New assessment types that include multimodal and digital elements are increasingly being used to assess university students' 'soft skills' such as communication, as well as their science content knowledge. However, very little is known about how or how well such products assess communicative elements, particularly when these elements are so…

Classrooms are complex in their real sets. To understand such sets and their emergent patterns, network approach provides useful theoretical and methodological tools. In this work, we used network approach to explore two domains of complexity in a classroom: the interpersonal domain, via social networks; and the representational domain, through…

Word vectors are widely used as input features in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Researchers have found that word vectors often encode the biases of society, and steps have been taken towards debiasing the vectors themselves. However, little has been said about the fairness of the methods used to evaluate the quality of vectors.…

According to rational adaptation approaches of language processing, readers adjust their expectations of upcoming information depending on the distributional properties of the preceding language input. However, adaptation to sentence structures has not been systematically attested, especially not in second-language (L2) processing. To further our…

This paper proposes a personalized teaching strategy based on Total Physical Response (TPR) to acquire new words. TPR combines target language items with semantically corresponding gestures conducive to learners understanding and memorizing them by repeatedly executing commands from their teachers. One limitation of TPR is that it does not allow…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning applications. This article examines the word cloud, a toolkit often used to scaffold teaching and learning for reflection, critical thinking, and content learning. Addressing the issues in traditional word clouds, semantic word clouds have been…

This study investigates how academic disciplines impact second language (L2) lexical competencies. Prior L2 research has often overlooked the broader effects of disciplinary backgrounds on lexical development. To address this gap, this study utilized lexical decision, memory, and semantic fluency tasks to examine lexicon recognition, memory, and…

Studies of English academic writing have revealed a shift to a compressed style, with preferences for lexical and phrasal types of noun modifiers over clausal modifiers. However, condensed noun phrases may result in a loss of explicitness since they lack grammatical markers specifying the semantic relations between head nouns and modifiers. This…

This research discusses the close relationship between visual literacy, the ability to read, understand, and create visual texts -- and elementary school books, particularly children's picture books. It aims to explore the visual literacy parameters in English elementary textbooks published by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture. In…

The paper focuses on the semantic derivation models of irrational vocabulary -- a semantic class of words that denote the situation of experience that is not based on logical reasoning or clear thinking. The study shows the characteristics of the development of an irrational vocabulary semantic paradigm and reveals semantic derivation models of…

The Four Es (Explain, Engage, Extend, Examine) is a concrete approach to incorporating research-based practice into daily vocabulary instruction by focusing on the pivotal role of teacher and student talk in word learning. Specifically, teachers use language that is understandable to students, identify misunderstandings and correct them within a…

Purpose: Vocabulary intervention can improve comprehension of texts containing taught words, but it is unclear if all middle school readers get this benefit. This study tests 2 hypotheses about variables that predict response to vocabulary treatment on text comprehension: gains in vocabulary knowledge due to treatment and pretreatment reading…

Although there is considerable research on and knowledge about students' conceptualizations of learning or academic practices and skills, the variability of these conceptualizations has been consistently neglected. In the present study, we address this variability in the field of academic reading with the help of a novel approach. Drawing on…

To directly investigate the reciprocal causal relationship of the conceptual and affective meaning of words, two priming experiments were conducted with the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the influence of semantic relatedness on the affective priming effect was explored by manipulating the semantic associative strength between the prime…

Purpose: Improving the ability to listen efficiently in noisy environments is a critical goal for hearing rehabilitation. However, understanding of the impact of difficult listening conditions on language processing is limited. The current study evaluated the neural processes underlying semantics in challenging listening conditions. Method: Thirty…