This study compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (Italian, Mandarin) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Japanese consonant length (i.e. singleton vs. geminate) according to the phonemic status of length in L1 and experience with Japanese. The participants included two groups of non-native learners of…

The purpose of this study was to explore how students with high- and low-prior-knowledge employed multiple representations in argumentation evaluation and generation tasks. The argumentation performance and eye-movement behaviors of 96 college students in these tasks were investigated. The number of participants who proposed complex argumentation…

This study investigated the influence of focus-on-form task-based language teaching (TBLT) on Taiwanese children's English vocabulary acquisition and retention. Focus-on-form TBLT here refers to instruction in which the teacher and students interact, negotiate, and respond to each other on the subject of a second language (L2) vocabulary. The…

In the past decades, collaborative game-based learning has been used to facilitate students' learning in authentic learning contexts. Although several previous studies have reported the potential of this approach for students' learning performance and motivation, unequal participation could negatively influence the learning effectiveness of…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

This study explored the effects of technology-mediated task-based language teaching (TMTBLT) in an English as a foreign language (EFL) writing course on students' descriptive writing performance. A quasi-experiment was conducted. Students in two writing courses were recruited and randomly assigned to an experimental or control group. The…

Differences exist between engineering and liberal arts students because of their educational backgrounds. Therefore, they solve problems differently. This study examined the brain activation of these two groups of students when they responded to 12 questions of verbal, numerical, or spatial intelligence. A total of 25 engineering and 25 liberal…

The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on the pragmatic comprehension of speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well as the way learners of different proficiency levels employ strategies when comprehending a pragmatic task. Thirty-three high-proficiency and forty-one low-proficiency Chinese learners of English completed…

This study examined the effect of the combination of task repetition and post-task transcribing (TRPT) on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of L2 oral performance and their subsequent development. Taiwanese university students (N = 39) were randomly assigned to one of the three groups: TRPT, task repetition (TR), and control group, and…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of different types of language tasks performed in Second Life (SL) on the oral performance of beginners of Chinese as a Second Language (CSL), focusing on oral accuracy. The 30 CSL beginners who participated in this study were randomly divided into two groups (n = 15 per group), required to…

This study examined the influence of morphological instruction in an eye-tracking English vocabulary recognition task. Sixty-eight freshmen enrolled in an English course and received either traditional or morphological instruction for learning English vocabulary. The experimental part of the study was conducted over two-hour class periods for…

This study investigated the possibility that initial-level learners may acquire oral skills through synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). Twelve Taiwanese French as a foreign language (FFL) students, divided into three groups, were required to conduct a variety of tasks in one of the three learning environments (video/audio, audio,…

How bilinguals' two languages interact with each other has stimulated considerable research. However, little of this research has focused on objective measures of speech production. This study aims to investigate bilinguals' production of Guoyu and Taiwanese voiceless sibilant fricatives to see how language contact and language dominance influence…

Task-based language learning using the benefits of online computer-assisted language learning (CALL) can be effective for rapid vocabulary expansion, especially when target vocabulary has been pre-arranged into bilingual categories under simpler, common Semantic Field Keywords. Results and satisfaction levels for both Chinese English majors and…