This paper reports a study in a technology-assisted Chinese teaching context where one major teaching objective is to encourage international students to participate in speech contests with the theme of 'Tell China, Tell Your Stories'. Results showed that through four weeks' preparation, all the students had a more robust method for presentation…

Background: As adequate support, virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly introduced into the classroom to help students learn a new language. However, empirical studies exploring the educational potential of using 360° spherical video-based virtual reality (SVVR) in high-school Chinese language classrooms are still lacking. Objectives: A mind…

Learning through YouTube has become one of the main sources of learning in the student's life at the present time which provides illustrative images, scalability of knowledge, and ease of searching for sources of knowledge. It also provides the student with large areas of self-learning and the provision of knowledge according to the desire of the…

This article draws on the concept of the Production of Space (Lefebvre, 1991) to interpret the silence of one female international student from Japan in two semesters of study in a New Zealand Tertiary institution. Data from an English for Academic Purposes course and mainstream courses, and from various sources including video/audio recordings of…

This study focuses on the social presence framework (Rourke et al., 2001), in order to examine the ways that university-level international students develop social interaction and support in a virtual asynchronous learning community in an online class during the COVID-19 pandemic. English language learners (ELLs) participated in weekly online…

Drawing on the framework of invariant measurement from Rasch measurement theory, the purpose of this study is to psychometrically evaluate the 20 language and teaching skill domains of the International Teaching Assistant (ITA) Test using the many-facet Rasch model and to empirically explore performance differences between females and males in…

The present study exemplifies the potential of International Corner Speed Chatting activities to enhance English fluency when local students use English as an international language (EIL) with other local as well as international students. For data collection during the activity, classroom observation through video recording and photography was…

International students, particularly international English as a Second Language (ESL) students who come to the United States with relatively lower levels of English oral language proficiency, are often reluctant to participate in academic discussions. In a graduate-level TESOL program with a majority of international ESL students, a video…

Using a smartphone is a very convenient way to learn languages in modern life. To understand the impact of the immersive environment created by a smartphone on essay writing in Chinese for second language learners, a study was conducted on 36 Vietnamese students in their first year at a university in Taiwan. This study adopted an experimental…

Purpose: This study aims to explore students' interests in multimodal texts by focusing on videos of social issues. Design/methodology/approach: Data from 50 students in a first-year multilingual composition course were analyzed in two phases. Phase One examined 14 students' reasons for self-selecting videos for multimodal analysis essays in one…

"Generation Z" multilingual writers are caught up in a globalized/globalizing and superdiverse linguistic and cultural contact zone as well as a neoliberal political and institutional environment. To understand how they inhabit their idiosyncratic literate worlds and practice their differences, I aligned myself with an ethnographic case…

Multimodal composing is the construction of meanings through a combination of semiotic modes such as visual, audio, and textual to create multimodal texts. Studies have investigated the application of multimodal composing in the English language, in content area classrooms, and within various educational ESL and EFL contexts. However, the…

This study examines language in conjunction with co-speech gesture awareness and use in relation to second language development, and as linked to identity-in-the-making for four Chinese international graduate students attending an American university in the U.S. Data collection took place at two different times: after three months of initial…

Although studies in higher education have paid attention to the complexities of learning disciplinary language and discourse, little attention has been given to learning professional discourse in a second language (L2). Recent studies on language socialization have addressed this gap by focusing on L2 students' emerging communicative competence in…

There are two broad approaches to the research and teaching of second-language (L2) pronunciation--'bottom-up' and 'top-down'--which roughly align with structural and communicative approaches to language teaching. A bottom-up approach, explicitly focusing on de-contextualised linguistic forms, is structuralist and predominated in the second half…