Graduate programmes in most universities are typically oriented towards training students to master their disciplinary studies and communication skills courses are often offered as add-on courses that rarely take into consideration students' needs. The needs of graduate students can vary depending on their educational backgrounds and English…

In this process-based study, we introduced a collocation tool with a new interface and advanced search features and examined how a class of EFL college students interacted with it. To elicit their tool consultation behaviors, a vocabulary test with collocation questions was designed. The students' use of the tool to answer the vocabulary questions…

Researchers have used different measures to examine participants' second-language (L2) proficiency, yet it remains unclear how these different measures influence research results on the effect of L2 proficiency on the target variable. The present research explored the modulation effect of four different measures of L2 Chinese proficiency on…

This qualitative study reports an investigation of the nature of interactional competence at various levels of achievement in the context of role-play speaking assessment. The focal point of this study is on how examinees jointly accomplish the interactional work involved in proposal sequences in role-play interaction. Based on a conversation…

The focus of this article is on topic management and student initiation in the context of an advanced university-level Chinese-as-a-foreign-language class. Drawing on a corpus of 17.5 h of video-recorded classroom interactions, we focus on the ways in which students initiate topic expansions, thereby disrupting the IRF structure of discourse and…

This paper develops a two-voiced self-dialogue with some compelling ideals of critical pedagogy advocated by Paulo Freire: reflection, dialogue, "conscientização," (conscientization) praxis, critical engagement, and transformation. This dialogue, as a critical pedagogy encounter, has allowed me to go through a process of self-criticism…

This study used the bibliometric method to examine the field of second language acquisition (SLA) between 1997 and 2018 to provide a systematic overview of the field and to discover major trends in SLA. Based on citation/cocitation information and keywords retrieved from Web of Science, this study performed three types of bibliometric analyses to…

In this paper we review Martin Lamb's (2016) publication when motivation research motivates: issues in long-term empirical investigations. We discuss his insightful arguments about the challenges and opportunities related to the engagement with longitudinal research. We begin with a discussion of the concept of context and unpack the complex…

With the promise of achieving bilingualism, biliteracy, and cultural pluralism, Chinese immersion programs for students from kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12) in North America, especially the US, have been proliferating in the past two decades. Research on this rapidly growing population of non-native Chinese learners is also growing. This…

Recent research in second language acquisition suggests that a number of speed, breakdown, repair, and composite measures reliably assess fluency and predict proficiency. However, there is little research evidence to indicate which measures best characterize fluency at each assessed level of proficiency and which can consistently distinguish one…

Directed motivational currents (DMCs) are goal-directed motivational surges in pursuit of a much-desired personal outcome. This book introduces the reader to cutting-edge theory and research in second language learner motivation and presents empirical research which investigates DMCs in the context of language learning. The studies explore the…

Today's use of technology and media in daily life has altered the dominant role the written word has played in communication over centuries. Currently, educational settings take into consideration the combination of different modes of representation that exist in an array of everyday texts. "Developing knowledge about linguistic, visual and…

Many studies of non-native speech sound learning report a great deal of individual variability; some learners master the sounds of a second language with ease, while others struggle to perceive and produce sounds, even after years of learning the language. Although some contributions of phonological, auditory, or cognitive skills have been found…

Second language learner motivation research has witnessed a transition from a historically static approach to a more dynamic approach, yielding extensive research during the past decade. Dornyei (2005, 2009) proposed a vigorous motivation framework, the Second Language Motivational Self System (L2MSS) that highlights the dynamic nature of learner…

The purpose of this dictionary and thesaurus of contemporary figurative language and metaphor is to identify all the words and phrases used figuratively and metaphorically in everyday contemporary English and to categorize each word or phrase not only by meaning but also by what cognitive linguists and others have described variously as figure and…