Gender-stereotypical design, such as the predominance of blue colors in interfaces, leaderboards with only men at the top, and male avatars, may have negative effects on women in gamified tutoring systems, especially in courses with a majority of male participation, such as courses of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). We…

Speaking in a second/foreign language, especially in English, is one of the most anxiety-provoking tasks for language learners. Anxiety provoked while speaking in a second language distresses the learners and further affects their oral proficiency in English. This article focuses on investigating the presence of anxiety among (n = 86) first-year…

Intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), which are voice-activated agents enabling human--computer interaction, have recently been reported to be pedagogically useful agents in language learning. IPAs use various forms of humor to better communicate with users and to compensate for any performance limitations. In order to understand the IPAs' sense…

Research has revealed the positive impact of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) on L2 learners' oral development and learning attitude. These studies, however, focused mostly on the in-class use of IPAs, with existing research on the out-of-class use being exploratory. To fill the gap of lacking empirical investigations on IPA-based autonomous…

Little studies have been conducted on the question of the use of augmented reality technology in the education field. The effects of augmented reality technology on the educational environment of tertiary students need to be further explored. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of augmented reality technology in…

This study examines four elements of learner motivation, attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction, in an EFL speaking course that uses the computer mediated communication (CMC) tool Google Hangouts. The study found that a preparatory concept mapping task before the CMC sessions improved students' perceived attention, relevance,…