This qualitative case study aimed to examine pre-service teachers' and teacher educators' interactions during their English grammar lessons via the WhatsApp platform. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) model was employed to categorize the WhatsApp interactions based on social, cognitive and teacher presences. Participants wrote their reflections for…

In most universities in South Africa, English is still preferred as the medium of instruction. However, most schools in South Africa have adopted a home-language education approach. Those school students then have a lower English proficiency compared to other students from English schools. Providing these students with instructional assistance…

Research on second language (L2) writing suggests that student engagement with automated writing evaluation (AWE) feedback is influenced by various individual and contextual factors. Little attention, however, has been given to the role that students' digital literacy can play in this process. Increasingly, digital literacy is becoming…

Research in applied linguistics and language education has well documented that ethnic minority students often face challenges and underperform in mainstream English classrooms due to their limited linguistic capital and proficiency. However, the connections between these students' English learning experiences and the social contexts that shape…

Purpose: Prosodic sensitivity, or the ability to perceive suprasegmental features of speech such as lexical tone in Cantonese and lexical stress in English, has been recognized as an essential component of reading acquisition. However, the specific pathways by which it influences reading comprehension remain unclear. This study evaluates how…

This study examined the writing score and writing feature changes of 562 repeat test takers who took the Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program--General (CELPIP--General) test at least three times, with a short (30-40 day) interval between the first and second attempts and a longer (90-180 day) interval between the first and third…

This study examined seven Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) teachers' accounts of current Portfolio Based Language Assessment (PBLA) practices, elicited through semi-structured interviews, in order to explore "washback" -- the effects of PBLA on teaching and learning. Portfolios are primarily useful as formative…

We evaluate how higher- vs. lower-scoring middle-school students differ in their composition processes when writing persuasive essays from source materials. We examined differences on four individual process features--time taken before beginning to write, typing speed, total time spent, and number of words started. Next, we examined differences…

Background: There is no sufficiently accurate short-language measure that could be used by speech-language pathologists, teachers or paraprofessionals to screen young school-aged children to identify those requiring in-depth language evaluations. This may be due to poor development of the available measures, which have omitted crucial test…

The argument-based approach to validity (Kane, 2013) focuses on two steps: (1) making claims about the proposed interpretation and use of test scores as a coherent, interpretive argument; and (2) evaluating those claims based on theoretical and empirical evidence related to test performances and scores. This paper discusses the role of…

How can state-of-the-art computational linguistic technology reduce the workload and increase the efficiency of language teachers? To address this question, we combine insights from research in second language acquisition and computational linguistics to automatically generate text-based questions to a given text. The questions are designed to…

In this study, neural representation of adult second language (L2) speakers' implicit grammatical knowledge was investigated. Advanced L2 speakers of Japanese living in Japan, as well as L1 Japanese speakers, performed a word-monitoring task (proposed as an implicit knowledge test) in the MRI scanner. Behavioral measures were obtained from…

Finding out which teaching strategies best support students learning is a key objective of educational research. Knowing this, this study investigated the comparative effects of consciousness-raising (CR) tasks and dynamic assessment (DA) on morphological awareness in an Afghani EFL context. To achieve this, 90 EFL grade 11 learners from three…

There has been an ongoing debate on the effectiveness of spaced and massed distribution instruction in second/foreign language learning. A number of studies in the literature have investigated the impacts of spacing effect on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' vocabulary acquisition. This study aims to expand the body of existing…

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists need tools that can accurately estimate bilingual children's language abilities and thus help avoid misdiagnoses. This study addresses this need by investigating the accuracy of a novel curriculum-based dynamic assessment of narratives in distinguishing bilingual children with language difficulties (LDs) from…