Twenty Japanese university freshmen majoring in International Studies (N = 4) and Nursing (N = 16) participated in a 10-month project examining changes in their motivation. Using monthly focus group interviews and a 35-item questionnaire, the dynamic systems of various types of learners of English over two semesters were explored. Trajectories of…

Some recent research has focused on the students' silence and inviting more student voice. This paper investigated the reasons behind Iranian undergraduate students' silence in English classes and stepped further to give voice to those students' attitudes toward English with the belief that inviting and including student voice could improve the…

Purpose: Factors of self-regulated learning processes, namely teacher autonomy support/parental autonomy support, and three types of individual goal-orientations (i.e. mastery goal, performance-approach goal, performance-avoidance goal) were examined. Methodology: A questionnaire was used to survey 212 Japanese undergraduate students who were…

The present study examined the impact of trained peer feedback on Spanish as a second language (L2) in terms of language performance, nature of feedback, and perceptions of peer feedback in speaking tasks. Participants in the study included 17 intermediate L2 Spanish learners enrolled in a conversation course that incorporated peer feedback…

Considerable resources are expended on the development of learner autonomy (LA), and in particular on the provision of self-access facilities as one of the most common ways in which institutions have tried to foster autonomy. Whether the intended outcomes are achieved depends in large part on teachers' agreement with and understanding of the…

Every individual has a different perspective on time, known as "temporal perspective". A person's orientation and attitude towards time can have a profound effect on their behaviour and motivation. In Second Language Acquisition, a variety of work has considered learners and their behaviours from various temporal perspectives. However,…

Teachers employ various strategies aimed at enhancing student motivation, yet there is scant empirical evidence to support their effectiveness. Based on an investigation of 30 EFL classroom observations involving 10 teachers and more than 900 learners (including 90 learners at different levels of English proficiency who completed questionnaires),…

This study investigated how well interest and motives to communicate with the instructor (MCI) predict L2 willingness to communicate (WTC) and L2 speaking among English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, and tested whether these variables predict L2 WTC and speaking differently across different age and sex groups. It also examined whether there…

As a result of the global presence of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), it has been argued that learners of English should be exposed to a range of varieties of English, rather than a single variety of English, so that they can be better prepared to communicate with other people in ELF communication. However, little is known about second language…

The study aimed at enhancing Chinese as a second language (CSL) students' listening comprehension by using authentic contexts in Second Life (SL). Twenty-seven CSL students from 4 countries participated in the 6-week study. A within-subject design was adopted to confirm the effects of 3D immersive experiences on CSL students' listening…

This article presents a didactic experience carried out in the Degree of Translation and Interpreting (English) at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville and it is part of a project of Innovation and Teaching Development. The main objective is the development in students of a metaphoric competence -- metaphorical awareness and strategies to…

This paper reports on a study examining the attitudes and perceptions of a group of in-service teachers who are new or relatively new to facilitating self-directed learning (SDL) before and after they taught a course with an integrated SDL component. The study also investigates the impact on those teachers' attitudes of an orientation package…

This paper reports on the findings of a study looking at students' motivation to engage in self-access language learning (SALL) while taking an English for Academic Purposes course which contains a substantial integrated SALL component. To-date there has been limited research into the motivation of such students but it is an important area of…

The present study aimed to investigate the possible relationships between field of study, learning style preferences, and language learning strategies among university students majoring in the fields of arts and humanities, science, engineering, social sciences, and English as a foreign language. To this end, 376 university students completed the…

The study reported in this paper explored if learners' perceptions of two types of oral corrective feedback, recasts, and metalinguistic feedback, are influenced by their foreign language anxiety in classrooms. Corrective feedback was provided to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who were homogeneous with regard to their proficiency…