The voice effect or principle assumes that people learn better when they are exposed to multimedia instruction that includes a human voice rather than a machine voice. This investigation reconsiders the voice principle by investigating the relationship between learning outcomes and mental effort of the learners. Text-to-speech (TTS) engines have…

This paper reports a post-hoc analysis of the influence of lexical difficulty of cue sentences on performance in an elicited imitation (EI) task to assess oral production skills for 645 child L2 English learners in instructional settings. This formed part of a large-scale investigation into effectiveness of foreign language teaching in Polish…

It is argued that tasks with different structures yield different performances in terms of accuracy, fluency and complexity. The present study is thus an attempt to investigate the impact of task structure on second language task performance. Thirty two upper-intermediate Iranian learners of English performed two narrative tasks (Structured vs.…

A study examined the control of selected areas of French grammar by 40 students at 4 different levels of university language study. Improved performance was found at each successive level of study, but significant discrepancies were also found within levels. Implications for instructional and curricular improvement are discussed. (MSE)