Language abilities in preschool years, including those measured with letter knowledge, are predictors of reading development in later school years. The aim of this study was to investigate variation in children's language abilities before they started school in relation to gender and neighborhood level socioeconomic status (SES). Schools from…

The objective of this study was to explore the role played by phonological memory (PM) in the learning of new second language (L2) vocabulary presented in a narrated story. The proposal was that individuals with a strong PM would do better on this largely auditory task than those with poor PM capacity, since fewer visual/written cues could make…

The present study examined the effects of using automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology on oral complexity in a flipped English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course. A total of 160 undergraduates were enrolled in a 14-week quasi-experiment. The experimental group (EG) and the control group (CG) were taught with a flipped approach, but the EG…

Pre-service English teachers' beliefs about learning and teaching delineate how they plan, design, and perform in the classroom. The objective of this article is to report pre-service teachers' beliefs about learning and teaching and how those beliefs continued, changed, or disappeared once pre-service teachers faced English classes. This…

This study uses a complexity-accuracy-lexis-fluency (CALF) framework to explore performance on 2 speaking tasks: a narrative picture-based task and an interactive decision-making task. A preliminary aim is to compare performance on the 2 tasks, using a wide range of CALF measures to explore where scores are similar and where they are different.…

The current laboratory-based study examined individual differences in sadness coherence (i.e., coherence between objectively coded sad facial expressions and heart rate in response to a sad film clip) and associations with dispositional affect (i.e., positive and negative affect, extraversion, neuroticism) and age in a sample of younger and older…

The study aims to measure the effect of Task-based language teaching on grammatical achievement and the motivation of EFL learners at Dong Nai Technology University. The research will conduct a quick grammar test to administer 48 students at the school to achieve this goal. After sitting the test, the learners will undergo a 6-week course applying…

In a knowledge society characterized by an abundance of information sources that present conflicting perspectives on socio-scientific controversies, it is extremely important for readers to construct effective mental models of such controversies. Nevertheless, readers' mental representations of controversial information are assumed to be biased…

This article synthesizes the roles of morphology in English reading acquisition and reports a meta-analytic structural equation modeling study (k = 107, N = 21,818) that tested the effects of morphological awareness (MA) on reading comprehension in school-aged readers. Moderator analysis was conducted through a set of subgroup comparisons based on…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

This study investigated the relationship between a metaphor-based approach to teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) and involvement of the brain's right hemisphere. Specifically, it examined learners' understanding of three levels of sureness associated with different expressions in English -- those that are "certain,"…

Local tour guides' English speaking competence determines inbound international tourists' travel experiences. This study investigated student tour guides' English learning by adopting role-play tasks. The communicative tasks were designed to explore how real interactions prepared English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners to become cultural…

Learning trajectory (LT) research in mathematics education has shaped both instructional materials and assessments. But, the body of LT research has also been critiqued for not adequately considering equity and addressing student diversity. This study begins to fill this gap by characterizing the reasoning of 23 multilingual students who…

This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children,…

The many permutations of spoken English have called for an interrogation into the notions of 'standard English' and 'native accents'. Despite their problematic nature, these terms remain commonly used, and familiarity with 'standard', inner-circle varieties of English is typical among L2 English speakers, differences in education and language…