The unforeseen shift to virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic required instructors and students to face unprecedented learning challenges. Under these circumstances, Chinese international students who intended to come to the U.S. to begin their studies were required to remotely access their courses while still residing in China, which…

Many human languages have complex grammatical machinery devoted to temporality, but very little is known about how this came about. This paper investigates how people convey temporal information when they cannot use any conventional languages they know. In a laboratory experiment, adult participants were asked to convey information about simple…

In the past decades, society in general has become strongly diverse. This change also affects schools. As a result, learning groups cannot be seen as homogeneous and taught in this way. One of the challenges is students' linguistic skills. Dealing with different linguistic competencies should not only be a focus of formal education in schools but…

College students in the non-English-speaking world have to overcome formidable barriers in reading and writing when their medium of instruction is English. One particular problem faced by science majors is the writing of lab reports, a demanding task that might not be effectively supported by the standard guides and manuals available. This paper…

As a result of recent developments in digital technologies, new genres as well as new contexts for communication are emerging. In view of these developments, this article argues that the scope of English language teaching be expanded beyond the traditional focus on speech and writing to the production of multimodal ensembles, drawing on a range of…

The common links in language learning theory relating to school content areas are the notion of input comprehensible to the learner, the distinction between language usage and use, and the concept of cognitive/academic language proficiency in contrast with basic interpersonal communication skills. This suggests that a laboratory-based science…