Purpose: Although acquisition of Chinese lexical tones by second language (L2) learners has been intensively investigated, very few studies focused on categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones by highly proficient L2 learners. This study was designed to address this issue with behavioral and electrophysiological measures. Method: Behavioral…

Writing native-like has always been a primary purpose for non-native writers of English and, accordingly, many language components have been investigated to develop writers' fluency. One of these language components is syntactic complexity (SC), which is often regarded as a reliable way to grade any texts from easy to difficult. This study aims to…

Reading in difficult or novel fonts results in slower and less efficient reading (Slattery & Rayner, 2010); however, these fonts may also lead to better learning and memory (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011). This effect is consistent with a desirable difficulty effect such that more effort during encoding results in better…

Among other things, learning to write entails learning how to use complex sentences effectively in discourse. Some research has therefore focused on relating measures of syntactic complexity to text quality. Apart from the fact that the existing research on this topic appears inconclusive, most of it has been conducted in English L1 contexts. This…

To build a coherent accurate mental representation of a text, readers routinely validate information they read against the preceding text and their background knowledge. It is clear that both sources affect processing, but "when" and "how" they exert their influence remains unclear. To examine the time course and cognitive…

The current study digitalised an assessment instrument of receptive vocabulary knowledge, GraWo-KiGa, for use in Austrian kindergartens. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study looks at 85 kindergarteners in their last year (age M = 5.79 years, 51.8% male, 71.8% L1 German), to find out (a) whether the form of digital assessment employed meets…

'High-quality talk' is a fundamental principle of many approaches to teaching grammar. However, relatively few studies have attempted to characterize this talk with attention to the ways in which classroom dialogue might engender metalinguistic thinking. This paper explores how the concepts of procedural and declarative metalinguistic knowledge…

The aim of this quantitative study was to scrutinize the significance levels in logistic regression model used for classifying Turkish listening comprehension success (successful/unsuccessful) of the 5th grade Turkish students taking compulsory Turkish language course. The study was conducted with 286 students at 5th grade in six different private…

Although many studies have investigated teaching in one-to-one computing classrooms, not many have considered the material dimension as equally important to the human dimension. Thus, by using a sociomaterial perspective, we aim to broaden the discussion about emergent teaching practices in Nordic classrooms where students use tablets as personal…

Purpose: This preliminary research examined (a) the perception of two common sources of indexical variability in speech--regional dialects and foreign accents, and (b) the relation between indexical processing and sentence recognition among prelingually deaf, long-term cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method: Forty-three…

Studies of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in higher education institutions have focused on students' learning outcomes and intelligibility in ELF, but little attention has been given to local students' resistance to the use of ELF. Utilising the concept of language ideology and interactive regimes, I demonstrate the tensions and dilemma arising…

Foreign (especially English) language learning has witnessed growing popularity in Russia over the last decades due to the enormous change in economic, political, legal, and cultural domains in the current period. The increasing need for good English speaking and writing skills put forward a demand for the accurate use of lexical items and…

In this paper, we explore challenges in conveying the culturally constructed meanings of local Indigenous musics and the worldviews they manifest to students in K-12 school music classes, when foundational aspects of the English language, historical and current discourse, and English language habits function to thwart the transmission of those…

This study investigates the links between the second-generation Chinese Australians' heritage language proficiency and perceptions of Chinese identity. Thirty 10--11-year-old children of Chinese immigrants took a Chinese proficiency test and participated in semi-structured interviews. The test revealed a wide range of performance levels in all the…

Language-specific features necessitate certain processes and skills in reading. The visually unmarked between-word boundaries in written Chinese render it critical that readers be able to segment words in the continuous texts. It may pose challenges for second language (L2) readers whose first language (L1) is word-spaced. In light of the lack of…