Generally speaking, third-world literary scholars have been seen as representative tools for their societies. The current article aims to look at postmodern African and Asian societies. Thus, these two literary works "The Arrangers of Marriage" by the African novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and "Brick Lane" by Monica Ali…

This paper documents a cross-sectional look at L1 transfer and L2 contact for learners of English in a UK study abroad (SA) context. The study employed an instructional experimental design over a 6- month period with 34 Chinese students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction. Instruction took…

Given the financial implications for studying at a higher education institution, students are faced with many decisions both in terms of the topics they wish to study but also the decision of whether to remain at home or move away. The aim of this article is to compare the experiences of South Asian (Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani) female…

The internal/external frame of reference (I/E) model and dimensional comparison theory posit paradoxical relations between achievement (ACH) and self-concept (SC) in mathematics (M) and verbal (V) domains; ACH in each domain positively affects SC in the matching domain (e.g., MACH to MSC) but negatively in the nonmatching domain (e.g., MACH to…

The importance of motivation in learning has been widely recognized. However, due to its multidimensional and complex nature, it appears difficult to synthesize research findings on motivation across studies. Heated debates about the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on learning and their interaction have been going on since the terms…

This study analyses the educational progress of an entire national cohort of over 530,000 pupils in England between age 7 in 2000 and age 11 in 2004. The results show that Black Caribbean boys not entitled to free school meals, and particularly the more able pupils, made significantly less progress than their White British peers. There is no…

We consider the effects of daytime fasting by pregnant women during the lunar month of Ramadan on their children's test scores at age seven. Using English register data, we find that scores are 0.05 to 0.08 standard deviations lower for Pakistani and Bangladeshi students exposed to Ramadan in early pregnancy. These estimates are downward biased to…