Spelling words accurately is not an easy process. Instead, it is a complex developmental skill. Due to this fact, several studies have recently investigated learners' spelling ability and how this skill develops in different stages. The main purpose of this study is to examine the developmental nature of Saudi intermediate school students'…

This article offers a solution to a significant problem for teachers and researchers of language learning that confounds their interpretations and expectations of test data: The apparent simplicity of tests of vocabulary knowledge masks the complexity of the constructs they claim to measure. The authors first scrutinise task elements in two widely…

An investigation was conducted to help weak academic English learners in a public high school in Colombia, as they seemed to be facing a learning specific difficulty called dyslexia. A focus group of ten students from ninth and tenth grade was the beneficiaries of the design, implementation, and assessment of five multisensory activities to help…

Classroom practices, materials and teaching methods in language classes have changed a lot in the last decades and continue to evolve; however, the commonly used techniques to test students' foreign language skills have not changed much regardless of the recent awareness in Bloom's taxonomy. Testing units at schools rely mostly on multiple choice…

This study investigates the direct and/or indirect effects of some cognitive (working memory capacity) and affective (writing anxiety and writing self-efficacy) variables on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of second language (L2) learners' writings. To achieve this goal, 232 upper-intermediate English learners performed an automated…

Investigates hypothesis that topic familiarity and assessed difficulty of a text correlate positively with performance on reading comprehension tests. A study of 177 advanced students of English for Specific Purposes indicates that students' subjective evaluation of the relative difficulty of a reading text is not always a reliable index of their…

Attitudes toward and achievement in a foreign language were studied with 349 high school seniors. Controlling for native language achievement, difficulty in learning the language was an important achievement factor, and gender and years of study contributed to achievement. Implications for instruction are discussed. (SLD)