A major rationale for study abroad (SA) from the perspective of second language acquisition is the presumed opportunity available to sojourners for naturalistic second language (L2) "immersion". However, such opportunities are affected by variations in the linguistic, institutional and social affordances of SA, in different settings.…

This study investigated how word and child characteristics affect children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words. Participants were fourth- and fifth-graders representing native English speakers (NE) and bilingual learners with fluent English proficiency (FEP) and designated English Learners (EL). Students were taught the meanings of a…

This article provides critical student perspectives on a set of instructor-created materials in which students ultimately delivered a spoken anecdote in a class presentation. The research was conducted qualitatively through the lens of narrative inquiry. Data were gathered from six participants, all undergraduate English majors at a Japanese…

Background: Many empirical investigations focus on how personality traits and academic motivation are related to academic achievement. Regarding the personality traits described in the five-factor model, prior research has shown associations between openness to experience and language achievement in particular. Following the principle of trait…

This study examines policies of English language teacher recruitment in Iran as part of broader education policies reflected in official national documents, and briefly investigates the implementation of these policies in selected educational institutions. Seven major documents are scrutinised using qualitative content analysis revealing three…

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) has been frequently used to provide feedback on student writing. Many empirical studies have examined the effectiveness of AWE on writing quality, but the results were inconclusive. Thus, the magnitude of AWE's overall effect and factors influencing its effectiveness across studies remained unclear. This study…

Following Richards's (2015) ideas of using movie clips, videos, and games as valuable technological tools for language learning, the present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using novel extracts and computer game cutscenes based on the same story to develop the vocabulary knowledge of English as a foreign language (EFL)…

Teachers are constantly involved in the act of decision-making in every moment of the classroom. These decisions are underpinned by pedagogical reasoning, which entails situated knowledge about particular teaching episodes and is reconstructed through teaching practice. The present case study sought to explore the pedagogical reasoning skills that…

Even though international research has offered a rich account of teacher educators' professional learning, it has overlooked the implications of the disciplines they teach for their professional learning engagement. Therefore, it is timely to examine teacher educators from different fields of expertise to offer a more specific and subject-related…

This paper describes one 4-week long online language learning module which utilizes the animated documentary film "My Favorite War" (Burkovska-Jakobsen, 2020) and analyzes four students' final essays. The learning module was created considering ethnographic views of cultural inferences (Spradley, 2016), the framework of social space…

In the field of applied linguistics, the use of multiple languages in educational settings has often been studied from a pedagogical perspective, focusing on teacher practices. In order for multilingual teaching pedagogies, such as translanguaging to reach their full potential, pupils should participate actively in classroom interaction and be…

Research on pragmatic awareness of language learners has mainly focused on the target language. As argued by some scholars, a multilingual perspective should also be adopted in the analysis of pragmatic awareness. In fact, existing findings point to the peculiar characteristics of multilingual pragmatic comprehension and awareness. Bearing these…

The present study explores the effects of distributed practice by extending this area of research to L2 learning from audiovisual input. A total of 96 L1 Russian elementary to advanced learners of English watched five episodes of captioned TV series under three viewing distribution conditions: longer spacing of viewing once per week; shorter…

This study investigated how English learners complete multimodal formative quizzes. Participants included 17,950 students enrolled in a mandatory English for Academic Purposes course at a university in Hong Kong. We retrieved data from Blackboard, a learning management system, and conducted a two-step cluster analysis to examine student…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…