher development program on three primary school teachers' teaching practices. To this effect, we used a survey, classroom observations, and semi-structured interviews before and after the…

The current research aims at constructing a developmentally sensitive mindreading scale (i.e., a battery of tasks measuring different aspects of mindreading ability in children from 1 to 3.5 years of age). Over 300 Polish children were tested at six-month intervals with 48 different tasks designed to measure mindreading ability (for a total of six…

Background: Key to optimizing Computational Thinking (CT) instruction is a precise understanding of the underlying cognitive skills. Román-González et al. (2017) reported unique contributions of spatial abilities and reasoning, whereas arithmetic was not significantly related to CT. Disentangling the influence of spatial and numerical skills on CT…

This article reports on the second language (L2) perception of contrasts among British English monophthongs. This study has two aims: 1) to explore the discriminability of contrasts in L2 British English monophthongs; and 2) to test the perceptual assimilation model-L2 (PAM-L2) towards the ability to discriminate British English contrasts. The…

The Interface Hypothesis proposes that second language (L2) learners, even at highly proficient levels, often fail to integrate information at the external interfaces where grammar interacts with other cognitive systems. While much early L2 work has focused on the syntax-discourse interface or scalar implicatures at the semantics-pragmatics…

The proposed revisions to the "Australian Curriculum: Mathematics" highlight the importance of learning to mathematise, problem-solve and reason in real world contexts, including financial contexts. Through the Economics + Maths = Financial Capability research project, the authors have been imagining fresh ideas for connecting the…

This study aims to investigate the differences in the realization of request speech act between the IEL (Indonesian English Learners) and the AES (Australian English-Native Speakers), as well as explain the factors influencing these distinctions. The descriptive-qualitative method and discourse completion task (DCT) were used to obtain data in…

The experience of poverty embodies complex, multidimensional stressors that may adversely affect physiological and psychological domains of functioning. Compounded by racial/ethnic discrimination, the financial aspect of family poverty typically coincides with additional social and physical environmental risks such as pollution exposure, housing…

Language learners are underserved if there are unlearned meanings of a word that they think they have already learned. For example, "circle" as a noun is well known, whereas its use as a verb is not. For artificial-intelligence-based support systems for learning vocabulary, assessing each learner's knowledge of such atypical but common…

Second language acquisition has been observed to be variable in its outcome such that, unlike native speakers, all second language learners do not achieve total success. Second language acquisition is made of macro and micro processes. External and internal (e.g., age, individual differences) factors are assumed to affect language processing in…

Learning to use prepositions in English as a second language (L2) has been widely acknowledged to pose significant difficulties to learners, especially within metaphorical contexts. Difficulties relate to the complex distributional patterns of prepositions in discourse, namely, the variety of collocations requiring their use, as well as…