The study examined Finnish elementary school pupils' academic peer assistance and its relation to their demographic backgrounds of gender and language, social networking with schoolmates, and orientation toward sociodigital participation. The participants (188 fifth graders) responded to a social networking questionnaire on schoolmate and academic…

The circumstances associated with high levels of achievement in undergraduate studies has not been thoroughly explored in the Australian context. This study investigated factors predicting high academic achievement, defined as maintaining a Distinction average, at undergraduate level. Findings revealed several factors that predicted achievement…

The quest to flourish academically and acquire skills needed for job opportunities has brought people from different cultures and countries to closely interact. Using Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, this study examines the relationship between international students' intercultural sensitivity and academic adaptation and the mediating role of…

There is considerable controversy over the factors that shape infants' developing knowledge of grammar. Work with artificial languages suggests that infants' ability to track statistical regularities within the speech they hear could, in principle, support grammatical development. However, little work has tested whether infants' performance on…

The authors explore the occurrence of different learner profiles in secondary education, as well as their relationship with test performance and student characteristics. Based on a cluster analysis of 1,931 secondary school students' self-reported text-learning strategy use and study traces, the authors identified and validated four distinct…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between writing motivation and performance for students in grades three to five, and whether scores differed based on students' language status, gender, or grade level. Three student language groups were included: (1) emergent bilingual students currently receiving services for English…

Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable…

Individual differences in motivational beliefs, such as writing efficacy and attitudes toward writing in different contexts (academic, recreational, print or digital), are hypothesised to account for variability in writing performance. This study tested this proposition with 185 middle school students (58% were male), examining if writing…

Research on inner speech is still in a nascent stage. The present paper investigates consecutive multilinguals' self-reported language use for inner speech with a focus on the L1 (first language) and L2 (second language). Its aim is to identify influential variables in these processes and to investigate if findings from previous studies are…

A number of longitudinal studies of L2 production have reported frequency effects wherein learners' produce more frequent words as a function of time. The current study investigated the spoken output of English L2 learners over a four-month period of time using both native and non-native English speaker frequency norms for both word types and word…

This book examines the role of interlocutors and their individual differences (IDs) in second language (L2) development from four theoretical lenses: the cognitive-interactionist approach, sociocultural theory, the variationist approach, and complex dynamic systems theory. A theoretical overview to each approach is written by a preeminent scholar…

The present longitudinal study examines the interaction of learner variables (gender, motivation, self-efficacy, and first language literacy) and their influence on second language learning outcomes. The study follows English learners of French from Year 5 in primary school (aged 9-10) to the first year in secondary school (Year 7; aged 11-12).…