When individuals read a narrative text, they construct a mental representation known as a situational model to comprehend the unfolding story. These models require updates at meaningful changes in the story to reflect current information accurately. Existing research highlights the attentional and working memory demands of these updating…

Previous research has documented that students' reading comprehension performance in learning English as a foreign language (EFL) differs greatly between mobile-assisted and paper-based reading. The present study extends previous work by investigating whether reading cognitive load differs between mobile-assisted and paper-based EFL reading…

This study investigates how academic disciplines impact second language (L2) lexical competencies. Prior L2 research has often overlooked the broader effects of disciplinary backgrounds on lexical development. To address this gap, this study utilized lexical decision, memory, and semantic fluency tasks to examine lexicon recognition, memory, and…

Although an accurate measure of vocabulary size is integral to understanding the proficiency of language learners, the validity of multiple-choice (M/C) vocabulary tests to determine this has been questioned due to users guessing correct answers which inflates scores. In this paper the nature of guessing and partial knowledge used when taking the…

Speech fluency has been extensively researched as a core construct for second language (L2) speaking assessment. Despite the broad consensus on its multifaceted nature, few researchers have empirically explored the dimensionality of this construct. Operationalizations of fluency vary across research and practice, using both holistic and…

Three source-memory experiments were conducted with Spanish-English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers matched on age, education, nonverbal cognitive ability and socioeconomic status. Bilingual language proficiency and dominance were assessed using standardized objective measures. In Experiment 1, source was manipulated visuo-spatially,…

This study aimed at exploring the impact of mentor text modelling on Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' accuracy and fluency in writing tasks with different cognitive complexity in comparison with two conventional approaches to teaching writing; namely, process-based and product-based approaches. To this end, 60 Iranian EFL…

This study investigates the combined effects of task-based careful online planning and the storyline structure of a task on second language performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency). Sixty intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups (n = 15). Participants were asked to perform two tasks with different degrees of storyline…

The impetus of the present study was to scrutinize the impact of planning and proficiency on 172 EFL learners' written task performance regarding concept load, fluency, complexity and accuracy. Planning was operationalized at two levels: pretask planning (PTP) and online planning (OLP). Participants of this study were two groups, high and low…