According to cognitive psychologists, consistent practice (i.e., tasks with a high degree of similarity) of a skill leads to the development of automaticity, with the degree of automatization being increased if the practice also involves exact repetition. Practice is skill specific, meaning that practicing one skill does not automatize related…

The present study examines the effects of pre-task explicit instruction on second language (L2) oral self-repair behaviour while controlling for the effects of working memory. The participants were 121 Iranian learners of English at incipient levels of language proficiency. Their working memory was measured using an operation span task and then…

Adopting a cognitive perspective, this study examined roles of working memory capacity (WMC), first language (L1) syllogistic inferencing, and second language (L2) linguistic knowledge on literal and inferential understanding of L2 reading comprehension in adolescent L2 learners. Participants were 193 Korean ninth-grade learners of English. The…

This study investigated the extent to which different pedagogical gestures contribute to learners' foreign or second language (L2) narrative recall, and further discussed how task complexity and task difficulty (i.e. working memory capacity or WMC) influence recall performance. Sixty-four adolescent learners, assigned to four different gesture…

This study investigated the effects of working memory capacity (WMC), first language (L1) syllogistic inferencing ability, and second-language (L2) linguistic knowledge on L2 listening comprehension for passages of different lengths. Participants were 193 Korean ninth-grade learners of English. A path analysis was used to examine multivariate…

The aim of our study was to examine the relationship between NL (Native Language: Polish) phonological processing skills (verbal and phonological short-term memory, phoneme segmentation and blending, rapid automatised naming (RAN)) and the accuracy and fluency of NL and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) word and nonword decoding and word…

Second language (L2) educators have proposed a unique anxiety for general L2 learning and an anxiety specific to L2 reading. Since the early 1990s, the L2 anxiety concept has been challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds. In this investigation, U.S. high school L2 learners were administered the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS)…

This experimental study examined how VSTF (Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting)-based text benefits reading speed, reading comprehension, reading efficiency and retention for middle and high school students. Prospective within-subjects tests were conducted in Japan on a total of 132 students: 76 high school students from 12th grade and 56 middle…

Based on the "Simple View of Reading," the present study investigates whether component skills of reading differ between adolescents from low-track schools speaking German as a first (L1) versus as a second language (L2). In our study, 479 9th-grade students completed the "Programme for International Student Assessment" reading…