Affordance refers to the opportunity available to a learning activity. Taking affordance as a theoretical and analytical construct, this exploratory study investigates learners' attitudes and the opportunities WeChat may provide for Chinese cultural knowledge (CCK) learning. The aim is to find out the potential new affordances and compare learners…

As intercultural learning has been increasingly regarded as essential in higher education, researchers have promoted it through integration of digital storytelling into cultural exchange activities. However, most studies have focused on the utilization of only one language whereas the effects of multilingual digital storytelling on students'…

The present study investigates whether or not Thai students' English writing skills can be improved by using an online grammar checker. First, typical syntactic errors made by undergraduate students majoring in English and English for Careers were examined. Secondly, possible reasons for syntactic errors in English writing in the light of Lado's…

The primary goal of this project is to assess the students' better communication attainment after applying a series of five interactive strategies to an experiment group of subjects. This class will be compared with a control group of other participants, and in their class, the interactive approaches are not emphasized and practiced openly. The…

Research on the implementation of CLIL at the onset of primary school is limited and has largely overlooked the role of other sources of individual differences. This study investigated the effects of the CLIL approach to English learning, together with the effects of out-of-school exposure to the language through media and other sources of…

Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic forms characterized by their use as conversation organizers or pause fillers (Fox Tree, 2010). Although used frequently in both speech and writing, DMs are not often taught in L2 classrooms, despite incorrect usage causing potential misunderstandings (Polat, 2011). Additionally, L2 learners have been observed…

Issues of intelligibility may arise amongst English learners when acquiring new words and phrases in North American academic settings, perhaps in part due to limited linguistic data available to the learner for understanding language use patterns. To this end, this paper examines the effects of Data-Driven Learning for Pronunciation (DDLfP) on…

Many overseas students in Higher Education in the UK struggle to understand the compulsory texts for their course, and obtain lower scores for their modules than their monolingual peers. While the existence of this achievement gap is well established in the literature, little is known about the ways in which overseas students in HE with limited…

The study explores the extent to which the intrinsic complexity of relative clauses (RCs) and prior linguistic knowledge impact the acquisition of RCs by L2 learners. The study investigates the main sources of the erroneous and avoided types of English RCs produced by Persian-speaking learners of English at three proficiency levels. The data…

This study was designed to investigate the impact of visual mnemonic technique on young and adult Iranian English learners' vocabulary learning. The current study followed a quasi-experimental design. 48 female students were selected based on their performance on the Quick Placement Test. The participants were divided into four groups, two…

The redesigned "TOEIC Bridge"® tests were designed to evaluate test takers' English listening, reading, speaking, and writing skills in the context of everyday adult life. In this paper, we summarize the initial validity argument that supports the use of test scores for the purpose of selection, placement, and evaluation of a test…

This study investigated the effects of two different planning time conditions (i.e., operational [20 s] and extended length [90 s]) for the lecture listening-into-speaking tasks of the "TOEFL iBT"® test for candidates at different proficiency levels. Seventy international students based in universities and language schools in the United…

Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

This study investigated the influence of focus-on-form task-based language teaching (TBLT) on Taiwanese children's English vocabulary acquisition and retention. Focus-on-form TBLT here refers to instruction in which the teacher and students interact, negotiate, and respond to each other on the subject of a second language (L2) vocabulary. The…

Despite the numerous reforms that Thailand's educational system has undergone, test scores show that a majority of the population still lacks the ability to use English with the skill required to compete in the international community. While many reasons have been proposed for Thailand's poor ranking, only a small number have looked beyond…