This study investigated how the inclusion of model texts as a feedback technique affected students' task motivation and engagement in writing tasks. Adopting a longitudinal design, 60 English as a foreign language (EFL) children (aged 11-12) were divided into three groups: a treatment group, a long-term treatment group, and a control group. The…

Research on recasts has gotten increasing attention from SLA researchers ever since 1990s. However, the studies on the effectiveness of recasts had inconsistent findings and are still debatable in what way recasts facilitate L2 learning. This study aims to examine the effects of recasts on English question production by adopting a pretest,…

15-month-olds behave as if they comprehend filler-gap dependencies such as "wh"-questions and relative clauses. On one hypothesis, this success does not reflect adult-like representations but rather a "gap-driven" interpretation heuristic based on verb knowledge. Infants who know that "feed" is transitive may notice…

The abstract concept of time is conceptualized as moving linearly across space, known as the mental timeline (MTL). The direction of our MTL is consistent with reading direction. English speakers, who read left to right, think of past on the left and future on the right; the reverse is true of Hebrew speakers, who read right to left. However, it…

Children's sentence interpretations often lack flexibility. For example, when French-speaking adults and children hear ambiguous "wh"-questions like "Where did Annie explain that she rode her horse?", they preferentially associate the "wh"-phrase with the first verb and adopt the main clause interpretation (e.g.,…

In this article, the authors report on a study designed to explore college students' experiences in two writing environments, or ecologies: a media-free, silent zone and a media-saturated zone. Participants shared varying reactions to both environments. Some individuals found media distracting while writing, and others found it to be an energy…

This study shows impoliteness as a form of face-threatening that can be intentionally caused by verbal threats in a particular setting. It investigates: what strategies and mitigators do IraqiKurdish English as a foreign language (EFL) learners use in situations of threat responses? The present investigation paper aims to examine impoliteness…

The current study examined the effects of grade level and object size on the ability to estimate the measurement of objects. Fifth- (n = 198) and sixth-grade (n = 208) students and freshman undergraduate students (n = 71) from Taipei city, Taiwan, participated in the study. The findings indicated a tendency for measurement estimation ability to…

The teleological bias, a major learning obstacle, involves explaining biological phenomena in terms of purposes and goals. To probe the teleological bias, researchers have used acceptance judgement tasks and preference judgement tasks. In the present study, such tasks were used with German high school students (N = 353) for 10 phenomena from human…

The present study aims to investigate the role of L1 transfer effects on L2 sentence processing strategies during the interpretation of relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguities. The main body of the study is divided into two sections. The first section describes Experiment 1, which is designed to test the resolution of RC attachment ambiguities…

This study investigated the mode of directness of requests and refusals and the background variables that explain this production in two trilingual populations in Israel (i.e. native speakers of Arabic for whom English is an L3, and Hebrew, an L2, and native speakers of Hebrew for whom English is an L2 and another language is their L3). Data were…

The Widget design task is an in-class, experiential exercise that affords students the opportunity to develop interpersonal skills in group negotiation. Students engage in new product design in committees of two dyads where one dyad represents Consumer Research and the other represents Strategic Management. Task information creates different…

This study compares how the native speakers of Thai (TTs) and American (AEs) as well as the Thai learners of English as a foreign language with high exposure to English (TEHs) and those with the low exposure (TELs) perform the speech acts of compliments (Cs) by taking the context of age into their consideration. The data were collected by means of…

This study reports the effectiveness of self- and peer-assessment in improving students' learning experience. Students in a group of four were required to submit two self-assessments, one after the first submission and the other during the final submission of the assignment. An anonymous assignment was then given to each group for a peer-based…

In the assessment of aural skills of second language learners, the study of the inclusion of visual stimuli has almost exclusively been conducted in the context of listening assessment. While the inclusion of contextual information in test input has been advocated for by numerous researchers (Ockey, 2010), little has been said regarding the…