The study aimed at enhancing Chinese as a second language (CSL) students' listening comprehension by using authentic contexts in Second Life (SL). Twenty-seven CSL students from 4 countries participated in the 6-week study. A within-subject design was adopted to confirm the effects of 3D immersive experiences on CSL students' listening…

Climate change is complex, requiring critical thinking on both local and global scales. Its effects vary dramatically around the world and require new strategies to help students grasp its complexity, scale, and interrelatedness. This article describes a project to help biology students think critically about climate change from a global…

Along with the expansion of computer technologies in education, an increasing number of academic degrees and professional development credentials in second-language (L2) education are offered online. Despite the rapid growth in the number of online language teacher education (OLTE) programmes, there is still a dearth of research about OLTE and its…

This research examines a selection of academic articles, existing evidence, and early indications of newly-designed Learning Management System (LMS) tools/functions, and then analyzes and synthesizes the concepts to form a thorough description of the components within the concept of next-generation LMS. The comparison of conventional LMS and…

This article describes the innovations introduced into the undergraduate "ab initio" Italian language programme at the School of Languages at the University of Bristol and the use of a range of online tools and resources. It evaluates to what extent the innovations have enhanced the students' experience. The article describes the course…

There is a growing consciousness to the need to know English among the Saudi Arabian peoples. This is apparent in the painstaking efforts of the policy makers in bringing in technology as an aid to teachers, institutions diverting huge funding to the field and encouraging research in the area. Learning outcomes, however, do not reflect these…

The present study focuses on determining whether automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology is reliable for improving English pronunciation to Iraqi EFL students. Non-native learners of English are generally concerned about improving their pronunciation skills, and Iraqi students face difficulties in pronouncing English sounds that are not…

Retrieval practice has been shown to produce significant enhancements in student learning of course information, but the extent to which students make use of retrieval to learn information on their own is unclear. In the current study, students in a large introductory biology course were provided with optional online review questions that could be…

This study explored Russian as a foreign language (RFL) learners' self-reported strategic uses of "VoiceThread" (VT)--a multimodal asynchronous computer-mediated communication tool--in order to gain insights into learner perceived effectiveness of VT for second language (L2) oral skills development and to determine the factors that…

Although data collection has been used in language learning settings for some time, it is only in recent decades that large corpora have become available, along with efficient tools for their use. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled rich tagging and annotation of corpus data, essential for their effective use in language…

This experimental study investigates the effect on the examination performance of a cohort of first-year undergraduate learners undertaking a Unified Modelling Language (UML) course using an adaptive learning system against a control group of learners undertaking the same UML course through a traditional lecturing environment. The adaptive…

In this mixed-methods study, researchers examined the literacy development of prekindergarten students (N = 162) randomly placed in one of two treatment groups with each receiving 15 minutes of computer-assisted literacy instruction for four months. Literacy development of a control group of children not receiving computer-assisted instruction was…

The gap in academic achievement between regular and special education students is well documented. Math was once the stronger area for students with IEPs; however, the scores in Illinois in 2013 suggest that for the subgroup of IEP students, reading and math performance has reached an all-time ten-year low, even when correcting for the change in…

Mobile learning (m-learning) challenges the traditional definition of teaching and learning. M-learning concept is gaining popularity because it enables learning across multiple contexts and disciplines by using portable mobile devices. In recent years, it has attracted increasing attention at the tertiary level as some institutions adopt Bring…

Addressed are four key issues regarding concrete instruction: What is concrete? What is a worthwhile concrete experience? How can concrete experiences be used effectively in early childhood mathematics instruction? Is there evidence such experiences work? I argue that concrete experiences are those that build on what is familiar to a child and can…