This study set out to test the theoretical premise of the SSARC model of pedagogic task sequencing, which postulates that tasks should be sequenced for learners from cognitively simple to complex. This experiment compared the performance of three tasks differing in cognitive complexity in a simple-complex sequence versus in the absence of any…

Though California's English Learner (EL) policies were developed in response to civil rights struggles for language access and equal educational opportunity, they are also conditioned by the history of U.S. settler and overseas conquest. This article presents a Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) of the California EL classification policies and…

Research has shown that collaboratively produced texts are better in quality compared with individually written texts. However, no study has considered the role of collaboration in authorial voice, which is an essential element in current writing curricula. This study analyzes the effects of collaborative task performance in the quality of L2…

This study examines the potential effectiveness of Web 2.0-supported project-based learning in Jordanian EFL eleventh-grade students' speaking fluency and accuracy of grammar and vocabulary. The participants of the study were 43 female students who were purposefully selected from two schools at Al-Koura Directorate of Education (Jordan) in the…

The present study was an attempt to investigate the differential effect/s of three different planning time scenarios (i.e. 0 min, 10 min, & 20 min), as well as three task conditions of (1) topic given, (2) topic and ideas given, and (3) topic, ideas and macrostructure given on EFL learners L2 writing complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF).…

The study reported in this article was aimed at investigating whether making the findings of second language fluency research accessible to language teachers has an impact on their self-reported understanding of the concept of oral fluency, confidence in promoting it, and classroom practice in short and medium term. The data come from 106 initial…

This study examines a common pedagogical approach whereby students view teacher feedback outside of class time. Facilitated through Moodle, it aimed to investigate not only the effect of written corrective feedback (WCF) on learning outcomes, but importantly, how frequently students review the feedback they receive. The study was conducted at a…

This study examined the role of visual cues (facial expressions and hand gestures) in second language (L2) speech assessment. University students (N = 60) at English-medium universities assessed 2-minute video clips of 20 L2 English speakers (10 Chinese and 10 Spanish speakers) narrating a personal story. They rated the speakers'…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

Learning collocations poses difficulties for foreign language learners despite their importance for fluency in the target language. Collocation learning and teaching should therefore be an integral part of foreign language instruction. With a focus on the receptive knowledge of collocations, this 5-week-long pretest/posttest quasi-experimental…

This paper examines the differences correlation between instructor- and peer-based participation scores and oral proficiency in an EFL course focusing on oral communication. It finds that there is very little correlation between instructor-based and peer-based participation scores (r = 0.187, p = 0.053) and that the former is more associated with…

To achieve a high level of language fluency, learners need to possess sufficient collocational competence. However, collocation is considered a problematic area for many EFL learners, partly because of its arbitrariness. To gain more insight into the problems involving learners' productive collocational skills, the current study examines lexical…

This paper explores a general approach to paraphrase generation using a pre-trained seq2seq model fine-tuned using a back-translated anatomy and physiology textbook. Human ratings indicate that the paraphrase model generally preserved meaning and grammaticality/fluency: 70% of meaning ratings were above 75, and 40% of paraphrases were considered…

Over the past 40 years, Jim Cummins has proposed a number of highly influential theoretical concepts, including the threshold and interdependence hypotheses and the distinction between conversational fluency and academic language proficiency. In this book, he provides a personal account of how these ideas developed and he examines the credibility…

This dissertation examines individual, constricted agency in a multilingual environment within the context of a language discussion group and the form of social capital possessed by their Mexican Indigenous diasporic community living on the California Central Coast. The research is based on participant-observation ethnographic work with a language…