The spread of misinformation has underscored the importance of cultivating citizens' competency to critically evaluate popular accounts of scientific evidence. Extending the prevailing emphasis on evidence in the natural sciences, we argue for fostering students' understanding of psychological evidence and its communication in the media. In this…

Computer-mediated social learning contexts have become increasingly popular over the last few years; yet existing models of students' cognitive-affective states have been slower to adopt dyadic interaction data for predictions. Here, we explore the possibility of capitalizing on the inherently social component of collaborative learning by using…

Communication strategies interlocutors use to avoid or resolve potential problems in face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated interactions can facilitate English learners' second language acquisition (SLA) (Smith, 2003). Such strategies are beneficial because they encourage English learners to practice the second language (L2), learn vocabulary,…

Group-level metacognitive scaffolding is critical for productive knowledge building. However, previous research mainly focuses on the individual-level metacognitive scaffoldings in helping learners improve knowledge building, and little effort has been made to develop group-level metacognitive scaffolding (GMS) for knowledge building. This…

Research on collaborative learning has revealed that peer-collaboration explanation activities facilitate reflection and metacognition and that establishing common ground and successful coordination are keys to realizing effective knowledge-sharing in collaborative learning tasks. Studies on computer-supported collaborative learning have…

Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) engages students in solving ill-structured problems, creating group knowledge, and developing self-regulation and collaboration skills. Different scaffoldings, such as minimal-guided, task-oriented, and idea-oriented, can be used to facilitate students' CPS activities, but their effects have not been…

The aim of this personal reflection is to revisit the major concepts that have informed my academic research in the area of applied linguistics and second language development, and show how my overall pedagogical approach has evolved, thanks to the contribution of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (SCT). The main focus of this paper is on the…

There has been growing interest in the possibility that peers' ideas can stimulate students' creativity in group contexts. However, empirical research on this issue is limited. This study tested the hypothesis that peers' ideas and students' openness to experience would predict student creativity and attention to peers' ideas. Undergraduate…

Computer-mediated communication tools facilitate international collaboration projects between foreign language learners and peers abroad (O'Dowd, 2018). Social Virtual Reality (VR) applications allow for synchronous interactions and task-based communication in which learners can experience telepresence and immersion and conversate in a foreign…

In this article, the authors propose a set of examination strategies for distributing tasks of collaborative activities. The first purpose behind this proposal is to assess fairly the learners who are involved in group or team work at the e-learning platform. Indeed, in the literature, few methods are used to assess the learners' individual…

While intercultural learning is a key goal of study abroad, it is often difficult to assess or even achieve. Recent models, such as linguistic landscapes (which looks at the language of public signs, including road signs, advertising billboards, street, and place names), can help students reflect on and make sense of their intercultural…

This study highlights the implications, potentials, and challenges of an attempt to conduct the final project of a tertiary level course in a fully online learning environment following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the study is to investigate the English language teaching (ELT) pre-service teachers' (PST) (n=46) preferences of…

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…

Language interaction has been shown to positively impact second language development (Long, 1996). However, whereas research that examined interactionist approaches to second language acquisition (Gass & Mackey, 2006) has meticulously studied how different factors in the interaction (interactional context, type of task, etc) may affect L2…

The aim of the study was to investigate whether telecollaboration is a suitable environment for the acquisition of the speech act of apologies. Participants were aerospace engineering students from the Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) who performed six open role-plays to elicit apologies. The Control Group (CG, n=17) carried out the…