Recent communicative teaching approaches view learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) as involving more than knowledge of grammar structures. Students are expected to develop communicative skills which allow them to interact inside and outside the language classroom. To this end, learning idioms plays a significant role because these…

In the assessment of English as a foreign language (EFL) reading proficiency, text adaptation is an important and challenging task for teachers. Although an increasing number of technology tools are available to facilitate text adaptation, research exploring how teachers engage with technology-enhanced text adaptation (TETA) is scarce. Drawing on…

The purpose of this study was to examine pre-service teachers' perceptions of their use of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) as an English language proficiency tool. Pre-service teachers' perceptions were analysed using Engeström's second-generation cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). A qualitative interpretivist paradigm was used. Six…

Generating accurate word-level transcripts of recorded speech for language documentation is difficult and time-consuming, even for skilled speakers of the target language. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has the potential to streamline transcription efforts for endangered language documentation, but the practical utility of ASR for this purpose…

This study examined Chinese university students enrolled in a Sino-United States university and how they perceived learning processes, academic value, and cultural awareness at two distinct campuses. Comparing and contrasting student experiences at a foreign satellite campus in China (Wenzhou-Kean University) with the experiences of those same…

The longitudinal study was designed to investigate the impacts of the International Training Program in Pedagogy (ITPP) at a midwestern institution in the US on the visiting scholars in seven cohorts from China in 2012-18. The study used the cohort survey research design method. The first part of the data was collected from 48 visiting scholars…

The study investigated the processing of Russian gender and number agreement by native (n = 36) and nonnative (n = 36) participants using a visual lexical decision task with priming. The design included a baseline condition that helped dissociate the underlying components of priming (facilitation and inhibition). The results showed no differences…

In 2 studies conducted in Germany, we investigated preservice teachers' stereotypical judgement biases regarding Turkish female students and the application of shifting standards in stereotyping. Study 1 (N = 148) showed that Turkish students' German language proficiency received lower judgements, but other -- particularly social -- dimensions…

Utilizing data from the 2012 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES), the following question was addressed: "What are the direct and indirect effects of writing proficiency on cognitive development among international students?" Because many international students have chosen to study in the United States to…

Cross-cultural experience plays a very important role in the growth of preservice teachers. This narrative study explored Canadian pre-service teachers' Chinese language learning and their cross-cultural experiences in China in relation to their participation in a three-month international program between a university in Canada and a university in…

The association between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension has been extensively researched. However, modeling the contribution of vocabulary knowledge within different frequency ranges to second language (L2) learners' reading comprehension is an underexplored area. Thus, the present study examines the degree to which high-, mid-, and…

The current study examines how second language (L2) users differentially assess the comprehensibility (i.e., ease of understanding) of foreign-accented speech according to a range of background variables, including first language (L1) profiles, L2 proficiency, age, experience, familiarity, and metacognition. A total of 110 L2 listeners first…

It is common to have good declarative but poor procedural knowledge of a foreign language, especially for classroom learners. To study this gap in a constrained manner, we asked Chinese learners of English to repeat, correct and produce indirect speech. The indirect speech construction was selected in the present study because it is known to be a…

This study investigated the effects of captioned videos on ESL primary school students' comprehension of video content. A total of 182 primary school students watched two short English story videos in one of three conditions: fully captioned videos (N = 62), keyword captioned videos (N = 63), and uncaptioned videos (N = 57). Each group included…

This article examines the profile of prisoners who do not take part in formal education while being incarcerated (e.g. language or ICT courses) and the barriers to participation these prisoners experience. Survey data were collected as part of a research project conducted in a remand prison in Belgium (n = 486). The results demonstrate that 29% of…