The goal of this small-scale qualitative study was to investigate the reasons and factors that may demotivate a group of university EFL students from participating in class, in the context of a school of language in the central part of the state of Veracruz in Mexico. While previous studies conducted, in this same setting, have focused on factors…

The rapid advancement of technology has allowed computer-assisted language learning (CALL) to have made inroads in the area of pedagogy for language and culture learning. While the majority of studies have used online and virtual environments for culture learning, very little attention has been paid to a real world environment. This study is based…

Background: Students' motivation generally declines over time. Some researchers have suggested that the parallel decline in academic self-efficacy and values may be as a result of the longitudinal reciprocal relations between these two motivational constructs. However, little empirical evidence has supported this speculation. Further, all prior…

The study aimed to investigate if there was a motivational difference between Turkish students and international students for learning English at a prep-school of a state university in Turkey in terms of attitude, integrative orientation, instrumental orientation, altruistic motivation and parental encouragement. It was also carried out to find…

Working Memory (WM) is an essential concept of cognitive science since many aspects of human learning depend on it. Primarily proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) and developed by Baddeley (1986), the concept of WM comprises the number of subsystems involved during the process and the considerable emphasis on its key role in cognitive tasks such…

Background: Opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities to become bi/multilingual tend not to be widely available despite demonstrated linguistic and extralinguistic advantages associated with an ability to use more than one language. This article focuses on the learning experiences of students with intellectual disabilities in…

Various approaches help determine students' need for language support courses. Some programs use standardized language proficiency test scores, which are available from the admissions process; others use local placement tests, which are typically designed to be aligned with local language needs and ESL course curricula. Using local placement tests…

Until very recently, ability and whiteness as relational systems have been uninterrogated by TESOL research, policy, practice, and teacher education. Consequently, monolingual teachers often use students' proximity to whiteness and nondisabled status as a metric for ascertaining their ability or belonging in certain language learning spaces.…

Motivations-beliefs for learning and their relationship to instructional experiences are a poorly understood aspect of higher education. Notably, interest is an individual difference that both researchers and educators alike believe should be supported. However, this support is too often relegated to the craft of instruction. To be enhanced…

In the context of language instruction and learning, willingness to communicate (WTC) is an important factor in learners' language use. It is viewed as a volitional process influenced by individual, social, linguistic, and situationally dependent factors. Foundational research focused on trait and state WTC-influencing factors as separate…

Various aspects of semantic features drive early vocabulary development, but less is known about how the global and local structure of the overall semantic feature space influences language acquisition. A feature network of English words was constructed from a large database of adult feature production norms such that edges in the network…

Widely recognized lately, interactional competence (IC) has been of growing research interest. However, there are still some questions and gaps in conceptualizing, operationalization, and assessment. The present article examines the evolution of the combination of concept-based instruction (CBI) elements and conversation analysis (CA) findings…

Westergaard's microcue account raises the question of the exact nature of language transfer in the acquisition of languages as well of how L1/Ln input interacts with the principles of universal grammar (UG) during processing. In order to consider in more detail the actual representation building, processing mechanisms that would be involved, her…

Westergaard (2021) presents an updated account of the Linguistic Proximity Model and the micro-cue approach to the parser as an acquisition device. The property-by-property view of transfer inherent in this approach contrasts with other influential models that assume that third language (L3) acquisition involves the creation of a full copy of only…

When we think of the debates surrounding linguistic transfer in L3 acquisition, one of the most prominent discussions concerns whether transfer occurs in a wholesale fashion or whether it is property-by-property. One such model is the Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM, Mykhaylyk et al., 2015; Westergaard et al., 2017; Westergaard, 2021), which…