Research is scarce about the lexical processes undertaken by thousands of L2 learners worldwide who already command one or more languages. Some aspects involved in lexical organisation and production, such as clustering and switching, have been traditionally approached through manual methods, which depend on subjective judgments of semantic…

This study examines how the genre of input text influences Chinese young EFL learners' performance on continuation tasks. Participants were 30 students in Grade 9 and repeated-measures design was adopted to compare their performance on narrative and argumentative continuation tasks, in terms of writing quality, CAF indicators as well as alignment.…

This study seeks to delve into the potential role of divergent thinking, a component of creativity, in second language learning. Specifically, we compare the use of lexical organization and production strategies of two groups of more and less creative EFL learners in year 12 through an automatic vectorial semantic analysis of their retrieval in…

The interactionist hypothesis holds that conversational interaction facilitates second language (L2) learning by providing learners opportunities to receive meaningful input, modify their output, and attend to language form. Although research has often explored the efficacy of different types of L2 instruction (deductive or inductive), few studies…

In the context of an analytical geometry, this study considers the mathematical understanding and activity of seven students analyzed simultaneously through two knowledge frameworks: (1) the Van Hiele levels (Van Hiele, 1986, 1999) and register and domain knowledge (Hibert, 1988); and (2) three action frameworks: the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs, 1999;…

Usage-based approaches to language acquisition explain language development as a gradual process of generalizing constructions through language experience. This study investigated second language learners' development of constructional knowledge from the perspective of usage-based language development. A total of 169 Korean EFL students at five…

This article explores the perceived disconnect between informal and formal musical knowledge, through a focused case study which aligned students' informal knowledge with aspects of the formal curriculum. The upper high school or senior secondary student participants had a background in the creation and performance of popular and contemporary…

By adopting a usage-based approach to language acquisition, this study investigated the emergence and development of L2 constructional knowledge. A total of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs) and their associated verbs were extracted from a learner corpus and three verbal fluency tasks, each conducted in L1 and L2 English and L1 Korean.…

This study investigates representational code-switching (RCS) by considering three high school students' communications in the process of comparing and contrasting pairs of representations (e.g., equation and graph) in the context of rational functions. Supporting this study is research in the realms of students interacting with mathematical…

A visual representation involves delivering messages through visually communicated images. The study assumed that semantic recognition can affect visual interpretation ability, and the result showed that students graduating from a general high school achieve satisfactory results in semantic recognition and image interpretation tasks than students…

Language play and its effects on second language learning have been addressed by many scholars in recent years with instances of language play being identified both inside and outside the classroom. However, only a few have integrated language play with classroom tasks, and they just sufficed to the qualitative analyses of the learners'…

As an assignment in their course on worldwide religions, a group of Swedish High School pupils followed 12 biblical rules for two weeks, while another group from the same school just imagined the experience. Groups were asked to reflect and write down either how it was (experience) or how it would have been (imagine) to follow the rules. By…

This paper compares explicit instruction in second-language Spanish with a control treatment on a written picture description task and a timed auditory grammaticality judgment task. Participants came from two intact, third-year US high school classes, with one experiencing a week of communicative lessons on the Spanish clitic "se"…

The study aimed to investigate whether or not negotiation of meaning is effective in L2 vocabulary acquisition of Chinese learners of English in the classroom setting. In the study there were two experimental groups (pre-modified input and negotiation of meaning) and two control groups (pre-modified input). The four groups were required to do a…

The 9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2016) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Sheraton Raleigh Hotel, in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, in the USA. The conference, held June 29-July 2, 2016, follows the eight previous editions (Madrid 2015, London 2014, Memphis…