Studies have shown that raising L2 learners' metaphor awareness contributes to the acquisition of figurative language, which fosters students' development of language skills. However, the instruments measuring metaphor awareness, in the majority of relevant research, did not seem to have undergone proper methodological procedures for checking…

This study continued a project aiming at empirically investigating the Plurilingual Creativity paradigm. It looked at the mediating role of tolerance and intolerance of ambiguity in the relation between plurilingualism/pluriculturalism and creativity. To test the research hypotheses, we recruited 261 participants using a simple random sampling…

Traditional approaches to intercultural competence (IC) in language learning have been criticised for reproducing cultural differentialism, a theoretical perspective which emphasises that people are different due to essential distinctions between their ethnic or national cultural background. While differentialist views have been recognised as…

Effective communication requires social and cultural norms in addition to linguistic competence. This study explores the challenges that people who studied English in Burundi face when communicating in English. It, also, seeks to determine the causes of these challenges. To this end, people who often participate in meetings, conferences, or…

Effective teaching of English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) is considered to enhance workers' performance, efficacy, and professional development. Thus, what students and teachers believe to lead to effective EOP teaching is worth exploring. This study set out to compare students' and teachers' beliefs about effective EOP teaching. It employed a…

Intercultural competence is a crucial element of foreign language education, yet the multifaceted nature of this construct makes it inherently difficult to assess. Although several tools for evaluating intercultural competence currently exist, research on their use in secondary school settings is scarce. This study reports on the development and…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between intercultural communicative competence and demotivation to learn a second language. The participants of the study included 60 Iranian EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. Data were collected through administering the intercultural communicative…

The spread of English as a world language has reached many non English speaking countries. In the Expanding Circle (Kachru, 1988), many countries in Africa demonstrate more and more interest in learning it. This paper investigates Chadian learners' attitudes and motivation in learning that language. The study's subjects are made up of 190…

Despite textbooks serving as a primary educational resource, they are not inclusive. While the argument that the native speaker (NS) lingua-cultural approach or dominance in textbooks may impede English as a lingua franca (ELF)-aware teaching and learning has been accepted by some scholars, this assertion is supported by little empirical evidence…

This article provides information on an action research project in a low-level EFL setting in Japan. The project aims were to (1) foster spoken communication skills and (2) help students engage with their own learning. The project investigated the applicability of board games as a mediating tool for authentic communication as part of a wider TBLT…

Although the ability to speak is usually seen as a key manifestation of learners' ability in the target language they are attempting to master, research has not given ample attention to strategies that can be employed to enhance this skill. In fact, the bulk of such empirical investigations has mainly focused on communication strategies that are…

The New Zealand school curriculum was last revised in 2007, at which time a new emphasis was placed on culture in language teaching. The practice of intercultural language teaching is implicit in the curriculum document and explicit in the curriculum guide, which features a set of principles for intercultural communicative language teaching…

The aim of this article is to focus on university students' attitudes towards English and their anxieties concerning the use of English in the Basque Country, a multilingual context where exposure to English is limited but internationalisation is an important aim. Participants were 360 undergraduate university students of business (N = 180) and…

This article investigates 292 postgraduate students of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), through a Likert-scale questionnaire. This inquiry was about private, educational actions and learning valuation of a foreign language and its relation with the learning of one or several foreign languages. The analysis of…

With increasing arguments and evidence suggesting its benefits, First Language (L1) use (including translation exercise) is experiencing a resurrection in Second Language or Foreign Language (SL/FL) classrooms. One form of L1 use is composing comparable and parallel texts, which can be an important pedagogical resource but which has received…