Growing up in the digital era, young children are exposed to numerous educational applications and programs, some with well-designed curricula and others focused more on entertainment or game-like qualities. With the increasing popularity of mobile language-learning applications among young children, this dissertation raises a crucial question: do…

Recent research into Japanese as a foreign language education has strongly emphasized the link between Japanese popular culture and learning Japanese. However, these studies have only targeted Japanese language learners in formal education contexts and have largely ignored those who are not studying Japanese or studying Japanese informally. This…

This article reports on fan practices, in English, among an international community of bronies--adult fans of the animated cartoon "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" (MLP). Originally directed at a target audience of young girls, MLP has become popular among men. These older male fans have been extremely active in producing multimodal…

Fan practices involving translation open up opportunities to explore language learning practices within the fandom (Sauro, 2017). We examine how three fans capitalize on fan translation and language learning. We consider the cases of Selo (an English-Spanish translator of games), Nino (a Japanese-Catalan fansubber of anime, and Alro (an…

This study investigates the differential effects of the iPad on first and second language learning by Saudi children in the home environment. The subjects consisted of 78 parents and 118 children. The children were grouped into: 1-6 years old (young children in kindergarten and pre-school); 7- 9 years (grades 1-3); and 10-12 years (grades 4-6).…

Simultaneous bilingual education of a child is a dynamic process. Construction of linguistic competences undeniably depends on the conditions of the linguistic environment of the child. This education in a monolingual family, requires the practice of parenting tactics to increase the frequency of the language use in minority, during which,…

This study aimed to find out whether watching subtitled cartoons influences incidental vocabulary learning. The study was conducted with 42 first grade English Language Teaching (ELT) department students at the University of Mehmet Akif Ersoy, Burdur. To collect data from the subjects, a 5-point vocabulary knowledge scale was used and 18 target…

This paper explores the attitudes of teachers, as adult learners, towards learning to do animation. A part of popular culture which second-language students enjoy, until recently, animation has been technically too demanding for non-specialists to learn. Adult learners can experience e-learning as transformative, but also as a barrier. Thus,…

The present study investigated the effect of context on the strategies the EFL learners utilized to process idioms. To do so, ten Iranian intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to two groups who then attended a think-aloud session. The 5 subjects in the first group were exposed to an animated cartoon including 23 unfamiliar idioms while…

The Spanish version of "Sesame Street" was used in a project in a class of 12 students in the second semester of first-year Spanish at Phillips Exeter Academy, and an attempt was made to evaluate the usefulness of the series in second language acquisition. This account of the project has five parts: (1) a history of the production of…