Children begin to learn abstract rules at an early age, in an implicit way, without access to rule descriptions. They rely on specific rule instances that they encounter. However, rule instances often co-occur with rule-inconsistent instances. One kind of inconsistent input, non-application instances, constitutes a learnability problem. For…

Input variability is key in many aspects of linguistic learning, yet variability increases input complexity, which may cause difficulty in some learning contexts. The current work investigates this trade-off by comparing speaker variability effects on L2 vocabulary learning in different age groups. Existing literature suggests that speaker…

In this research report, we describe the design and empirical findings for a large-scale study of essay writing ability with approximately 2,500 high school students in Germany and Switzerland on the basis of 2 tasks with 2 associated prompts, each from a standardized writing assessment whose scoring involved both human and automated components.…

The rising prevalence rate of obesity in the United States has accentuated concerns about obesity-related problems as a major public health issue, which has motivated widespread efforts to increase public knowledge and to motivate individuals to change their relevant behaviors. Although health campaign messages commonly include information about…

Because scaffolded feedback is a key component of dynamic assessment (DA) and is present in some forms of corrective feedback (CF), it can be unclear how the 2 frameworks differ. Further complicating the distinction, many second language (L2) DA studies have focused on how a teacher provides mediation as a series of prompts, usually in reaction to…

The Mandarin resultative verb compound (RVC; e.g., "tui dao" "push fall" and "pa shang" "climb ascend") encodes complex events composed of an initiating action and resulting activity or state. This study investigated when Mandarin-speaking children acquired this language-specific device. Specifically, we…

Picture use in an educational setting fits the idiom: old but gold. They have been used in the classrooms of various levels across generations. They are long known and proved to have the ability to help motivate, demonstrate, and instruct the students during a learning process. However, still, there are plenty of studies done revealing how…

One goal in teacher education is to prepare prospective teachers (PTs) for a career of systematic reflection and learning from their own teaching. One important skill involved in systematic reflection, which has received little research attention, is linking teaching actions with their outcomes on student learning; such links have been termed…

Using the framework of conversation analysis, this study investigated the interactional workings of laughter in task-based interactions. The analysis was drawn from 160 cases of pair work interactions, collected in 2nd-semester Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classrooms. The pair work activities examined in this study are mostly grammar-focused,…

Information provided at the moment a person makes a decision can influence behavior in predictable ways. The United Kingdom's Behavioural Insights Team have used this idea to help improve the insulation of lofts, collect taxes, and even reduce litter. The authors of this article developed software that appends a personalized message to each…

Adult learners are taking advantage of the availability and convenience of online education. Mature learners in online higher education classrooms bring a wealth of experience filtered through cultural, generational, and socioeconomical differences. The purpose of this research was to explore community building in an online graduate course by…

Sighted speakers of different languages vary systematically in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech. These differences influence how semantic elements are organized in gesture, but only when those gestures are produced with speech (co-speech gesture), not without speech (silent gesture). We ask whether the…

The self-teaching hypothesis describes how children progress toward skilled sight-word reading. It proposes that children do this via phonological recoding with assistance from contextual cues, to identify the target pronunciation for a novel letter string, and in so doing create an opportunity to self-teach new orthographic knowledge. We present…

This study investigated how speaker certainty (a rational cue) and speaker benevolence (an emotional cue) influence children's willingness to learn words in a selective learning paradigm. In two experiments four- to six-year-olds learnt novel labels from two speakers and, after a week, their memory for these labels was reassessed. Results…

Research has mainly focused on the causes and effects of foreign language anxiety (FLA), an affective factor that adversely affects speaking skills, while few studies have concentrated on how to decrease the level of FLA among English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. Moreover, research lacks the effects of the use of paralinguistic features…