This article discusses the phenomenon of task-based language teaching (TBLT) in instructed additional language settings. It begins from the premise that, despite considerable theoretical and empirical support, TBLT remains a contested endeavour. Critics of TBLT argue that, particularly with regard to time-limited foreign language instructional…

While there is a long history and tradition of behavioral research on basic motor skills in Down syndrome (DS), there has been only limited research on handwriting ability. We analyzed the spatiotemporal features of handwriting produced by children and adults with DS (n = 24), and compared their productions with those of comparison groups matched…

In the present study, we compared the processing of both conventional and novel metaphors by deaf versus hearing young adults. Eighteen deaf participants with severe-to-profound hearing loss and 18 controls matched for age, sex, and years of education were presented with word pairs of 4 types (literal, conventional metaphors, novel metaphors, and…

This study tests the theoretical predictions regarding effects of increasing task complexity (Robinson, 2001a, 2001b, 2007, 2010; Robinson & Gilabert, 2007) for second language (L2) pronunciation. Specifically, we examine whether more complex tasks (a) lead to greater incidence of pronunciation-focused language-related episodes (LREs) and (b)…

Sideline shouting to "focus" and "anticipate" can be stressful and counterproductive for athletes, especially when they are novices playing in dynamic sport environments. An alternative aproach is to coach athletes to understand that focusing is a concentration skill that improves with practice. Selective attention, attentional…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of external feedback in auditory perceptual learning of school-age children as compared with that of adults. Method: Forty-eight children (7-9 years of age) and 64 adults (20-35 years of age) conducted a training session using an auditory frequency discrimination (difference limen for…

Young children can engage in diagnostic reasoning. However, almost all research demonstrating such capacities has investigated children's inferences when the individual efficacy of each candidate cause is known. Here we show that there is development between ages five and seven in children's ability to reason about the number of candidate causes…

With technology increasingly being introduced into classrooms worldwide, stakeholders are asking whether ICT provides educational value. It is not simply having access to technology but how teachers use it that will determine its worth to education. Thirty-three teacher-designed technology-based tasks from eight subject areas were analysed for…

Individuals hold different epistemic beliefs at different ages, and these beliefs can affect a wide range of reasoning tasks. The present study examined Chinese secondary school students' epistemic beliefs at different grade levels, and how these related to the students' abilities to identify various forms of fallacy with the use of a…

This dissertation explores the relationship between the parser and the grammar in error-driven retrieval by examining the mechanism underlying the illusory licensing of subject-verb agreement violations ("agreement attraction"). Previous work motivates a two-stage model of agreement attraction in which the parser predicts the verb's…

From a commognitive approach, this article focuses on the discourse generated by preservice primary teachers who are solving didactic-mathematical tasks. Our aims are to study the characteristics of the aforementioned discourse and, through these characteristics, identify whether a discourse close to the one of primary teachers is beginning to…

Metacognitive monitoring in educational contexts is typically measured by calibration indicators, which are based on the correspondence between cognitive performance and metacognitive confidence judgment. Despite this common rationale, a variety of alternative methods are used in the field of monitoring research to assess performance and judgment…

This study investigated the influence of L1 allophonic rule, L1 segment articulation, and gender in Korean learners' production of English /s/ in two different contexts (i.e., before a high front vowel vs. elsewhere) and at three different proficiency levels in English (i.e., low vs. intermediate vs. high). The influence of the Korean allophonic…

Causal sequences can be segmented into cause and effect. However, some argue causal relations in discourse are by default in "effect-cause" order. Others claim "cause-effect" order is easier to process and the default way of expressing causality, due to iconicity. We conducted experiments testing participants' production…

We report on three experiments that aim at measuring the role of prosody in the acceptability and interpretation of discourse relations between utterances connected by two French discourse markers, viz. "et" "and" and "alors" "then/well." These two discourse markers are highly polyfunctional: "et"…