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…

To determine the effects of explicit instruction (EI) and potential moderators in second/foreign language (L2) teaching, this study meta-analyzed 28 primary reports (a total of 67 unique samples, N = 3754). The main results show that EI was significantly effective in facilitating L2 development, with effect sizes ranging from moderate to large…

Scoring rubrics are known to be effective for assessing writing for both testing and classroom teaching purposes. How raters interpret the descriptors in a rubric can significantly impact the subsequent final score, and further, the descriptors may also color a rater's judgment of a student's writing quality. Little is known, however, about how…

The purpose of this study was to find the effect of English Language Teachers' Methodology (ELTM) on the Career Growth (CG) of the Saudi students. In order to provide a solid basis for this research study, a cross-sectional-descriptive research design was employed. For scale development and tool standardization, inter-class correlation…

Since the original and adapted versions of the scales that aim to measure foreign language enjoyment may not be appropriate for learners with low English proficiency levels, it seems necessary to develop scales in their native languages. This study aims to create a valid and reliable scale of foreign language learning enjoyment that can be applied…

Employing G-theory and rater interviews, the study investigated how a high-stakes writing assessment procedure (i.e., a single-task, single-rater, and holistic scoring procedure) impacted the variability and reliability of its scores within the Turkish higher education context. Thirty-two essays written on two different writing tasks (i.e.,…

The article introduces triangulation to converge evidence from corpus and experimental data, by means of two case studies in second language (L2) learners of Greek. The first case study investigates the acquisition of gender agreement, while the second probes the development of relative clauses. In both studies, findings from the corpus are tested…

Interactional competence has recently gained considerable attention in language education. As an aspect of this competence, classroom interactional competence has been in the limelight since Walsh's (2006) delineation of this concept. However, there is no survey tool to measure teachers' classroom interactional competence. To bridge this gap, the…

Although lexical diversity is often used as a measure of productive proficiency (e.g., as an aspect of lexical complexity) in SLA studies involving oral tasks, relatively little research has been conducted to support the reliability and/or validity of these indices in spoken contexts. Furthermore, SLA researchers commonly use indices of lexical…

The emergence of AI-driven writing tools has assisted students in writing academic papers. Although the positive benefits of these tools have been acknowledged, concerns regarding ethics emerge. This research is a qualitative study aiming to explore university students' perspectives on the use of AI tools for academic writing. This study sought to…

Motivated by the "emotional turn" in applied linguistics and the recent introduction of positive psychology in L2 studies, the present study aimed to validate and shorten the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ) for measuring positive emotions in foreign language learning and classroom settings. To this end, data were collected from…

This study investigates the validity and reliability of generative large language models (LLMs), specifically ChatGPT and Google's Bard, in grading student essays in higher education based on an analytical grading rubric. A total of 15 experienced English as a foreign language (EFL) instructors and two LLMs were asked to evaluate three student…

Comparative Judgement (CJ) is an evaluation method, typically conducted online, whereby a rank order is constructed, and scores calculated, from judges' pairwise comparisons of performances. CJ has been researched in various educational contexts, though only rarely in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing settings, and is generally agreed to…

The effects of learner- and task-related variables on second language (L2) writing syntactic complexity (SC) have been extensively investigated. However, previous research has rarely assessed the reliability of computational tools for analyzing the SC of L2 spoken production, and we know less about the effects of such variables on L2 speaking SC.…

This best-evidence synthesis appraises the design and outcome characteristics of vocabulary intervention studies conducted with preschool through 6th grade emergent bilingual (EB) children and spotlights rigorously designed studies for which effects could be better attributed to instructional features. Twenty-nine selected studies were analysed…