Online learning environments afford opportunities for participation and equally offer a new perspective on engaging vicariously. Drawing on the concept of vicarious learning and taking account of the roles of input and interaction for language development, this paper reports on an enquiry into students' retrospective use of recorded group…

Autonomous learning is one of the most important factors in the field of language learning. Leaning a language demands a considerable amount of time and learners have to work inside and outside the classroom to develop their language skills. The present study explored ways of promoting autonomous learning skills in mixed-level of students of…

The "alone together" paradox is a phenomenon that occurs when adults make meaning of their learning in the online environment. By way of being "alone together," the online environment manifests a context for incidental and informal learning.

African township schools are characterised by cultural and linguistic diversity, hence, teachers have the dual task of ensuring that learners grasp scientific concepts, while also catering for the diversity in the learners' backgrounds. The study reported on here was aimed at investigating teachers' beliefs and practices in teaching life sciences…

The potential benefit of employing a flipped learning approach, where learners are presented with the content preceding the class time, is to make a shift from traditional teacher-centered learning environments to more learner- and learning-centered ones. As this content delivery should be short, small, fine, and powerful, 'microlearning' as a new…

The present study provides empirical data measuring the effects of a flipped and blended course design for beginning-level Spanish on the four skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening, compared to a control group following a traditional present-practice-produce instructional format. The study provides a template for the successful…

This study combined virtual reality (VR) technology, the 6E (Engage, Explore, Explain, Engineer, Enrich, and Evaluate) model, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education to develop a hands-on activity aimed at helping students to achieve "learning by doing." The participants were 162 tenth-grade students,…

The goal of this brief article is to highlight a specific methodological consideration pertaining to the examination of linguistic transfer in sequential language acquisition: When and how can transfer be meaningfully disentangled from issues pertaining to developmental trajectories of the target language? While this methodological issue is…

In educational psychology, the theories of interest and self-determination have been well studied to find the relationships between learning attitudes and learning outcomes. However, the instructional design and the learning behaviors are the two missing elements which have not been fully investigated in the learning process. Therefore, we…

Foreign language teaching is one field that is changing and being updated to meet the needs of learners and recent advances lead to consider new perspectives, directions and approaches. As an example of blended learning, flipped classrooms have gained prominence in recent years owing to the interest in crucial impacts of online and learner-centred…

We report on mixed methods research that explored pre-service teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in basic musical methods for teaching and learning of basic fractions within the framework of Vygotsky's Theory of Scaffolding. Vygotsky's use of scaffolding opines that knowledge, skills and prior experiences, create the foundation for potential…

Studies have indicated the importance of scaffolding in the problem-solving process, as well as the potential of integrating learning content into the troubleshooting tasks. However, few have explored in depth the learning process during troubleshooting via scaffolds while also taking students' cognitive load into account. To address this issue,…

Although digital game-based vocabulary learning (DGBVL) has attracted considerable attention, factors attributing to the facilitative effects of DGBVL have not yet been satisfactorily understood. To this end, under the theoretical framework of flow theory, this study investigates the effects of flow experiences on Chinese…

We propose a previously unexamined factor instrumental in learning vocabulary accounting for the differences between learning a native and a foreign language: the development of critical thinking in adolescence. We hypothesize that the difficulties experienced in foreign vocabulary development result from the learner's readiness to question new…

Globalization and new technologies mean that additional-language students now have unprecedented access to naturalistic interactions with native or highly competent speakers (HCSs). Even though a majority of students would still prefer to have teacher guidance in these interactions, only some teachers may want or be able to do so. This…