This paper presents the findings of a survey on research activities and research cultures across the CercleS network. The survey was conducted under the auspices of the CercleS Focus Group on Leadership and Management and aimed to explore the scope of research in Language Centres; the links between institutional factors such as staff contracts and…

The relationship between foreign language anxiety (FLA) and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) experienced during a creative collaborative oral English-as-a-foreign-language task, and the relationships between FLE/FLA and task speech fluency were investigated. The task was performed by mid-intermediate/high-intermediate English learners (N = 43) in…

This article reports on the rationale, implementation, results and evaluation of four rounds of co-creative Citizen Science (CS) projects (2021-2024) conducted with 10 public secondary schools in Opole, Poland. These educational interventions consisted in facilitating 18 team research projects designed and executed by 55 teenagers…

Bilingual children's total vocabulary in each of their languages is often smaller than that of monolinguals. In their seminal study, Bialystok et al. (2010. 'Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children.' "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" 13 (4): 525-531) divided children's vocabulary into 'home' and…

Phonetic imitation is a ubiquitous process in speech production. Speakers have a strong tendency to imitate their interlocutors both in a native and a non-native language. It is especially important in acquiring non-native speech, because it allows forming new sound categories. In the current study we investigated whether and to what extent Polish…

Pre-service teachers (PSTs) of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) need extensive training, preparing them for challenges encountered in real classrooms. Such challenges include presenting the target content knowledge in front of the class and promptly responding to students' questions on the content. High-immersion virtual reality (VR) is…

Vocabulary assessment is an important part of measuring language proficiency in both monolingual and bilingual children. The LITMUS Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT) provides a framework for assessing the vocabulary of monolingual and bilingual children using a standardized procedure and comparable stimuli across languages. All language…

Grit is among the individual difference (ID) variables that have recently come to the attention of researchers investigating second language acquisition. While some empirical evidence has been accumulated, it is clearly scant and limited, also because of the fact that many studies have looked into domain-general grit rather than this attribute as…

The current study utilises the history-in-person theoretical framework, developed by Holland and Lave to explore the personal history and history in institutional struggles of pre-service teachers who, upon enrolling in a Master's programme of pre-school and early teacher education at a public university in Poland, have an unfavourable attitude to…

Many educators teach an increasing number of newcomer students such as immigrants, refugees, or asylum-seekers. These students need to acquire a new language as well as content in the language arts and other disciplines. This study explores how to share new ideas in literacy and language teaching and learning with teachers of newcomers while…

Given the novelty of human--machine communication (HMC) in task-based language learning (TBLL), we conducted a multimethodological pilot study to explore the use of Alexa in out-of-class task-based learning to mediate texts in English as a foreign language. Fourteen Polish intermediate learners participated in the quasi-experiment and programme…