This study set out to examine the writing skill self-efficacy of students studying at English and German Language Teaching Departments in terms of various variables. Survey model, one of the quantitative research methods, was preferred. Participants who study at English and German Language Teaching Departments at a university in Turkey were the…

This study aimed to compare whether Traditional Grammar Translation Method (henceforward TGTM) or Communicative Language Teaching (henceforward CLT) was more effective in teaching English language grammar and vocabulary. The participants of this study were sixty-eight 9th grade students attending to a high school. Mixed methods research design was…

We investigated the contributions of multiple strands of factors--individual characteristics (struggling reader status, working memory, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, knowledge-based inference, theory of mind, comprehension monitoring), a text feature (narrative vs. expository genre), and question types (literal and inferential)--to one's…

Purpose: This study examines the contribution of number morphology to language comprehension abilities among children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls. It addresses the question of whether number agreement facilitates the comprehension accuracy of object-initial declarative sentences. According to the predictions of…

L2 test developers often use scripted spoken texts in their L2 listening tests, because it is efficient and practical to create scripted spoken texts that meet predetermined test specifications. But because scripted spoken texts differ in a number of fundamental ways from unscripted spoken language, there are potential threats to validity when…

Demotivating factors are one of the sources that can reduce students' motivation toward language learning. This study investigated language learning demotivating factors among high school EFL students. It also explored the educational implications and recommendations for promoting EFL students' motivation from teachers' perspectives. A total of…

This study is primarily designed for investigating the tertiary students' perspectives on the writing difficulties of essays. This study was conducted in explanatory research in which quantitative and qualitative data were obtained from the web-based questionnaire and semi-structured interview, then analyzed separately. Twenty-one undergraduate…

This study aims to examine the challenges in translating Malay cultural terms into English, and to determine practical procedures to overcome these challenges. The translation challenges in translating Malay cultural terms into English raised due to some factors; sound, lexis, grammar, and style. Both English and Malay originate from different…

The early use of first and second person pronouns has been viewed as a sign of emerging social understanding. However, it may also depend on general language development: pronouns do not appear among the first words children acquire. In addition, some languages conjugate verbs for person, and the inflections may thus show similar relations to…

Critical thinking skills are the 21st-century life skills that are needed by students. However, in elementary schools, there are no instruments that are truly effective and efficient to measure critical thinking skills. This research aims to develop an open-ended question assessment instrument to measure students' critical-thinking skills, to test…

The ability to spell correctly is a fundamental skill for participating in society and engaging in professional work. In the German language, the capitalization of nouns and proper names presents major difficulties for both native and nonnative learners, since the definition of what is a noun varies according to one's linguistic perspective. In…

This study (a) conducted a feature analysis of the spoken data of Chinese university students in pronunciation, grammar, and discourse, (b) investigated the contributions of the discrete linguistic features to the perceptual ratings on foreign accent, comprehensibility, delivery, and general language use. Ten university learners were selected from…

Across languages, certain syllable types are systematically preferred to others (e.g., "blif" ? "bnif" ? "bdif" ? "lbif" where ? indicates a preference). Previous research has shown that these preferences are active in the brains of individual speakers, they are evident even when none of these syllable types…

Recent experimental results suggest that negation is particularly challenging for children with reading difficulties. This study looks at how young poor readers, speakers of Mandarin Chinese, comprehend affirmative and negative sentences as compared with a group of age-matched typical readers. Forty-four Chinese children were tested with a truth…

This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al.,…