In this paper the development of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) over the past 20 years is reviewed with a particular focus on the pedagogical challenges facing its exploitation. Following a consideration of the definition of mobile learning, the paper describes the dominant mobile technologies upon which MALL applications have been…

One of the main objectives of the European Networked Interaction in Foreign Language Acquisition and Research (NIFLAR) project is to make foreign language learning and teaching processes more relevant and rewarding for reaching intercultural communicative competence. This is realized by offering foreign language learners and pre-service teachers…

Internet-mediated intercultural discussions have been adopted for intercultural and second-language learning. However, the notion of community development in this context has received less attention. This study employs exchange structure (ES) analysis (Stubbs, M. (1983). "Discourse analysis." Oxford: Basil Blackwell) to investigate the…

Self-study is playing an increasingly important role in the learning and instruction of many subjects, including second and foreign languages. With the rapid development of the internet, language websites for self-study are flourishing. While the language of print-based teaching materials has received some attention, the linguistic and…

The study explored the effects of students' locus of control and types of control over instruction on their self-efficacy and performance in a web-based language learning environment. A web-based interactive instructional program focusing on the comprehension of news articles for English language learners was developed in two versions: learner-…

There has been extensive reporting on the interactional characteristics of multi-participant text-based chat rooms. In these chat rooms there are several students typing at the same time, often on more than one topic. As a result, it is not uncommon to see multiple overlapping utterances. Despite these communicative challenges, research suggests…

The present study investigates the effects of scaffolding and web concordancers on students' proofreading performance. The study addresses the following research questions: (1) How does a concordancer search enhance students' proofreading performance? (2) How does scaffolding for concordancer searches enhance students' proofreading performance?…

Concordancing in the classroom is fairly a new approach that has emerged with the use of corpora in language learning. In a concordance, language is presented in an authentic context; learners are able to examine a key word in the context of a string of sentences which can exemplify the use of that particular word. This exploratory study examined…

This study investigates the influence of using five web-based practice units on English verb-noun collocations with the design of a web-based Chinese-English bilingual concordancer (keyword retrieval program) on collocation learning. Thirty-two college EFL students participated by taking a pre-test and two post-tests, and responding to a…