The goals of the current study were (a) to assess differences in child and adult pausing and (b) to determine whether characteristics of child and adult pausing can be explained by the same language variables. Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from 10 5-year-olds and their accompanying parent using a storytelling/retelling task. Analyses of…

This study introduces an approach to providing corrective feedback to L2 learners termed analogy-based corrective feedback that is motivated by analogical learning theories and syntactic alignment in dialogue. Learners are presented with a structurally similar synonymous version of their output where the erroneous form is corrected, and they must…

One of the central considerations in the validity argument for the TOEFL iBT is the relationship between the language on the exam and the language required for university courses. Corpus linguistics has recently been shown to be an effective way to explore this relationship, which can also be considered as an aspect of authenticity. Applying…

Bilingual children often show advanced executive functioning (EF) and false belief (FB) understanding compared to monolinguals. The latter has been attributed to their enhanced inhibitory control EF, although this has only been examined in a single study which did not confirm this hypothesis. The current study examined the relation of EF and…

This study investigates the relative effectiveness of four types of input-enhanced instruction on the development of Iranian EFL learners' production of pragmatically appropriate and grammatically accurate suggestions. Over a 16-week course, input delivered through video clips was enhanced differently in four intact classes: (1) metapragmatic…

Schools in Ireland vary in how they introduce reading in the two official languages, Irish and English. There is particular variability within immersion (Irish medium) schools. Some introduce Irish reading first (IRF) and others English reading first (ERF). This study compared the development of Irish and English skills in children attending…

Purpose: This study examined the potential roles of phonological sensitivity and processing speed in age-related declines of verbal working memory. Method: Twenty younger and 25 older adults with age-normal hearing participated. Two measures of verbal working memory were collected: digit span and serial recall of words. Processing speed was…

This study compares how the native speakers of Thai (TTs) and American (AEs) as well as the Thai learners of English as a foreign language with high exposure to English (TEHs) and those with the low exposure (TELs) perform the speech acts of compliments (Cs) by taking the context of age into their consideration. The data were collected by means of…

The focus of this study is the relationship between students' performance in mental calculation and the strategies they use when solving three-digit mental addition problems. The sample comprises 78 4th grade students (40 boys and 38 girls). Their mean age was 10 years and 4 months. The main novelties of the current research include (1)…

The multimedia elements of text and audio need to be carefully integrated together to maximize the impact of those elements for learning in a multimedia environment. Redundancy information presented through audio and visual channels can inhibit learning for individuals diagnosed with ADHD, who may experience challenges in the processing of…

Vocabulary development is an essential goal in any language teaching program, and considering the multidimensional nature of this construct, achieving this goal needs effective assessment of all dimensions of word knowledge, i.e. breadth, depth and accessibility of word knowledge. Most of the current vocabulary assessment tools measure the breadth…

This study examines second language activation in Arabic-English bilinguals for whom Arabic was the first language. Modeling its design on Colome (2001), the research compared processing in a picture-phoneme matching task for Arabic-English bilinguals tested in the United States or in Saudi Arabia to determine whether activation of English…

This paper reports an experiment designed to evaluate an attempt to improve the effectiveness of an existing L2 idiom-learning tool. In this tool, learners are helped to associate the abstract, idiomatic meaning of expressions such as "jump the gun" (act too soon) with their original, concrete meaning (e.g. associating "jump the…

Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore possible age differences in children's perceptions of illness and health and to what extent these differ from adults' perceptions. Design: Cross-sectional design. Setting: Selected nursery and primary schools in Greece. Method: The sample consisted of 347 children aged 5-11 years and 114…

The article reports on a study investigating the comparative effects of immediate and delayed corrective feedback in learning the English past passive construction, a linguistic structure of which the learners had little prior knowledge. A total of 120 learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) from 4 intact classes at a Chinese middle school…