Previous research has provided ample evidence for the processing advantage of formulaic sequences, leading researchers and teachers to argue for its facilitation of speech fluency. However, few studies have examined how the processing of formulaic sequences interacts with speaker proficiency and task difficulty; even fewer studies have…

The higher education community often views international students through a homogenous lens. To challenge the cultural norms set by the dominant group, researchers need to explore how these norms affect international teaching assistants (ITAs). The following questions guided the current study: (a) How do ITAs construct intersecting identities of…

The capacity to perceive and meaningfully process foreign or second language (L2) words from the aural modality is a fundamentally important aspect of successful L2 listening. Despite this, the relationships between L2 listening and learners' capacity to process aural input at the lexical level has received relatively little research focus. This…

This study examined linguistic development among both intermediate and advanced college-level second language (L2) learners during short-term study abroad summer programs in Spain. Participants completed a measure of overall proficiency, as well as assessments of receptive grammatical (morphosyntactic) and lexical (semantic) abilities at the…

Korea is widely recognized to be among the world's most advanced digital countries with nearly every university student owning the latest smartphone. Yet language education is largely still taught in traditional classroom methods. This study was designed to see how students in two major universities used smartphone apps to informally supplement…

Assessing student writing is a complex task and experimental studies have shown that textual determinants, such as spelling or vocabulary, affect teachers' judgments of other analytic criteria in student essays. Among these elements, organisation has not been extensively explored. This experimental study examines how organisational quality…

Dynamic Assessment (DA) is an implicit kind of assessment that most teachers and learners engage in during class time. Although there exists a body of research on the promising effects of DA, the studies have not compared the results across proficiency levels. This study examined the effect of interventionist approach to DA on Iranian English as a…

Teacher perspectives have been lacking in the mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) literature. To fill this gap, this study investigates how Chinese teachers implemented WeChat-supported language tasks and the challenges they encountered in the process. Based on technology-mediated task-based language teaching and authentic assessment…

While a wealth of research is available on the frequent multi-word units in academic genres, studies that exclusively link lexical sequences to the rhetorical moves in research articles (RAs) are fairly limited. This study involved compiling a corpus of 8,500 RA abstracts sampled from five disciplines of economics, law, political sciences,…

Sleep plays a role in the consolidation of various aspects of language learning. In this study, we investigated the extent to which sleep-dependent memory consolidation contributes to second language (L2) rule generalization and enhancement of L2 explicit knowledge. One hundred native English speakers were engaged in a meaning-focused training of…

The purpose of this research is to model the link between language learners' socioeconomic status (SES), their self-directed, technology-enhanced language learning, and their language achievement. The participants of this study are 382 university students taking part in a survey related to their perceptions of their self-directed,…

This study examines the effects of Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) in 52 non-native Mandarin learners of Mandarin beginning level learning motivation and the associated factors affecting their learning motivation. Mix method design was applied in the research. Quantitative questionnaire data were analyzed using paired sample t-test to examine…

Unlike other groups of international students, Chinese speakers' use of English names while studying in English is an established norm. Relatively little discussion of the practice has taken place within recent literature, and less attention still has been paid to the minority of Chinese-speaking students who do not adopt English names. The choice…

Professor of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Robert DeKeyser is from the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland. His research builds bridges between the theory of second language acquisition with major concerns in cognitive aspects such as implicit and explicit learning mechanism, age differences, and…

This paper explores the attitudes of undergraduate language learners and their lecturers towards the introduction of an attendance policy in an Irish Higher Education Institution. It also analyses the relationship between the introduction of this policy and student performance (average grade) and progression (pass rates). The policy was introduced…