Growing up in the digital era, young children are exposed to numerous educational applications and programs, some with well-designed curricula and others focused more on entertainment or game-like qualities. With the increasing popularity of mobile language-learning applications among young children, this dissertation raises a crucial question: do…

The current study examined the extent to which cognitive fluency (CF) contributes to utterance fluency (UF) at the level of constructs. A total of 128 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed four speaking tasks--argumentative task, picture narrative task, reading-to-speaking task, and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task--and a battery…

Besides being promoted as a way to improve target language proficiency, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is also believed to positively impact socio-affective variables such as language attitudes and motivation. Yet, few extensive empirical studies exist on these aspects in CLIL. The present contribution aims to address this gap in…

Scalar implicatures involve inferring the use of a less informative term (e.g. some) to mean the negation of a more informative term (e.g. not all). A growing body of recent research on the derivation of scalar implicatures by adult second language (L2) learners shows that while they are successful in acquiring the knowledge of scalar…

This regional dossier aims to provide concise descriptions and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Lithuanian is a Baltic language that belongs to the Indo-European family. Most of the Lithuanian-speaking minority in Poland is confined to three municipalities near the Polish-Lithuanian border.…

Drawing on the lived experiences of three community school English teachers in Nepal, this article explores the uses of the learners' first language (L1) in English as a foreign/second language (ESL) classes. As the data, we collected the written lived-experience descriptions from the teachers, observed their classes, and interviewed them. We…

This study explored rhetorical devices and their effect on forming coherent and cohesive wholes in the writing of 61 EFL students. When analyzing their writing using the five-paragraph essay format, 57% of students deviated from the format, with some resorting to their L1 rhetorical structures (the indirect group) and others employing rhetorical…

Scope ambiguity arises when a sentence contains scope-bearing logical operators like quantifiers and negation (Fox, 2003). For instance, in English, the sentence 'Every horse didn't jump over the fence' can be interpreted as either 'None of the horses jumped over the fence' (surface scope) or 'Not all of the horses jumped over the fence' (inverse…

A critical approach to "neofalante," newspeakers of Galician and their theoretical framework, is presented. In order to do so, we take as a case study some of its documented cases as a popular notion, its transformations, and its mobilisation in the planning discourse, along with its construction and evolution as an analytical category…

The Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) is a promising project which aims to elevate the living standards of the Thai people. Large numbers of skilled workers with a good command of the English language are urgently needed. The present study aims to examine the English proficiency of Thai employees and explore the expectations of employers in the EEC.…

Purpose: Language sample analysis is widely regarded as the gold standard of language assessment. However, the uncertainty regarding the optimal length of sample and the limited availability of developmental language data for nonmainstream languages such as Afrikaans complicate reliable use of the method. The study aimed to provide guidelines on…

The aim of this article is to explore how the teaching of English as a foreign language is planned in three plurilingual state schools in Catalonia. We carried out classroom observations (first and second grade of primary education) and interviewed the English teachers who teach these lessons and the headmasters of the three schools. The use of…

Studies have confirmed that fair assessment practices in educational contexts affect learners' motivation, self-regulation, and above all teacher credibility, yet the concept has been subject to educational stakeholders' diverse outlooks and perspectives. On this basis, this study delves into the high school English as Foreign Language (EFL)…

Student engagement research in the field of English language teaching (ELT) has substantially increased in recent years. However, there is a research gap concerning the up-to-date analysis of the current state of student engagement research in ELT. This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the historical evolution of trends in…

The present study explored the processing units of high-proficiency second language (L2) Chinese learners in on-line reading in an eye-tracking experiment. The critical aim was to investigate how learners segment continuous characters into words without the aid of word boundary demarcations. Based on previous studies, the embedded words of 2- and…