This paper reports on the results of a quantitative study that was aimed to measure the use of socio-cultural strategies in learning English writing among a group of 155 Chinese university English major students. This quantitative survey was informed by the socio-cultural theory that holds that L2 learning is a mediational process in which a…

Language assessment is a vital part of the process of learning and teaching a foreign language. Language learners need to be provided with the best methods to measure how much they are acquiring the target language and to select the most authentic tasks of testing for them. As it has been recommended to use multiple assessment instead of…

This study is intended to explore the influence of partners' L2 proficiency on test-takers' performance and on their interaction patterns in paired oral assessment, and it tries to analyze the underlying causes on the basis of Vygotsky's theory of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and Storch's patterns of interaction. An experiment including…

Most people want to be able to read their reading materials quicker and remember them effectively. Covering a large quantity of reading materials at a normal speed requires much more time than is usually available. Good readers, however, can cover a lot of materials by identifying key elements of a sentence for key idea with the help of…

From the perspective of complexity theory and based on Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis and the Triadic Componential Framework, this paper investigated the effect of manipulating task complexity along resource-dispersing dimension on L2 written performance. The results showed that: 1) Significant interactive effects were found between the two…