A study is presented with a twofold objective related to child voice: to explore children's views on the use of video recordings in an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) class, and to promote the inclusion of child voice in decision-making processes in the foreign language classroom. The study was carried out in a primary school setting in…

Working memory (WM) may be an essential component of incidental vocabulary learning and retention from captioned videos. However, how WM affects young learners' incidental vocabulary learning under different types of captions remains unclear. The present study employs a between-subject research design. The main purpose is to examine how two types…

A compulsory foreign language in Finland starts now in Grade 1 instead of Grade 3. The change has forced teachers to adopt new teaching methods. As young learners are not yet literate, teaching should focus on oral skills and awareness of diversity. Video data from 19 early foreign language lessons of five English, German, or French teachers in…

Design and content of classroom activities are crucial to foreign/second (L2) language learners' motivation, be they children or adults. Lifeworld relevance and learner autonomy are two important aspects in building motivational L2 curricula for adults (e.g.), but such considerations rarely filter through to primary school learners due to…

This study intended to examine L2 young learners' vocabulary learning (i.e. form, meaning, and use). The research design involved a 2 (advance-organizer strategy: present vs. absent) × 4 (caption type: glossed full captions, glossed keyword captions, full captions, keyword captions) between-subjects design. A total of 240 Chinese ESL primary…

The goals of this paper were to: (a) recognize the funds of identity that five emergent bilingual mother-child dyads express while making personal connections to culturally relevant books, (b) identify whether each dyad's responses were convergent or divergent, and (c) explore how these discussions expanded participants' views of one another or…

Students classified as English language learners (ELLs), many of whom are also Hispanic/Latiné/x, are at times excluded from opportunities to engage in engineering design experiences due to the emphasis on learning English. In dual language bilingual education, however, language policies that allow for the use and development of more than one…

Flipped learning is gaining prominence in EFL classrooms, where it has been shown to provide various advantages. However, the literature has not adequately addressed the integration of L2 interaction outside the classroom into flipped learning design. Accordingly, given the ubiquitous and interactive nature of chatbot technology, we designed a…

Research on how the use of social robots helps improve English as Foreign Language (EFL) young learners' pronunciation and willingness to communicate (WTC) is understudied. This study developed a robot and tangible objects (R&T) learning system and examined its impact on elementary EFL learner's English pronunciation and WTC. The R&T…

Many educators in immersion contexts support a policy of strict separation of languages in the classroom as the ideal model for second language acquisition and are reluctant to make connections between the dominant language, the target language and pupils' home languages. This can result in missed opportunities for drawing on pupils' entire…

In the United States, research on reading difficulties is predominantly carried out by scholars who project findings on L1 English reading difficulty to generalized difficulty in learning a second language (L2; e.g., Galuschka et al., 2020; Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2020; cf. Sparks, 2023). This research extrapolation creates a negative feedback…

Intercultural communication plays a crucial role in second language (L2) acquisition as it always happens in the context of another, usually very different culture. The present study sheds light on the benefits of using documentary videos in teaching intercultural communication to young students and how they can affect students' development of…

This study is aimed to design a novel vocabulary learning mechanism (VLM) in the previously developed video-annotated learning and reviewing system (VALRS) that allows learners to identify unfamiliar or unknown words when listening to the video and generate personalized input enhancement from English subtitles for vocabulary learning. It is…

The interactional role of language use in the mathematics classroom is explored in the last few decades. This paper adds to the knowledge base by exploring different ways of talking that children and their teacher use in a New Zealand primary geometry English-medium classroom. Bakhtin's concept of speech genres is used for an analysing transcript…

Within instructed second language research, there is growing interest in research focusing on primary school vocabulary learning. Research has emphasized classroom-based learning of vocabulary knowledge, with growing focus on the potential for using captioned videos and increased word encounters. The present study investigated the effects of…