Contact with living animals is an exceptional possibility within biology education to facilitate an intense immersion into the study topic and even allow for a flow experience (Csikszentmihalyi 2000). Further, it might affect the perceptions of the students' basic needs for autonomy and competence and thereby their quality of motivation (Deci and…

In such an era when the value is constantly restructured and information is rapidly changed, education reform should cater for new challenges. The role and function of teachers is encountering a new change. Coping with current information generation, people with high self-efficacy of selecting and mastering large amount of information and higher…

The authors present findings on the third round of the Czech validation of the Motivated Strategies for learning questionnaire (MSLQ), originally developed by Pintrich et al. (1991). The validation only covered an area designed to access motivation in self-regulated learning. Data was collected from a sample of university students in regular…

"Education, education, education" has been a mantra in transnational and national policies since the mid-1990s: everybody has to take part in learning activities throughout their lives in order to stay employable. Hereby lifelong learning establishes a dividing practice between active and inactive lifelong learners constituting the…

This research aimed to investigate second language learners' motivation and learning of English and the ways in which the teachers supported the students' motivation and learning in natural classroom settings. Based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), questionnaires were developed and data were collected from students and their teachers in twelve…

Introduction: Nowadays, one of the most important questions in teaching and learning involves increasing the degree of students' engagement in learning. According to Astin's Theory of Student engagement, the best learning environment is one in which it is possible to increase students' engagement. The current study investigates the influences that…

Open University (OU) students are typically mature students who combine studying part-time with work or caring responsibilities; the average age of OU language students has been dropping, and about 30% of our new students are now under 25. The traditional view of adult learners who study languages is that they often study for pleasure or personal…

The present study investigated how self-related English learning motivation among Taiwanese adolescent learners differs between students who only receive English instruction in formal schooling and those who have additional private tutoring. A total of 1,698 teenage English learners in public secondary schools across Taiwan completed a…

Professional and Community Engagement (PACE) at Macquarie University offers undergraduate students experiential learning opportunities with local, regional and international partners. Through PACE, students work on mutually beneficial projects that both meet the partner's organizational goals and enable students to strengthen graduate capabilities…

The article looks at language learner autonomy as a social construct in relation to the context and its user based on the example of "Italki", a social networking site for tandem language learning. Considering the two foci--the context and the learner--the study is divided into two parts, both carried out from the perspective of online…

The role of basic emotions in SLA has been underestimated in both research and pedagogy. The present article examines 10 positive emotions ("joy," "gratitude," "serenity," "interest," "hope," "pride," "amusement," "inspiration," "awe," and "love")…

This study investigates the experiences of a group of classroom teachers who transitioned into administrative roles as vice-principals in a rural schoolboard in southwestern Ontario. We included both elementary and secondary former teacher leaders who moved into the school administration and explored the aspects of their leadership experience that…

In 2006, Graddol predicted that numbers of "English as a foreign language" learners would begin to decline through the second decade of this century, as global English achieves basic skill status for children entering education in more societies across the world. As he further noted, having skills in additional languages may thus offer a…

This review of the literature examines the process of matching students with band instruments as presented in academic research journals and practitioner publications. While some directors may evaluate the potential impact of students' physical characteristics such as lip size and shape, teeth and jaw structure, body build, and so forth, other…

This quasi-experimental study examined the effects of a self-reflection intervention on college (college in this article refers to university-level education) students' positive thinking, learning motivation and self-regulation in Taiwan. One hundred and two college students were selected to participate in an 18-week intervention forming the…