Codeswitching is reported to be a common feature of group work in EFL classes, particularly those with learners sharing the same native language. On the other hand, there is little research on codeswitching in group work in EFL contexts. This study aims to investigate the reasons why codeswitching is employed in EFL group work interactions among…

Research Findings: The Latino population within the U.S. is heterogeneous with diversity in education level, country of origin, and English language fluency. Latino children often enter school with limited English language skills. In the current study, we surveyed 448 Latino families of Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican descent regarding their home…

The continuation task, a new form of reading-writing integrated task in which test-takers read an incomplete story and then write the continuation and ending of the story, has been increasingly used in writing assessment, especially in China. However, language-test developers' understanding of the effects of important task-related factors on…

Research has painted a pessimistic picture of students' second language (L2) writing skills in secondary education. One innovative tool that may help students foster their L2 proficiency, including writing ability, is in-class debate. Debate is commonly associated with oral communication and argumentation skills. However, debate may also offer…

Wikipedia is one of the most important innovations of the Internet age and has been analysed and criticised within higher educational settings for how it is utilised by students or academics for essay assignments or research. Less work has been done on how content writing for Wikipedia may be deployed as an instructional tool and its pedagogical…

This study compares the language proficiency gains of two groups of students taking a business English course module in a bilingual university in Catalonia (Spain). Whereas one of these groups followed a 'translanguaging' or 'plurilingual' pedagogy, the other followed a strictly monolingual approach. Participants were 54 mostly Catalan/Spanish…

Where the veracity of a statement is in question, listeners tend to interpret disfluency as signaling dishonesty. Previous research in deception suggests that this results from a speaker model, linking lying to cognitive effort and effort to disfluency. However, the disfluency-lying bias occurs very quickly: Might listeners instead simply…

Underpinned by a postmodern perspective of (teacher) identity, which characterizes it as unstable, multifaceted, unfinished, complex, dynamic, fluid, constructed in relation with others (Bauman, 2005; Bohn, 2005; Hall, 2006; Beijaard et al., 2011 among others), this qualitative research aims at exploring English language teachers' identities…

Speaking a foreign language is a complicated process that involves linguistic competence, skills, and strategy use. Communicating through English in English for Academic Purposes courses is a basic requirement for EFL learners, but it can be a challenge. To improve the quality of speech, strengthen components of speaking competence, and raise…

While fluency in second language speaking can be a challenging construct to measure, it is important to identify the discourse features that contribute to it. This small-scale classroom research project examined the effect of formulaic language sequences on fluency as measured by computer-based speaking tasks of young English learners. Thirty-six…

Despite English being a core and compulsory part of the curriculum for Chinese English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners, it is nevertheless often highly challenging for them. This is partly due to the discrepancies between English's citation and spoken form and the lack of recognition this pronunciation receives within ESL classrooms. With this…

The objective of this study was to examine college general chemistry students' conceptual understanding and language fluency in the context of the topic of acids and bases. 115 students worked in groups of 2-4 to complete an activity on conductometry, where they were given a scenario in which a titration of sodium hydroxide solution and dilute…

As our society has become increasingly data dependent, statistics education has emerged as a field of study. Research has focused on statistics course content outcomes, showing most students struggle with statistical concepts, including variation and the standard deviation. Variation is a foundational concept in statistics. Without a firm grasp of…

An essential component for assessing the accuracy and fluency of language learners is understanding how mode of communication and task type affect performance in second-language (L2) acquisition. This study investigates how text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and face-to-face (F2F) oral interaction can influence the…

The present study was designed to examine the underlying brain mechanisms of positive and negative emotional verbal fluency. Three verbal fluency tasks (one non-emotional phonemic task, two emotional tasks: "Joy" and "Fear") were used in this study. The results were analyzed for 35 healthy, Polish-speaking, right-handed adults…