The benefits of using social annotations to promote collaborative learning experiences have been investigated in the context of digital reading and listening, while its implications in multimedia learning contexts remain unclear. To investigate the influence of social annotations on multimedia language learning, we invited 16 African participants…

Students are often encouraged to explain recently-taught information to others to enhance their learning in various settings including face-to-face in the classroom, through text, or in educational videos. However, nearly all studies on the impact of explaining things to others have focused on the effects of explaining to a less-knowledgeable…

Background: Deep discussions play an important role in students' online learning. However, researchers have largely focused on engaging students in deep discussions in online asynchronous forums. Few studies have investigated how to promote deep discussion via mobile instant messaging (MIM). Objectives: In this study, we applied learning…

With an increasing number of international students to study in China, however, few studies have investigated how international students experienced assessment in Chinese higher education. Drawing upon the concept of sustainable assessment, we present findings from interviews with thirty international postgraduate students who shared assessment…

This paper, drawing upon a mobile telecollaborative project, resonates with the rapid development of technology in language learning. We employed the instant messaging app WeChat to create an English telecollaborative environment for two groups of Chinese students to communicate within. Interview data were triangulated with students' chat…

The role of practice has been largely overlooked in second/foreign (L2) pragmatics research. Furthermore, very few studies have directly compared the effects of different "practice contexts" (e.g. practice in a telecollaborative context versus practice in a face-to-face context) on L2 learners' pragmatic competence (e.g. in compliment…

Online collaborative learning has been widely used in the field of education. However, unrelated or off-topic information is often included in online collaborative learning. Furthermore, the content of online discussion is often too shallow or narrow. To achieve productive collaborative learning, this study proposed and validated an automated…

Motivation to learn languages other than English (LOTEs) has been underrepresented in second language (L2) motivation research. This study investigated and compared the motivational profiles of first-year and second-year students majoring in Spanish, grounded on the proposition of bifurcating ideal and ought selves into "Own" and…

While extensive studies on informal online learning have been well documented to afford teachers' collaborative learning and knowledge sharing, little is still known about their motivational factors regarding the continuance intention of informal online learning. To this end, an extended expectation confirmation model (ECM) was proposed including…

Social networking service platforms and social media have generated a significant amount of discussion and debate regarding their use in second or foreign language learning. However, leveraging digital tools with pedagogical constructs to enhance accessibility and engagement in teaching and learning English idiomatics has not received equal…

Grounded on constructivism, mining a complex mix of social and cognitive interrelations is key to understanding collaborative discussion in online learning. A single examination of one of these factors tends to overlook the impact of the other factor on learning. In this paper, we innovatively constructed a socialcognitive engagement setting to…

Affordance refers to the opportunity available to a learning activity. Taking affordance as a theoretical and analytical construct, this exploratory study investigates learners' attitudes and the opportunities WeChat may provide for Chinese cultural knowledge (CCK) learning. The aim is to find out the potential new affordances and compare learners…

Role-play activities are considered a useful instructional design in enhancing the speaking performance of foreign language learners. However, in the traditional classroom context, learners may not readily have access to interlocutors for role-play activities. In this study, we proposed a designed method that integrated the GenAI agent into…

This qualitative case study investigated L2 readers' semester-long experiences with web-based pre-class peer discussions (WPPD). Data were collected from a university L2 reading course and included field notes on 21 students' web-based learning activities and in-class learning activities, interviews with these students, and their reflections.…

Sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. Sense is viewed as knowledge, and the environment in which the sense is made is interconnected with communication effectiveness. Considering the critical role of sense-making in the learning process, scholars have emphasised the significance of providing…