This study consists of a categorisation of the vocabulary of chemistry, focusing on the terminological difficulties students face when learning this subject. Therefore, this classification intends to provide chemistry teachers an awareness of the language barriers students must overcome in their understanding of this scientific discipline. Two…

This paper argues for bringing insights from linguistics into the world language classroom. At any level of study, such insights can add intellectual interest to the study of a target language (TL), and can also help students accept and acquire aspects of the TL that are different from their first language or that are inherently challenging. As a…

Achieving sufficient proficiency in academic writing is critical in university level setting. It is not surprising hence, that the admission to English speaking universities is usually conditioned not only by a particular total score from Standardized tests of English proficiency, e.g., TOEFL or IELTs but also a specific band score in writing. To…

Physics and Mathematics are two deeply interlinked domains of Science. Mathematics is considered as the language in which the Physics theories are built by employing mathematical symbols and operations to make equations and representations in the world of Physics completely meaningful. In spite of being the backbone of Physics, the use of…

Objective: To evaluate support for three hypotheses about the etiology of adolescent-onset ADHD symptoms: (1) a "cool" cognitive load hypothesis, (2) a "hot" rewards processing hypothesis, and (3) a trauma exposure hypothesis. Method: Participants (N=50) were drawn from two public high schools in a culturally diverse…

In formal education, the teaching of natural sciences begins when children are about 12 years old. Teachers justify this with the difficulty and abstraction of concepts in these sciences, and they refer to the theory of child development by Piaget. However, numerous examples from everyday life, from non-formal education, analysis of the…

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation received direct instruction in adjective-forming suffixes, then they took an immediate and a delayed test. Error analysis showed that 36% of the responses were left blank or the subjects duplicated the stimulus word. In 32% they mismatched the word…

In this short article I try to present a taxonomy of sources of difficulty, in particular complexity. I emphasize how these factors interact with each other and with individual differences and treatments, before illustrating some of these interactions and the methodological issues involved in studying them with examples from the empirical studies…

The remote association test (RAT) has been applied in various fields; however, evidence of construct validity for the original version and subsequent extensions of the RAT remains limited. This study aimed to elucidate the dimensionality and the relationship between item features and item difficulties for the RAT--Chinese Version (RAT-C) using the…

Purpose: Current approaches to assessing sentence-level speech variability rely on measures that quantify variability across utterances and use normalization procedures that alter raw trajectory data. The current work tests the feasibility of a less restrictive nonlinear approach--recurrence quantification analysis (RQA)--via a procedural example…

Individuals frequently make use of the body and environment when engaged in a cognitive task. For example, individuals will often spontaneously physically rotate when faced with rotated objects, such as an array of words, to putatively offload the performance costs associated with stimulus rotation. We looked to further examine this idea by…

The authors argue here that contemporary use of action research shares the exploratory, inductive nature of many qualitative research approaches--no matter the type of data collected--because the type of research problems studied are set in complex, dynamic, rapidly changing contexts and because action research is undertaken to support social and…

Klauer and Phye's "Cognitive Training for Children" ("Cognitive training for children: a developmental program of inductive reasoning and problem solving." Hogrefe & Hogrefe Publisher, Kirkland, 1994) provides instruction in inductive reasoning through a sequence of 120 illustrations following a prescribed two-way…

Purpose: The article strives for the enhancement of the efficiency of translation competence assessment in philologists' university training with the help of the triangulation method. It is deemed in the concurrent involvement of different assessment agents (teacher, peer and self) into integrated and collaborative translation performance…

The present study investigated the applicability of word reading, word segmentation, and text reading as diagnostic tools to assess comprehension, detect struggling readers, and inform instruction for low-level Chinese as second language (L2) learners (n = 70). The results showed that the three instruments measured different dimensions of word…