This study examines four learner engagement dimensions (behavioural, cognitive, emotional and social) in pedagogical task performance and provides insights into the effects of two task types (information-seeking and direction-giving) and topic familiarity on learner engagement in a semester-long English course. A total of 28 foreign language…

This study investigates the effects of three word-focused exercise conditions on vocabulary learning. The exercises were developed based on the involvement load hypothesis. This study also explores how individual differences (e.g. second-language English proficiency level and working memory) affect vocabulary learning outcomes. A total of 180…

This study was conducted to understand issues related to the current practice of English teacher education development in the Lao People's Democratic Republic with a focus on reading. It recognizes that what pre-service teachers experience both prior to and during their teacher education are important and need to be understood if the goals of…

Shadowing, a practice of repeating what one hears as simultaneously and accurately as possible, has been researched in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) field for years. The research findings have shown that shadowing contributes to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' bottom-up listening skills, which leads to…

This study investigated the impact of metacognitive pedagogical sequence on development of less-proficient Thai EFL listeners' L2 listening metacognition and listening comprehension achievement over a semester. Sixty-four university students who were enrolled in a listening course participated in a quasi-experimental study. Both the intervention…

Many scholars and teachers in EFL education should agree that compared with reading and writing, listening has received much less attention. This brief article discusses important gaps existing in EFL listening and overall proficiency development. It presents the case for a greater focus on sounds and actual listening in the classroom and spoken…

Science texts use various text features and multiple representations to communicate meaning to their readers. English science texts are challenging for elementary-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Taiwan because they are familiar with reading language-controlled texts from textbooks. Teaching students to make use of various…

Single word items have usually been the unit of analysis for measuring L2 learners' vocabulary size, for designing word lists and for estimating word coverage of reading texts. However, what is lost in these estimates is the consideration of multiword expressions, such as idioms. To empirically test the assertion that the knowledge of single word…

The research genre has specific communicative purposes which require students to understand the tone, generic and disciplinary conventions. The present study explored the potential of thematic progression (TP) to contribute to research argument readability. TP concerns how clauses encode information and how that information is carried forward.…

Contemporary society demands from individuals new and relevant literacies that go beyond the basics of reading and writing. Furthermore, texts now appear less confined to a single semiotic resource. The proliferation of different forms of communication like visuals, among others, encourages people to use literacy in multiple modalities.…

This study examined whether the reading passages in the new series of English-language textbooks for high-school students in Vietnam fostered reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading by looking at four factors: the number of unfamiliar words in the texts, the importance of these words for text comprehension, the…

Research has suggested that the type and frequency of learning strategies employed by successful listeners is greater than their less successful counterparts. Based on evidence that metacognitive strategies (e.g. listening-for-gist; inferring meaning) are more effective than cognitive ones (e.g. word-for-word translation), this study sought to…

The ways that Iranian universities prepare their students for their future academic and professional lives are changing. Many universities have launched innovative practice in the use of technology in teaching and learning, aiming to present student learners with an engaging experience. The adoption of an innovation necessitates considering the…

Although second language listening has become a rather active area of research in the past ten years, some topics such as listening fluency development and extensive listening (EL) have not received much attention. The purpose of the present study is to examine the levels of listening support that might be needed to facilitate L2 learners'…

Literature has long been used as a tool for language teaching and learning. In the New Academic Structure in Hong Kong, it has become an important element in the senior secondary English language curriculum to promote communicative language teaching (CLT) with a process-oriented approach. However, as in many other English as a second or foreign…