Educators have long been advocating for the appropriation of students' interests into the classroom as a means of promoting participation and learning. However, little attention has been paid to the possible issues that interest-driven pedagogy might engender for both teachers and students through its blend of the personal and academic. This…

This study investigated whether encountering the target language words in variety of reading texts would have positive effects on vocabulary development or not. The participants of the study were 55 EFL learners from a state university in Turkey, and two classes were randomly assigned to a control (n=27) or an experimental (n=28) group. 58 English…

The growth of Thailand's medical tourism industry has inevitably made English oral communication skills become increasingly important to Thai medical personnel, especially to nurses who have to act as medical mediators between doctors and patients. Thus, in order to prepare nursing students for their future career, it is necessary that English…

This study explores how Arab L2 learners of English acquire mass nouns. The mass/count distinction is a morphosyntactically encoded grammatical distinction. Arabic and English have different morphosyntactic realisations of mass nouns. English mass nouns take the form of bare singular whereas Arabic mass nouns can take the definite singular form or…

Early prediction of student difficulty during long-duration learning activities allows a tutoring system to intervene by providing needed support, such as a hint, or by alerting an instructor. To be effective, these predictions must come early and be highly accurate, but such predictions are difficult for open-ended programming problems. In this…

This project was conducted in a five credit course in English as a Foreign Language, which was a compulsory module in first year business administration studies. The data includes students' learning diaries and a post-course online questionnaire (N=21). The data were analysed using a content analysis method. The results indicate that the students…

A common drawback in traditional language education is that all students in the same class use the same content. Since students may have different backgrounds such as prior knowledge and learning speed, one single curriculum may not be able to accommodate every student. Unfortunately, most students cannot afford personalized language learning,…

Problem-solving and collaboration are regarded as an essential part of 21st Century Skills. This study describes a task-focused approach to network analysis of trace data from collaborative problem-solving in a digital learning environment. The analysis framework builds and expands upon previous analyses of social ties as well as discourse…

This study investigates the effects of multimedia glosses on text recall and incidental vocabulary learning in a mobile-assisted L2 listening task. A total of 88 participants with a low level of proficiency in English were randomly assigned to one of four conditions that involved single channel (textual-only, pictorial-only) and dual-channel…

With use of self-assessment (SA) of young language learners on the rise, educators of young learners often want to know what SA captures and how best to use it in order to assist their students' learning. This study focuses on understanding how young learners' processes for responding to SA items differ by age and by context of implementation…

This study examined relationships between language learning motivation and the longitudinal development of second language (L2) pronunciation. Twenty-six English-speaking learners of Spanish recorded a simplified picture description task 5 times over a year-long period spanning their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th semesters of Spanish language instruction.…

Background: This investigation was designed to uncover the relations between students' cognitive and metacognitive strategies used during a complex climate simulation. While cognitive strategy use during science inquiry has been studied, the factors related to this strategy use, such as concurrent metacognition, prior knowledge, and prior…

Conflict adaptation is key in how children self-regulate and assert cognitive control in a given situation compared with a previous experience. In the current study, we analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify age-related differences in conflict adaptation. Participants of different ages (5-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and…

We investigated "scalar implicature" in adolescents and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to test whether theory of mind deficits associated with autism affect pragmatic inferences in language. We tested scalar implicature computation in adolescents with ASD (12-18 years) and asked whether they reason about mental states when…

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…