When recruiting respondents for cognitive interviews testing translated survey questionnaires, researchers often recommend interviewing monolingual non-English speakers because they are the likely users of the translations. However, these individuals are hard to recruit, and there is no standard definition of monolingual. Using cognitive interview…

This study investigated 228 English as foreign language freshmen at a university of science and technology in southern Taiwan to explore the participants' knowledge of English tense forms by recognizing 12 tense forms and translating Chinese sentences into English with specific tense forms. The results showed that the participants who were taught…

In recent years, a growing number of people have taken up interpreting training, with the intention of not only developing interpreting skills, but improving language proficiency as well. The present study sets out to investigate the impact of English-Chinese consecutive interpreting (CI) training on the enhancement of the second language (L2,…

This study examines the manifestations of purity and authenticity in 47 Basque bilinguals' reactions to code-switching. The respondents listened to two speech extracts with code-switching, filled in a short questionnaire and talked about the extracts in small groups. These conversations were then recorded. The respondents' beliefs can be…

It has been found that translation is an efficient means to teach/learn grammar, syntax, and lexis of a foreign language. Meanwhile, translation is good for beginners who do not still enjoy the critical level of proficiency in their target language for expression. This study was conducted to examine the teachers' and learners' perceptions of…

This study reports on investigating students' English translation performance and their use of reading strategies in an elective English writing course offered to senior students of English as a Foreign Language for 100 minutes per week for 12 weeks. A courseware-implemented instruction combined with a task-based learning approach was adopted.…

The effective use of reading strategies has been recognized as an important way to increase reading comprehension in hypermedia environments. The purpose of the study was to explore whether metacognitive strategy use and access to hypermedia annotations facilitated reading comprehension based on English as a foreign language students' proficiency…

This paper investigates the use of "Facebook" for out-of-class, informal language learning. 190 New Zealand university language students (Chinese, German, French, Japanese and Spanish) completed an anonymous online questionnaire on (1) their perceptions of "Facebook" as a multilingual environment, (2) their online writing…

Research on metacognition in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing is heavily dependent on a valid measure to assess metacognitive ability. Since there is no report of a validated domain-specific measure of metacognitive awareness of foreign language (FL) writing this study made an attempt to develop and validate a metacognitive awareness…

This article presents the findings of a study of English-Spanish mediation in hospital and court settings in the USA. The study is based on two main issues: the linguistic and cultural diversity of Hispanics, and the specialized nature of the health and judicial systems. When encountering new or different health care and judicial systems in the…

Through an analysis of students' reactions to transcription exercises, this exploratory study examined some of the differences between two forms of written help enhancing listening passages--second language (L2) captions and transcripts. This primarily qualitative analysis highlighted the role that student proficiency levels may have played in…

There are many different methods that individuals use to learn languages like reading books or writing essays. Not all methods are equally successful for second language learners but nor do all successful learners of a second language show identical preferences for learning methods. Additionally, at the highest level of language learning various…

We present an intelligent tutoring system that lets students of Chinese learn words and grammatical constructions. It relies on a Bayesian, linguistically motivated cognitive model that represents the learner's knowledge. This model is dynamically updated given observations about the learner's behaviour in the exercises, and employed at runtime to…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the problems and difficulties that face the students of Arabic Language at Mu'tah University when translating oriental texts from English into Arabic in the academic year 2011-2012. The difficulties facing Arabic students when translating oriental texts has never been studied, rising an urgent need to…

The present study examines how glossing of second language (L2) texts affects L2 learners' reading comprehension as well as their learning of L2 grammar and vocabulary. It employed a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest design with two treatment sessions. The target features were English unaccusativity and 10 pseudo-word items.…