This study investigated English speakers' perception of Mandarin sounds, aiming to answer three major questions. First, does the perceived similarity between Mandarin and English sounds affect learners' acquisition of Mandarin sounds? Second, do the groups with different amounts of Mandarin experience differ in their perception of…

The structure of Biblical Hebrew (BH) verse remains an open question today despite the extensive amount of investigation that the question has inspired. Much headway has been made in terms of describing the features and devices that find expression in BH verse, but little has been done to make a compelling and consistent distinction between BH…

Over the past years, several Open Educational Resources (OERs) initiatives have been emerged worldwide aiming to create, share and reuse digital educational resources among educational communities. As a result, organizing, offering and accessing these resources over the web have been key issues for both the research and the educational community.…

This chapter takes a critical look at complexity in L2 research. We demonstrate several problems in the L2 literature in terms of how complexity has been defined and operationalised as a construct. In the first part of the chapter we try to unravel its highly complex, multidimensional nature by presenting a taxonomic model that identifies major…

This article describes key findings from contemporary research on screening for early primary grade students in the area of mathematics. Existing studies were used to illustrate the constructs most worth measuring and the diverse strategies that researchers used to study potential measures. The authors discussed the strengths and weaknesses of…

The motivation for this paper is the authors' recent work on several randomized control trials in which they found the primary result, which averaged across subgroups or sites, to be moderated by demographic or site characteristics. They are led to examine a distinction that the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) makes between "confirmatory"…

Television shows, especially soap operas and sitcoms, are usually considered by English as a second language practitioners as a source of authentic spoken conversational materials presumably because they reflect the linguistic features of natural conversation. However, practitioners are faced with the dilemma of how to assess whether such…

Like professionals in other disciplines, music educators are expected to observe certain behavioral standards. In addition to teaching musical skills, concepts, and context, music educators are also expected to protect the welfare of children, serve as trustworthy stewards of public property, and generally behave responsibly and professionally…

This article examines stress experienced by graduate management students in an online learning environment. I use qualitative methodology to examine data collected from 32 students in 2 sections of a graduate online course. Findings identify 6 categories of stressors experienced by the students as well as 6 categories of stress relief agents.…

Recent studies have suggested that individuation of other-race faces is more crucial for enhancing recognition performance than exposure that involves categorization of these faces to an identity-irrelevant criterion. These findings were primarily based on laboratory training protocols that dissociated exposure and individuation by using…

We investigate the hypothesis that our conceptual systems provide two formally distinct ways of representing categories by investigating the manner in which lexical nominals (e.g., "tree," "picnic table") and phrasal nominals (e.g., "black bird," "birds that like rice") are interpreted. Four experiments found that lexical nominals may be mapped…

Stimuli that are processed fluently tend to be regarded as more familiar and are more likely to be classified as old on a recognition test compared with less fluent stimuli. Recently it was shown that the standard relationship between fluency and positive recognition judgments can be reversed if participants are trained that previously studied…

Driven by the growing presence of market forces within higher education worldwide, universities are changing the way they engage with students. This article explores how a university's internal culture relates to engagement with students and their views. It builds on wider research into student engagement and organisational cultures. The…

Bilinguals who are fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and English often produce "code-blends"--simultaneously articulating a sign and a word while conversing with other ASL-English bilinguals. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying code-blend processing, we compared picture-naming times (Experiment 1) and semantic categorization…

This article reports on research into the student experience of enquiry in two tasks in a university pharmacy course. Students were required to investigate through a field trip how a community pharmacy operated to meet customer needs and the requirements of the Health System in which it operated. Students were also required to investigate…