Humor can provide a multitude of benefits for language learners, including improvement of classroom atmosphere (Dewaele et al. 2018) and a reduction of anxiety (Tarone 2000). Moreover, the integration of humor into language lessons has been strongly endorsed by both students and instructors (Askildson 2005; Azizinezhad and Hashemi 2011). What is…

This study investigated students' perceptions of English reading practice using the LINE Webtoon application. The study employed a quantitative survey research design, involving 65 students of the English Language Education Study Program of Universitas Kristen Indonesia Jakarta. Data were collected in June 2023 using an online questionnaire via…

Internet memes--usually taking the form of an image, GIF, or video with text--have become an important type of semiotic tool for meaning making. Due to the fact that memes can help learners leverage semiotic modes in social contexts, they hold great potential for language education. Integrating ecological social semiotic frameworks, this…

There has been an increased interest in multimodality in the field of both language pedagogy and translation studies. To our knowledge, however, only a few empirical studies have investigated students' perceptions and learning through translation classrooms focusing on multimodality. This paper reports on multimodal translation tasks implemented…

The Topic Hypothesis posits that Chinese language learners progress through a developmental sequence comprising five stages (Gao, 2009; Wang, 2011), which includes the Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure at stage 4 and the ba-construct at stage 5. According to this hypothesis, learners typically master the OSV structure before acquiring the…

Due to its accessibility and popularity, anime has been explored as a motivation for learning Japanese and as a pedagogical tool linking Japanese-as-a-foreign-language (JFL) literacy practices inside and outside of the classroom. However, JFL learners' actual practices in anime-mediated self-directed learning have not been fully investigated.…

To date very little research is available that focuses on L2 pragmatics and young learners [cf. Schauer, G.A. 2022a. Teaching pragmatics to young learners: a review study. "Applied Pragmatics." DOI:10.1075/ap.00006.sch]. Recent studies have shown that textbooks for young learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) vary considerably…

Creative use of language is a central tenet of learner-centric pedagogy, and as such has become a big part of today's language classrooms. Students who are allowed to use their creative impulses are often more engaged during in-class activities (Gregory et al., 2013). This is precisely one of the primary motivators for teachers to leverage…

Adopting the methods of multimodal conversation analysis, this study demonstrates that adult second language (L2) users with emergent literacy formulate requests as 'complex multimodal Gestalts' consisting prototypically of deictic or depictive gestures combined with gaze, situationally relevant material, and vocal or linguistic resources. The…

Growing up in the digital era, young children are exposed to numerous educational applications and programs, some with well-designed curricula and others focused more on entertainment or game-like qualities. With the increasing popularity of mobile language-learning applications among young children, this dissertation raises a crucial question: do…

Critical exploration of socio-political issues has been a topic strongly carried out in English classrooms in the last decades. This article is the result of a research study that shows what the use of political cartoons reveals about the promotion of critical reading in an EFL classroom at a private university in Colombia. The study was developed…

The exponential increase of multimodal literacy in language learning in classroom contexts has insisted teachers reconstruct their roles. Teachers should be equipped with a number of different quality and ability to deliver meaningful lessons by incorporating technology and embedding moral education in the learning process. However, there is a…

This discussion describes a collaboration between a high school for recently arrived immigrant and refugee youth and a local college. Across 6 weeks, college tutors read a wordless graphic novel, "The Arrival" (Tan, 2007), with newcomer students to support oral English language development, to develop interpretations, and to invite…

Largely banished from language instruction following the adoption of communicative approaches, some researchers now encourage the use of translation as a valuable resource for the language classroom. While increasingly embraced in theory, there remains a need to better understand, through empirical research, the implementation of translation-based…

Studies on the role of input in L2 acquisition often estimate L2 input properties through L1 corpora and focus on L2-English. This study probes the initial stage of L2-Korean learning for adult English-speaking beginners of Korean to investigate input-output relations in the acquisition of L2 that is typologically different from English in a more…