Examined factors that predict foreign-language anxiety. Subjects included 10 university students; a setwise multiple regression analysis revealed that seven variables (age, academic achievement, prior history of visiting foreign countries, prior high school experience with foreign languages, expected overall age for current language course,…

Analyzes the relation between the revision skills of 53 Japanese university English-as-a-Foreign-Language students and the factors of language proficiency and second language writing experience, while exploring the possible effects of prior explicit instruction on participants' revision performance. (Author/VWL)

In this article, we draw from research on cognitive development, sociocultural learning, and organizational development to examine the key factors in teachers' professional learning. Our review of this literature suggests that looking at teachers' prior knowledge, the nature of their interactions, the representations they produce and use, and the…

In this article, the authors argue that despite the variable of language proficiency of young, immigrant children and educational programs designed for their language development (for example, ESL, Transitional Bilingual, Dual Language Bilingual, Sheltered Content Instruction), the strategy of historical thinking can help immigrant children…

The following article discusses cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies and the use of them particularly among bilingual students. It distinguishes between the two types of strategies. Strategy use among monolingual and bilingual students are described and compared. The article focuses on the need for strategy instruction, particularly…

The study reported in this paper investigated second language learners' ability to analyze new words without the use of context clues. The study focused on how confidence and accuracy increase or decrease with prior knowledge of a language and how availability of reading strategies can affect confidence or accuracy. Three groups of graduate…

Anxiety is believed to affect foreign language learning and performance. This preliminary study investigates the role of high school Japanese learning experience in student anxiety while taking an introductory Japanese course in college. This study shows that the presence or absence of high school Japanese instruction affects levels and sources of…

Investigated the effects of readers' gender, topic familiarity, enjoyment, and interest on second language reading. University students of Spanish completed a reading passage each day, a written recall comprehension task, and a questionnaire. Findings suggest that in addition to linguistic factors, other variables such as gender, passage content,…

This paper is based on a research project that explored a UK Government initiative to improve the quality of teaching adults, numeracy, literacy and English as a second other language. The findings will be of interest to teacher educators generally and also to those involved in teaching adults, language, literacy and numeracy. The paper reports on…

In the following article the author presents a methodological framework for the teaching of intercomprehension. Competence in intercomprehension is seen as a realisation of the general human faculty for using and understanding language, which includes the ability to comprehend texts and utterances in "unfamiliar" languages. This competence can be…

Globalisation has placed a growing importance on English language speaking and listening. Prior research indicates that many international students from Asia, studying in Australia, face serious learning difficulties and lack confidence in speaking and taking a proactive role in classrooms. The paper reports on data gathered in interviews with…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

The importance of reading for academic study cannot be overemphasized. At the postgraduate level, students are faced with complex text interpretation processes. Yet, while concerns have been expressed regarding the English as a second language literacy (Fitzgerald, 1995), few international students have been asked for their views on their…

This article addresses the learning of second language (L2) writing skills to show how pictures can be used as an effective guided writing tool to facilitate students' writing process and to improve their writing proficiency. A study was conducted with 53 university students who had a prior knowledge of Spanish in secondary school. All students…

The study investigated the role of a second language (L2) learner's prior cultural knowledge in target language lexical meaning-making. Comparison focuses on what important similarities in L2 lexical meaning-making of culturally loaded words appear among learners with the same ethnic background, and what important lexical meaning differences exist…