Despite a large body of literature on peer feedback and writing motivation, relatively few rigorously designed, experimental studies have been conducted to explore whether or not peer feedback affects students' writing motivation and which dimensions of writing motivation may consequently change. Using an experimental design, this study explored…

This study aimed at applying English reading and writing strategies' training to improve the low English proficiency students' competence of English reading and writing. It was a quasi-experiment design. In total, 70 non-English major undergraduates at a private university in China participated in the research, 35 students in the experimental…

Past studies have shown that multimodal presentation of story can improve story-retelling performance in the first language. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether similar multimedia effects can be observed in second language learning and graphic novel reading. A total of 51 Chinese elementary school children, aged 7-8, who…

Foreign language reading serves as the fundamental channel for foreign language acquisition and for information gathering. However, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners are generally slow in their reading rates. A number of approaches have been proposed to improve reading rates of EFL learners, underpinned by learning theories. From an…

Relevance Theory from the perspective of cognitive psychology argues that human communication is an ostensive-inferential process, and emphasizes the function of the optimal relevance for communication. In this sense, reading comprehension could be considered as a kind of communication in which the writer manifests his/her communication intention…

This paper intends to examine the efficacy of song education to develop English proficiency in China's EFL context. By conducting a comparative study between two parallel classes and analyzing the results of forty-eight questionnaires, the paper reveals the following: 1) song education can help improve pronunciation and intonation skills to a…

This study investigated the effects of creative literacy classroom activities on the acquisition of English as a foreign language. Ninety Chinese second graders were tested on reading attitude and English receptive vocabulary knowledge. They were randomly assigned to either a control group or an experimental group, which engaged in English…

The study reported here examined college students' academic self-efficacy, 'academic press' and learning achievement, as well as the association between these three variables within learning contexts using interactive whiteboard-based instruction. A quasi-experimental study was conducted using a sample (n = 103) of first-year college students in…

Scholars debate whether corrective feedback contributes to improving L2 learners' grammatical accuracy in writing performance. Some researchers take a stance on the ineffectiveness of corrective feedback based on the impracticality of providing detailed corrective feedback for all L2 learners and detached grammar instruction in language…

The pedagogical values of corpora for ELT have been widely acknowledged and exploited, but their direct application in classroom teaching has entailed many difficulties. This project aims to investigate the impact of the pedagogical application of corpora on the vocabulary ability of intermediate-level ESL learners in mainland China. This…

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of vocabulary enhancement activities on vocabulary learning in an ESP course. In designing the activities, technical terms on journal entries were chosen for the acquisition of language necessary for the successful implementation of accounting major's professional tasks. The desirable…

The critical thinking ability is an indispensable ability of contemporary college students, and the PBL teaching model abandons the shortcomings of traditional teaching methods, which is more suitable for the development trend of university curriculum teaching reform in China. In order to understand the influence of PBL teaching mode on college…

Thematic progression (TP) patterns used in English leaner essays provide clues as to how they organize information and develop important concepts in their essays. This quasi-experimental research proved that instruction in TP produced positive effects on Chinese college students' use of linear progressions, constant progressions and new Themes.…

This article investigates the role of direct corpus use in learners' collocational competence in academic writing. An experiment was conducted between two groups of Chinese postgraduates who had no previous knowledge of corpora. It was embedded in a regular 4-month linguistics course in the students' programmes, where a corpus-assisted method was…

This study designs a project-based flipped learning model for Business English Translation course and tests its efficacy by an empirical study on 65 third-year English major students divided into the experimental class and control class. This study incorporates the learning, teaching and assessment activities of both the students and teachers into…