This study investigated the comparative effects of strategic and unpressured within-task planning on second language (L2) Chinese oral production and the role of working memory in mediating the effects of the two types of planning. Twenty-nine L2 Chinese learners at a large New Zealand university performed a narrative task after watching a…

To meet the demands of contemporary society, students need to develop the ability to interact effectively with people from different cultures. To advance this goal, a project involving ethnographic interviews was introduced to an intercultural communication course. Participating students' attitudes toward other cultures were measured on a Likert…

Although there is significant research surrounding online foreign language education, there are still questions on whether the outcomes are comparable to those obtained in the traditional face-to-face classroom. This study examined four classes, two online and two face-to-face, where students took the second course of a 6-level program of English…

Monolingual and parallel concordancers have both been found to benefit second-language (L2) grammatical development. However, the relative benefits of these two concordancer types remains unclear. The present study compares learning outcomes and learners' perceptions of a monolingual English (Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA) and a…

This study was conducted to examine the predictors of willingness to communicate (WTC) inside and outside the classroom and to examine the effect of vision/imagery capacity on willingness to communicate. The study was designed via a quantitative approach in which a composite instrument was used to examine the relationships of different variables…

There has been considerable interest in cognitive load in recent years, but the effect of affective load and its relationship to mental functioning has not received as much attention. In order to investigate the effects of affective stimuli on cognitive function as manifest in the ability to remember foreign language vocabulary, two groups of…

Differences in learning patterns of vocabulary acquisition in children at risk (+SRD) and not at risk (-SRD) for Specific Reading Disability (SRD) were examined using a microdevelopmental paradigm applied to the multi-trial Foreign Language Learning Task (FLLT; Baddeley et al., 1995). The FLLT was administered to 905 children from rural…

In spite of Krashen's (1985) claims that the only way to acquire a second language is through non-stressful comprehensible input, Swain (1995, 1998, 2005) and others propose that the production of language (speaking or writing), under certain circumstances, is a significant part of the second-language acquisition process. Swain also states that…

Investigating supervision comments, as a form of interaction between the teacher and the learner, is an area of research that has received little attention so far in spite of being crucial in creating an atmosphere of friendship and confidence-building. Previous research in this area has emphasized the role of affect in supervision comments in…

What are the perceived effects of Telecollaboration (TC), compared to other types of communication-scenarios with peers (i.e. local peers in small groups and Erasmus students abroad)? This is the question this exploratory study tackles within a blended language learning course. The analysis of students' perceptions paints a rather contrastive…

This study empirically tested the noticing function of the output hypothesis (Swain, 1993, 1995, 1998) and explored the relationship between noticing and learning by comparing the effects of the production of output to exposure to textually enhanced input. The present study is a conceptual replication of Izumi (2002); however, Izumi examined a…

The present study investigated how self-related English learning motivation among Taiwanese adolescent learners differs between students who only receive English instruction in formal schooling and those who have additional private tutoring. A total of 1,698 teenage English learners in public secondary schools across Taiwan completed a…

Even though the majority of Colombian professors are also involved in research, they have limitations in their English language skills that separate them from the rest of the scientific society. Evidently, these limitations have become an obstacle in the awareness of professors' modest, but no less important, research work. In order to carry out…

The present study investigates the prosody/pragmatics interface in TBLT by extending the traditional morphological focus-on-form to a focus on intonational forms, with Spanish declaratives and imperatives. Twenty-eight intermediate L2 Spanish learners were assigned to one of two conditions that differed in the type of focus-on-form present during…

This study focuses on lexical diversity and the use of academic and lower frequency words in essays written by EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students enrolled in Years 1 and 2 at the undergraduate university level. The purpose of this study is to find out the extent to which EFL students become more proficient in their use of academic and…