There has been much debate in assessment research about the inclusion of Global English accents in high-stakes listening tests. This study explored test-takers' attitudes toward the inclusion of different English accents in the Duolingo English Test (DET) 2021 test version and their associations with listening test scores. One hundred sixty…

This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in…

Purpose: This study focuses on 7- to 9-year-old children attending primary school in Swedish areas of low socioeconomic status, where most children's school language is their second language. The aim was to better understand what factors influence these children's narrative listening comprehension both in an ideal listening condition (in quiet)…

The relationship between working memory (WM) and second-language (L2) reading has been extensively examined, with mixed results. Our meta-analysis models the potential impact of under-researched variables considered to moderate this relationship. Results from 74 studies (228 correlations) showed a significant, small relationship between WM and L2…

This study investigates the effects of linguistic knowledge (vocabulary knowledge) and cognitive abilities (metacognitive knowledge and cognitive styles) on the second language (L2) listening comprehension at different proficiency levels. The study has also sought to investigate whether or not cognitive abilities and L2 linguistic knowledge are…

The instruction of metacognitive strategies in listening has been increasingly implemented in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. However, there is yet a growing need to carry out this strategy instruction within a process-based approach for a more engaging and effective listening tasks. Thus, the present study attempts to investigate…

Although there is robust research on vocabulary learning strategies (VLSs), little is known about the strategies that learners use in pair work. Therefore, this study examines the VLSs employed by 40 Saudi undergraduate students whilst working in pair tasks. This study also investigates whether there is a relationship between using certain…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

This dissertation study explored the feasibility of using authenticated spoken texts to test L2 Chinese listening comprehension. The spoken texts used in the study were created using an "authenticating" technique, in which scripted spoken Chinese texts were infused with characteristics of real-world, unscripted spoken Chinese. In the…

This study investigated the relationship between the level of cognitive-linguistic difficulty of task input and the size of the cross-linguistic relationship for academic listening comprehension in emergent bilinguals. It was theoretically motivated by task-dependent cross-linguistic interaction frameworks. We hypothesized that task item sets that…

This study examined the effects of watching gestures and lip movement on second language (English) listening comprehension. The participants were 30 high and 22 low proficient learners of English. There were six listening tasks combining two variables: modality and difficulty. The modality consisted of three types of assessments: Body (the upper…

Research shows that meaning-focused reading offers opportunities for incidental grammar acquisition. However, the number of such studies remains limited and none have examined the role of both in-text encounters with grammar structures and reading comprehension in this learning. The present study filled these gaps. Employing a between-group,…

This study investigated L2 Korean speakers' self-assessment of speech comprehensibility and accentedness, including a conceptual replication of Trofimovich, Isaacs, Kennedy, Saito, and Crowther (2016, Experiment 1) and exploratory analyses of individual differences in self-assessment. L2 Korean speakers (N = 198) self-assessed their…

This study examines four learner engagement dimensions (behavioural, cognitive, emotional and social) in pedagogical task performance and provides insights into the effects of two task types (information-seeking and direction-giving) and topic familiarity on learner engagement in a semester-long English course. A total of 28 foreign language…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…