The challenges facing non-native English-speaking students (NNESSs) in adapting to the conventions of academic writing at the tertiary level in English-medium institutions have been widely canvassed in scholarly research. Nonetheless, there does not appear to be a great deal of research that investigates the experiences of Arabic-speaking students…

The perceptions of students who study environmental science related to pollution are certainly different because they are influenced by various circumstances. These circumstances, among others, depend on what they observe around them and their prior knowledge. This study aimed to determine the concept of pollution according to the cognitive…

This study proposed a three-tier test to help students learn English grammar. To reduce students' anxiety, game-based learning was incorporated into the three-tier test, where personalization was also implemented to accommodate students' different needs. More specifically, we developed a Personalized Entertaining Three-Tier Test (PET3), which…

Research has indicated the importance of vocabulary knowledge and background knowledge in second/foreign language (L2) listening comprehension. However, previous studies treated these two factors separately, and no study has examined the simultaneous contribution of these two factors to L2 listening comprehension. Therefore, the aim of this study…

Shadow education helps students become academically competitive. Currently, little is known about whether shadow education can effectively fulfill either remedial or enrichment purposes in China. Using the nationally representative data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) collected in 2013 and 2014, this paper explored the opportunity gap…

This study explores whether and to what extent the background information supplied by 10,155 immigrants who took an official language test in Norwegian affected their chances of passing one, two, or all three parts of the test. The background information included in the analysis was prior education, region (location of their home country),…

Emergentist, usage-based L2 research has witnessed that emphasizing formulaic sequences as entry points in meaning-based instructional contexts contributes to the development of linguistic comprehension and production. Related studies have thus far striven to find the most effective methods of highlighting these word strings. This study explored…

Despite some rises and falls in the numbers due to various reasons, including the political climate in the Trump era and the COVID-19 pandemic (Laws & Ammigan, 2020), each year universities in the United States host a large number of multilingual international students from different parts of the world. Based on their TOEFL scores, many are…

Despite increasing number of studies on incidental vocabulary learning through viewing in a foreign language, glosses, which have been proven to have facilitative effects in incidental vocabulary learning via other modes of input, have remained underexplored in audiovisual input. The current study investigates the effects of (1) traditional gloss…

There is growing evidence that L2 learners pick up new words while viewing video but little is known about the role of individual differences. This study explores incidental learning after viewing a French documentary containing 15 pseudowords and investigates whether learning is moderated by participants' prior vocabulary knowledge and working…

Though the empirical findings of the past studies in the literature have offered strong support to the significant role of language knowledge and background knowledge in reading comprehension, this issue has not been explored with regard to specific purposes tests in the Iranian higher education context. Therefore, this study aimed at exploring…

Educational societies encountered rapid development in all fields of knowledge, assisted by the invention of new technologies and development of linguistic systems. Over time, researchers contribute to design well known instructional models such as traditional-based and inquiry-based models. However, the previous literature investigations showed…

The present study investigates the effect of task repetition and individual differences on Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' lexical use and fluency in oral task performance. The study adopts a within-subjects design with forty students performing the same narrative task twice. Students also completed two prior vocabulary…

How do speakers learn the social meaning of different linguistic variants, and what factors influence how likely a particular social-linguistic association is to be learned? It has been argued that the social meaning of more salient variants should be learned faster, and that learners' pre-existing experience of a variant will influence its…

English is increasingly being used as a medium instruction in business education at the tertiary level, with its growth fueled by university internationalization. As a result, many students enrolled in English medium business programs are learning through a second or foreign language, with variant levels of prior knowledge and experiences. This…