Circumlocution--using known vocabulary to describe a forgotten or unknown word--can help English language learners avoid communication breakdowns when speaking. Students of all proficiency levels can benefit from instruction and practice related to circumlocution strategies. In the activity presented in this article, students use these strategies…

Listen-to-summarize cloze (LSC) tasks are not rare in high-stakes language tests; however, we know little about what test-takers do during the tasks. In our study, we examined 16 students' think-aloud protocols (TAPs) which were recorded while they were completing two LSC tasks. The analysis of the 16 TAPs indicated iterative cognitive processes…

In this study, it is aimed to determine at what level the Meaning Identification Technique (MIT) can measure the reading comprehension skills of the 4th grade primary school students and to test the validity and reliability of the MIT test with different types of texts. In the study carried out in the survey model, MIT and Sentence Verification…

Traditional grammar pedagogy conceptualizing grammar as rules of thumb fails to provide learners with comprehensive, accurate, or systematic knowledge on the system. The present classroom-based study aims at investigating application of an alternative pedagogical grammar method integrating the pedagogical framework of systemic theoretical…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the development of past tense counterfactual (PTCF) sentences ("If the dog had stayed in the house, he would not have bitten the police officer") in young adolescents and young adults, addressing both production and comprehension. The goal was to determine if growth occurs during…

In this paper we tried to demonstrate the validity of C-Test using construct identification approach. In this approach to construct validation the factors which contribute to item difficulty are identified. The assumption is that the factors which make items difficult are actually the construct underlying the test. For the purposes of this study,…

In this study the validity of partial dictation as a measure of overall language proficiency was examined. Two partial dictation tests along with a C-Test, a cloze test, and a reading comprehension test, as criterion measures, were administered to a group of Iranian EFL learners. The coefficients of correlation between partial dictation and…

The current study examined the impact of translanguaging on second language reading comprehension. The study involved an experimental and a control group. The participants in the experimental group (n = 38) were offered four opportunities to engage Arabic -- their first language -- in comprehending a text in English. These occasions for…

Many studies that have investigated the educational value of online machine translation (MT) in second language (L2) writing generally report significant improvements after MT use, but no study as of yet has comprehensively analyzed the effectiveness of MT use in terms of various measures in syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and…

Spanish learners engaged in two-way interaction gap tasks where, through social interaction, they identified and defined low-frequency vocabulary. Participants (referred to as actors to differentiate them from task partners) completed two such tasks. Each time, they collaborated with different partners of varying degrees of Spanish proficiency and…

The present study aims to verify the impact of dynamic aids on learning L2 prepositions in relation to individual learner variables. Situated within the cognitive linguistics (CL) framework and differing from previous research, the present study hypothesizes that dynamic (animated) aids are not equally effective for all learners; rather, their…

We used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate whether Spanish-English bilinguals preactivate form and meaning of predictable words. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., "The student is going to the library to borrow a..."), followed by the predictable word ("book"), a word that was form-related…

This study identified the accumulated distributions of the enacted discursive moves during classroom inquiry to demonstrate how a science teacher reacted to the existence of two mutually exclusive social languages: everyday social languages of the students vs. social languages of school science. The participants were a science teacher and 26…

The technical adequacy of CBM maze-scores as indicators of reading level and growth for seventh-grade secondary-school students was examined. Participants were 452 Dutch students who completed weekly maze measures over a period of 23 weeks. Criterion measures were school level, dyslexia status, scores and growth on a standardized reading test.…

The presentation of extraneous (i.e., irrelevant or unnecessary) information may hamper learning with multimedia. The present study examined whether people can learn to ignore unnecessary information with increasing experience with the task and whether this depends on the layout of that information. In two experiments, participants learned about…