The paper comes from the first extensive qualitative research project on immigrant students' experiences of higher education in Iceland. The aim of the paper is to explore immigrant students' experiences of different assessment methods, such as summative, formative and group assessment, applied in three Icelandic universities. The analysis of the…

This study responds to scholarship that has examined "folk concepts" of (non)nativeness through the lens of imagined ideals of the native speaker, by proposing a framework that integrates both ideals and habits. We operationalize these concepts by drawing from the theoretical notions of chronotope, scale, and habitus. Using data from…

This study examines Chinese international doctoral students' academic socialization into TESOL discourses and communities. Rooted in the academic discourse socialization theory, complemented by the notions of Lave and Wenger's "community of practice," and Bourdieu's "capital," "habitus," and "field," this…

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has been said to increase not only foreign language proficiency but also learner motivation (Coyle, D., P. Hood, and D. Marsh. 2010. "CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). In contexts where CLIL is elective, however, the question can be…

This article examines Vietnamese bilingual schools' statements of educational outcomes on their websites. Data were gathered from websites of seven schools that were publicly accessible on the Internet. The analysis suggests that the schools purported to provide students with different explicit and implicit outcomes related to language,…

Although decades of research have documented scaffolding in second language learning, providing scaffolding in content-based instruction (CBI) has remained under-explored. This qualitative study investigated teachers' discursive scaffolding strategies and functions and L2 students' reciprocity to teachers' scaffolding in science CBI. Four teachers…

This study examines relative weighting of two acoustic cues, vowel duration and spectra, in the perception of high front vowels by Japanese learners of English. Studies found that Japanese speakers rely heavily on duration to distinguish /i?/ and [character omitted] in American English (AmE) as influenced by phonemic length in Japanese /ii/ and…

Due to the growing status of English as the language of international communication, English immersion programs have been on the rise in China and the rest of the world. Though there has been much discussion on the theoretical and practical characteristics and features of immersion, current models are not adequate for explaining the…

Despite increased diversity on campuses worldwide, research has documented a lack of intercultural interaction among university students. Culturally mixed groups have been found to be a promising means of promoting the rich, repeated contact necessary for intercultural interaction, but hardly any studies of local students' perceptions of such…

The purpose of this study was to analyze six English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' trajectories of discriminating near-synonyms in a data-driven learning task. Since the learners find it considerably difficult to learn subtle meaning differences of near-synonyms, corpus-based data-driven learning may provide an opportunity for them to…

Literature circles [LC] are student-centered discussion groups that use various roles to make reading meaningful, comprehensible and enjoyable. The current research investigated the questioning effects and students' perceptions of integrating EFL [English-as-a-foreign-language] literature circles through student-led Facebook Groups. Findings…

This study examined the optimal learning schedule for second language vocabulary within an authentic classroom setting in Hong Kong. Following a pretest, treatment, delayed posttest design, fifty-two primary school students (Cantonese first language) studied 20 English adjectives over two learning episodes under spaced-short (1-day interval) or…

The present study aims at exploring: (a) the role of the educational setting in the acquisition of aspect and executive functions (i.e. updating) skills, (b) the acquisition of the aspectual features in Greek-German bilingual children and (c) the impact of updating on the acquisition of aspect. Imperfective aspect has been found to be acquired…

The topic of this study is professional development (PD) on Web 2.0 technologies for foreign language teachers and integration of these tools into the language classroom. This research explored the experiences of eighteen teachers of Spanish in grades 7-12 from both rural and urban areas in Nebraska, United States, who participated in a…

Attitudes toward a learning task deals with one's reaction to anything associated with the immediate context in which the language learning takes place. As such, the construct of self-efficacy, which is the belief in one's capabilities to carry out, organize and perform a task successfully, have always been underscored in the academic setting.…