Students commonly find specialist scientific language problematic. This study investigated developments in chemical language usage by six "non-traditional" students over the course of 1 to 4 years. The students participated in semi-structured interviews and were asked to explain specific chemical scenarios. Interviews were transcribed…

Although measures of lexical complexity are well established for printed texts, there is currently no equivalent work for videos. This study, therefore, aims to investigate whether existing lexical complexity measures can be extended to predict second language (L2) learners' judgment of video difficulty. Using a corpus of 320 instructional videos,…

Background: In many classrooms, science textbooks remain a significant tool, functioning in some instances as the de facto curriculum and influencing pedagogical practices. Such conventions are more noticeable in the science classrooms of developing countries, like Jamaica, because of a chronic shortage of specialist science teachers and the…

This research study aims to explore students' perceptions and reflections on the effectiveness of project-based learning (PBL) in a Thai-English translation course in the EFL context. The participants of this study included forty-nine students who were enrolled in the Thai-English translation course. The participants were asked to produce a…

Background: Chi and colleagues have argued that some of the most challenging engineering concepts exhibit properties of emergent systems. However, students often lack a mental framework, or schema, for understanding emergence. Slotta and Chi posited that helping students develop a schema for emergent systems, referred to as schema training, would…

Material development is important for training beginner student interpreters, as it guides the direction of interpreting learning. One key principle is difficulty progression, which requires a good knowledge of the indicators of difficulty. Since text structure outweighs words and sentences in the information processing of consecutive…

Coding, the analytic task of assigning codes to nonnumeric data, is foundational to writing research. A rich discussion of methodological pluralism has established the foundational importance of systematicity in the task of coding, but less attention has been paid to the equally important commitment to language complexity. Addressing the interplay…

In a bilingual educational setting, even when mathematical word problems are presented in one's first language, students may still perform poorly if cognitive constraints such as working memory limitations are not taken into consideration. The purpose of this study was to investigate the conditions under which learners are better able to solve…

This study investigated primary students' perceptions of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Natural Science and Social Sciences and variations in perceptions by individual and social factors. The sample comprised 524 Spanish-speaking students aged 9-13 years from bilingual Spanish-English schools in Andalusia (Spain). The study…

The present study examines university students' perceptions of learning academic terminology and using specialised language, and discusses the consequences of their vision. The aim is to elucidate the relationship between academic culture, academic education and the construction of knowledge in higher education. The fields of meaning and the level…

Needs analysis (NA) has long been argued to be the prerequisite for the design of language curricula or syllabi and the selection of tasks. According to Long (2005), a one-size-fits-all approach should be substituted by a careful examination of learners' needs in a particular domain or learner community. Despite the increasing practice of carrying…

The impacts of task characteristics on second language (L2) writing require further exploration. This study examined the effects of increasing task complexity on L2 argumentative writing. Upper-intermediate L2 learners performed two writing tasks with varying degrees of complexity in relation to the number of elements and the degree of reasoning.…

Background: The judicious use of worksheets ought to contribute to the establishment of literacy, with a special significance for multilingual classrooms where neither teachers nor learners are mother tongue speakers of the instructional language. Disparity between the pedagogical intention of the worksheet and learners' interpretation of the…

It has been well learnt that a large number of Arab EFL learners encounter a considerable degree of complexity in the use of tense and aspect as fundamental components of the English language. Such a degree of difficulty is perceived and experienced by those learners at their different levels of learning English starting at the primary level up to…

Experts in children's literature and child development value complexity in the language, socio-emotional content, and structure of books, yet little is known regarding parents' attitudes towards these aspects. The study thus examined how parents' gender, education, and profession, children's age and gender, and frequency of parent-child reading…