While mainstream psychology has made significant advances into the understanding of personality, applied linguistics research has offered a more muted response (Dörnyei and Ryan 2015) despite Bandura (2001:10) declaring that self-efficacy beliefs represent 'the foundation of human agency'. The study documented within this article therefore…

Few studies have examined willingness to communicate (WtC) changes resulting from short-term intensive immersion programmes. This study investigated the antecedents to and changes in WtC during one such programme held at a Macau university. The programme required students to reside on campus and participate in extensive task-based communicative…

Although some earlier studies reported female and child superiority in learning a second language (L2), current research has been inconclusive as to whether, and why, this might be the case. Using a socio-cultural paradigm, this study addresses how motivation, gender and age relate to the attainment of a native-like accent for young Kurdish…