Adopting mixed methods of data collection and analysis, the current study models the "perceived value of compulsory English language education" in a sample of 138 undergraduate non-language majors of Japanese nationality at a national university in Japan. During the orientation period of a compulsory 15-week English language programme,…

What happens in the first week of school could very well set the stage for the rest of the school year. Setting high standards for science activities based in inquiry can start on the first day of science class and develop as the year unfolds. With the use of simple, readily available, inexpensive materials, an efficient mystery box lesson can be…

Skilled writers have at their disposal a range of rhetorical strategies for positioning themselves as competent members of a particular discourse community, including the judicious use of self-referential pronouns (e.g. "I," "she," "he") to overtly signal authorial presence. However, while researchers routinely recommend that second language (L2)…

While numbers, data and statistics have been part of the bureaucracy since the emergence of the nation state, the paper argues that the governance turn has seen the enhancement of the significance of numbers in policy. The policy as numbers phenomenon is exemplified through two Australian cases in education policy, linked to the national schooling…

This paper reports on a small-scale study into the effects of uncoded correction (writing the correct forms above each error) and coded annotations (writing symbols that encourage learners to self-correct) on Colombian university-level EFL learners' written work. The study finds that while both coded annotations and uncoded correction appear to…

The present study aimed at examining the knowledge of Iranian EFL learners in responding to compliments in English, with a focus on the variables of gender, age and educational background. The data were collected through a 24-item English Discourse Completion Task (DCT) to which 40 male and female EFL learners were asked to provide short…

In examining life history narratives of 14 linguistically and culturally diverse pre-service teachers, this study addresses two research questions: How do pre-service teachers construct difference between themselves and others? How do they express a sense of belonging and community membership (or construct citizenship) in representing themselves…

This research work examined the impact of a science-reading instructional sequence ("InSciRead") on fourth-grade Spanish-English dual language learners' ability to monitor their comprehension of content-related (erosion, deposition, and transportation) texts. We used a quantitative measure of students' ability to detect incongruities in a related…

The recent availability of nationally mandated academic English proficiency data on all English language learners (ELLs) from landmark United States federal education legislation now makes it possible to track these learners' academic progress longitudinally. Using 5 waves of 9th through 12th grade academic English proficiency data from 2004-2008…

Among various study topics of advanced second language (L2) learners, mental lexicon shares a unique significance. This paper will introduce a comparative experiment between advanced Chinese English as a Second Language (CESL) learners and English as first language (EL1) speakers. The research question of the study is whether advanced CESL…

Very large numbers of students for whom English is not their native language attend public school classrooms in the USA every year. It is estimated that there are currently about 5.3 million English learners in K-12 grades (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition 2011). While teacher preparation programmes are required to prepare…

The literature on learning with animations has focused so far on subject matters in which changes over time depicted in the animation are mapped onto changes over time in the reality of the concepts to be learned. The experiments presented in this article, however, suggest that also a nontemporal mapping of facts, as in paired-associate learning…

Although research has consistently shown that a bilingual's two languages interact on multiple levels, it is also well-established that bilinguals can vary considerably in their proficiency in the second language (L2). In this paper we review empirical studies that have examined how differences in L2 proficiency modulate cross-language…

Structural priming (or syntactic priming) is a speaker's tendency to reuse the same structural pattern as one that was previously encountered (Bock, 1986). This study investigated (a) whether the implicit learning processes involved in long-lag structural priming lead to differential second language (L2) improvement in producing two structural…

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for researching classroom-based assessment (CBA) processes, and is based on a detailed empirical study of two Australian school classrooms where students aged 11 to 13 were studying Indonesian as a foreign language. The framework can be considered innovative in several respects. It goes beyond the…