Some issues regarding how secondary school pupils' and university students' (majoring in English, Chinese) intercultural competence, which are to be developed under conditions of the coronavirus pandemic COVID-19, are presented in the article. The authors review the literature on the education standards alongside some native and foreign scholars'…

The rationale behind this special issue is to underscore the importance of studying instructional materials in context--that is, how materials and textbooks are used by teachers and learners. Research on teaching materials needs to reach beyond traditional 'armchair' analyses and evaluations to appreciate the place of instructional materials in…

The concept of blended learning, a combination of online and face-to-face learning, has become popular in educational settings. Using qualitative methods, this study investigates the role of blended learning and in-service teachers' perceptions. Blended learning was used for 19 in-service teachers during their summer degree program at a Chinese…

Time has contributed to most of our daily activities. In the field of understanding how the human brain reacted to specific learning processes, the neuroscientist supports the impact of having multiple learning sessions with the retention of knowledge. Spaced Learning is a product makes out of human's lack of capacity in retaining information and…

Turkey has been attracting an increasing number of foreigners seeking to work or create a social life in the country over the last few years. Naturally, like with any country, there are some problems that foreigners may encounter in Turkish life due to cultural differences. While these difficulties are not unique to Turkey and there may be…

Much research exists on the role of textual enhancement in instructed second language (L2) development, yet little is known about how its effectiveness is influenced by multiple exposures, whether it can facilitate the acquisition of L2 derivational morphology, and how it may affect child language learning. To fill these gaps, this study employed…

The present study explored the extent to which teacher assessment (TA) and peer assessment (PA) differ in terms of magnitude and patterns of distribution across English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' descriptive and narrative writing performance. Twenty Persian-speaking EFL learners were non-randomly selected and voluntarily participated in…

The aim of the current study was to examine the effects of creative drama method on the 7th graders' achievement and motivation towards English language course. The study was in quasi-experimental pattern model with pretest and posttest control group. It was conducted with seventy 7th grade students, 36 of whom were assigned as the experimental…

This study examines the interpreter role among students who serve as interpreters in a community health clinic system in the Midwestern USA as part of a community health-themed service-learning course for advanced Spanish students. Drawing on Positioning Theory (Davies and Harré 1990), I consider the ways in which three second language learners…

In 1988 and 2006, "Applied Linguistics" published Low's and Littlemore and Low's seminal theoretical accounts of second language (L2) metaphoric competence (MC). Meanwhile, attempts to elicit metaphor-related skills/competences have been mixed. Instrumentation has varied in reliability, been limited in scope, and used arguably flawed…

We describe our experience with comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) content conducted during an EFL class at a state-run secondary school in Argentina. We first describe the legal landscape within which CSE is embedded in Argentina. Then, we discuss gender, sexuality, and CLIL. Next, we discuss the experience which aimed at problematizing CSE…

This provocative article raises many important issues that need to be addressed and in so doing will advance the fields of second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition in several important ways. Fundamental questions concerning multilingual development persist especially with respect to the role of Universal Grammar in this language…

Although a good number of studies have been conducted on the problems EFL learners face to develop oral English communication skills, only a few studies tackled the problems EFL teachers face when teaching oral English communication skills at the tertiary level globally and in the Bangladeshi EFL context. Thus, the objectives of this study are to…

Van Lier's [2004. "The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning: A Sociocultural Perspective." Boston: Kluwer Academy] concept of ecology of language learning is applicable to our focus on children's active engagement in bilingual preschool classroom activities, which are conducive to language learning. The aim of this study was to…

To test the effects of talker variability and explicit instruction on the statistical learning of lexical tone, 80 monolingual English listeners were taught an artificial language that mimicked Mandarin's asymmetric distribution of syllable-tone co-occurrences. Training stimuli consisted of either speech from one talker or speech from four…