Chinese has become a prime foreign language in the educational policies of many nations, including Thailand. However, strategies for Thai students to successfully improve their Chinese, especially speaking skills, remain understudied. To minimize the knowledge gap, this quantitative study investigated Thai students' speaking strategies when…

The aim of this study was to investigate university students' psychosocial apperceptions between face-to-face and emergency remote learning environments they experienced in the same academic term during the 2019-nCoV (coronavirus) pandemic of 2020. Utilizing a mixed methods study design, our investigation involved quantitative data collection with…

This study aims to investigate university students' readiness and presence towards online teaching in the context of various variables. The study is designed as survey research, one of the quantitative models. The sample of the study consists of 318 preparatory and firstyear university students studying at a university in the Eastern Anatolian…

This study examines the identity negotiation of Muslim female international students in ESL classrooms in the mid-southern United States, where linguistic adaptation and cultural integration pressures intersect. Drawing on intersectionality, postcolonial feminism, and Kim's International Student Identity Model, this research highlights how these…

Research finds that going far from home has many positive psychological outcomes such as enhanced creative thinking, and research on creativity reveals that nonconformity can be a useful tool to stimulate innovation. Merging these findings, we theorise that foreign experiences increase nonconformist attitudes and behaviours. In Studies 1 and 2,…

In an ever-evolving competitive world, learning a Foreign Language (FL) has become essential. To enhance learners' learning proficiency, learners should be encouraged to build the necessary competence for learning an FL, and this could be done by enhancing the employment of Language Learning Strategies (LLSs), as LLSs constitute an essential…

The advent of social networks has provided a good platform for everyone to share information to present themselves. Instagram is a tool to participate in social reciprocity, not only by the exploration of information but also through self-praise. This study examined the self-praise by Iranian EFL learners on Instagram from a pragmatic perspective.…

Compliments are expressions of positive evaluation that commonly occur in everyday conversational encounters. This paper aims at raising second language cross-cultural pragmatic awareness through investigating the use of complimenting expressions in Palestinian Arabic which are related to certain social variables, namely, gender, age, education…

Although research has investigated laughter in professional communication settings, fewer studies have explored laughter-talk in second language (L2) classrooms. This study examines L2 university students' use of laughter-talk in peer group conversation to understand the linguistics of affect and its interactional effects. The author draws upon…

This article reports on a study that set out to investigate how Iranian EFL learners respond to compliments in English. The data were collected using a discourse completion task (DCT) consisting of a variety of situations that required the participants, 26 EFL learners (13 males and 13 females) to respond to compliments directed at them. The data…

The ability to effectively communicate with individuals from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds is an invaluable asset. Learning a second language proves useful as students navigate the culturally diverse world; however, studying a second language can be difficult for learners who are not immersed in the real and natural environment of…

This study investigated cross-cultural differences on 38 subscales from 4 major domains--personality, social attitudes, values, and social norms. These scales were administered to participants who took the Test of English as a Foreign Language[TM] (TOEFL[R], N = 1,600) and U.S. college students (N = 429). Total variability of each subscale was…

The goal of this study is to describe the acquisition rate for gender acquisition in Spanish and to show whether individual variability and language contact may affect this rate. The participants were intermediate second language Spanish (first language English) learners in the study abroad and at-home contexts over a 4-month period. The…

The study described here investigated the refusal strategies of intermediate-level second language learners and the potential for developing sociolinguistic competence in nonnative speakers (NNS) through classroom instruction. Subjects were six college students of English as a Second Language, divided into treatment and control groups. The…

This article reviews the findings of a study which set out to examine the role that consciousness raising (CR) plays in grammatical development in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). Students participated in weekly SCMC sessions. Spanish L2 forms "por/para" and "ser/estar" were chosen, and the data from two groups--form-and-meaning…