This article traces the intellectual roots and developments of the notion of competence in second language (L2) teaching and research. Since L2 teaching and research invariably concern competence of some sort (linguistic, communicative, interactional, or otherwise), there have been countless attempts to define competence from diverse theoretical…

The article is devoted to the problems of foreign language education in linguistic universities, namely to promoting the students' linguistic competence, which has been the most urgent in mastering the language as a means of communication. The research prompts the standards to progress the grammatical competence. In the current study, we make a…

ICT tools have gained particular importance in the English as a foreign language classroom in order to promote students' interaction, exchange of opinions, negotiation of meaning, or digital competence. Technological development and the impact of multimedia and virtual spaces on students' lives make educational institutions and teachers explore…

As working life across the world is increasingly multilingual, multicultural and multidisciplinary, higher education language teaching is faced with a challenge of how to prepare students for it. Many universities have recently developed multilingual pedagogies but central to their success is learners' perceptions of these practices. To fill this…

Existing studies on L2 motivation have established a significant association between ideal self, learning engagement, and academic achievement, but few have examined the internal relationships between these variables in the L2 writing domain. In addition, students' linguistic competence, a fundamental element of writing achievement, remains…

Perceived competence is considered an essential predictor of learner´s performance in language learning. It is therefore important to identify strategies that favor its development. This study aims to analyze whether the perceived linguistic competence of English as a L2 of pre-service teachers improves after implementing Dialogic Pedagogical…

The second language (L2) acquisition of tense, aspect, and mood/modality (TAM) has been widely explored as it holds the promise of a better understanding of the L2 learners' linguistic competences, particularly semantically and morpho-syntactically. This study focuses on the acquisition of the subjunctive mood by L1 English learners of L2 French…

Some students are unable to fully comprehend lecture content delivered in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) because of their low linguistic competence. This negatively impacts their academic emotions and learning satisfaction. Speech-enabled language translation (SELT) technology was applied in this study to simultaneously translate lecture…

This research tries to investigate the importance of mobile translation apps when carrying out translation activities in the classroom. Specifically, this is a semester-long study which attempts to see how beneficial it is to allow translation students enrolled in the translation program at the Department of Languages and Translation at Birzeit…

This commentary draws on the four articles in this issue to discuss interactional competence from a usage-based perspective. The usage-based conception of language knowledge as an inventory of form-meaning pairings used for communicative purposes will be qualified by incorporating the idea that these communicative purposes are social actions. L2…

This article investigates whether explicit instruction can affect second language (L2) competence in the domain of English quantifier scope. An intervention study was conducted with L1-Mandarin L2-English learners in order to examine (1) whether these learners can learn inverse scope for the structure on which they are instructed…

This study aims to provide foreign language professionals with a sound methodology for selecting a suitable lexicon apropos of their students' level in the language. The justification of said selection is, herein, rooted in a cognitive argument: If we are able to observe the manner in which words are organized within the mind, we will be better…

The aim of this paper is to find out the attitudes towards Geordie regional variety of English compared to Received Pronunciation (RP) among Turkish speakers of English. There is a recent trend in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) studies which argue that there are different 'Englishes' and these Englishes have different attitude and prestige…

Applied linguists have been exploring approaches to second language acquisition and competence that move beyond a prioritization of cognition and grammar that was derived from the foundational structuralist legacy in linguistics. Recently, for example, they have collaborated in putting together an integrated alternative model (Douglas Fir Group,…

Since Ure (1971) and Halliday (1985), different measures have been proposed in the research literature as a proxy for investigating lexicon advances. They are called lexical richness measures and are an important tool in assessing advance of the lexicon (Johansson, 2009). This article evaluates three lexical richness measures of progress in the…