This exploratory study investigated the usability of immersive virtual reality (VR) as a way of creating a role-play task to examine pragmatic competence, specifically the ability to produce the speech act of request. The study created a closed role-play task in two versions. One was a standard computer-based version in which participants read a…

This study aims to explore an educational learning environment that supports students to learn conceptual modelling with the unified modelling language (UML). In this study, we call the describing models "UML programming." In this paper, we show an educational UML programming environment for science, technology, engineering, art, and…

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) oral proficiency interview -- computer (OPIc) testing system represents an ambitious effort in language assessment: Assessing oral proficiency in over a dozen languages, on the same scale, from virtually anywhere at any time. Especially for users in contexts where multiple foreign…

This study investigated how task complexity influences second language (L2) writing. Specifically, it focused on the possibility that prompts can create different demands at different stages of L2 writing production and on ways that prompts may affect learners' engagement in the revision of their writing. Fifty-one English as a foreign/second…

Children achieve their first language milestones initially in gesture and prosody before they do so in speech. However, little is known about the potential precursor role of those features later in development when children start using more complex linguistic skills. In this study, we explore how children's ability to reflect on their degree of…

Many teachers struggle with implementing self-help eating goals for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). No group programs exist to target this important problem. We used findings from applied behavior analysis research and adapted single-subject interventions into a group-based eating program. In describing the program using two…

In this study, we investigated how high school credit recovery students worked in small groups and used computer-based scaffolds to conduct scientific inquiry in a problem-based learning unit centered on water quality. We examined how students searched for and evaluated information from different sources, and used evidence to support their claims.…

Adaptive teaching is considered a cornerstone of effective literacy teaching. Research has explored this dynamic aspect of classroom instruction and has found that given recent educational reform efforts implementing adaptive teaching during reading instruction has been particularly difficult. This study examined a yearlong inquiry of teacher…

In this article we describe secondary school practising teachers' professional noticing expertise, which includes (a) attending to the details of students' written or verbal responses, (b) interpreting students' mathematical understandings, and (c) deciding how to respond to students based on their understandings, with a focus on algebraic-pattern…

The current study examined the effects of different types of instructor comments on student engagement in an online discussion. In particular, this study examined three comment types: (1) praise-oriented comments, agreeing with students' initial messages and recapping their ideas, (2) elaboration-encouraging comments, requesting elaboration on the…

This study reports the effects of using word clouds to support students' knowledge integration from online inquiry as demonstrated by blog posts, tags and concept maps. Fifty-four undergraduate students from a medium-sized university in the northwestern United States were randomly assigned into two groups and blogged for five weeks. To support…

The present quasi-experimental study investigated the comparative effects of metalinguistic clue (MC) and metalinguistic explanation (ME) on the accurate use of Japanese transaction expressions. The study recruited 25 learners in a second-semester Japanese course (i.e. non-introduced group) and 17 students in a fourth-semester course (i.e.…

We explore how native and non-native English speakers interpret cues of emotional expression in native English speakers, text-only messages in two studies. In Experiment 1, 28 native English speakers and 28 Japanese non-native English speakers rated the emotional valence of 98 public Facebook status updates written by native English-speaking…

Negation has been researched in second language acquisition in several languages (Bernini 2000; Donaldson 2017; Eskildsen 2012). However, there are very few studies that have discussed the acquisition of negation in L2 Spanish. In Alexandrino's (2010) dissertation, Grammaticality Judgment Tasks are employed to indicate that the acquisition of…

How does orthographic distinctiveness affect recall of structured (categorized) word lists? On one theory, enhanced item-specific information (e.g., more distinct encoding) in concert with robust relational information (e.g., categorical information) optimally supports free recall. This predicts that for categorically structured lists,…