Finding affordable textbooks is a challenge within many educational contexts, including English as a foreign language (EFL) settings and English as a second language (ESL) settings, such as universities and Intensive English Programs (often referred to as IEPs) in the United States. As educators, we know it is a struggle for many of our students…

"TikTok" has become one of the latest trends in education and in the ELT field in general since this application seems to bring potential benefits to the English classroom context. Although some studies have suggested that using "TikTok" as a classroom tool brings potential benefits to the teaching context, scholarly literature…

The current special issue is dedicated to studies exploring social interaction in second language educational environments that feature technology. In this introduction article, we contextualize the empirical studies included here with respect to the changing role of technology in education and situate them in the research tradition of multimodal…

In the current study, we examined the role of first-language (L1) influence on the additional-language development of grammatical gender marking in Spanish. The participants were L1 speakers of English or French (N = 215), who were learning Spanish and who were at three instructional levels. The data came from their use of gender marking in…

This intervention study was conducted to assess the effects of three instructional approaches to L2 listening. That is, a metacognitive pedagogical cycle, an awareness-raising approach which combined reflections and short discussions of factors associated with successful L2 listening, and an approach that incorporated vocabulary as a prelistening…

This article examines the impact that an arts project had on the relationship between a group of asylum seekers and the Italian town where they live. The project brought together local youth and asylum seekers to engage in dance workshops and video-making workshops. This article combines interviews with project participants and teachers with an…

The article offers an in-depth lexical analysis of the listening sub-test of the famous International English Language Testing System (IELTS). The vocabulary profile of 239 listening transcripts from 60 IELTS official practice tests were analyzed. The results showed that, 3,000 most frequent word families in the British National Corpus/Corpus of…

The present study investigated effective techniques of teaching vocabulary in an Afghan EFL setting. It also attempts to determine the impacts of the participants' demographic profile ((i.e., gender, age, first language, and teaching experiences) on their responses. The data were collected from 93 randomly selected English teachers through a…

The EULALIA (Enhancing University Language courses with an App powered by game-based learning and tangible user interface activities) project aimed to enhance the learning methodologies of four university language courses for Erasmus students in Italy, Malta, Poland and Spain by developing innovative and effective learning tools based on mobile…

This paper attempts to explore students' motivation to study French at a state-funded public university in Estonia. The first set of data collection was carried out in 2008 and repeated in 2020 using the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory and in-depth interviews. The results of the quantitative part indicate a significant increase in students'…

Translation has been one of the most commonly used strategies in learning an additional language. Although there is not a consensus on the usefulness of translation as a language learning strategy, the relevant literature indicated that it could contribute to the learning process when used purposefully and meaningfully. The present study aimed to…

The present study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine nonlocal agreement processing between native (L1) English speakers and Chinese-English second language (L2) learners, whose L1 lacks number agreement. We manipulated number marking with determiners ("the" vs. "that"/"these") to see how…

Entertainment video games are very popular among young audiences. Nevertheless, despite their potential to improve cognitive functioning, they are still studied rarely as a tool for digital game-based learning. To better understand video gaming practices' value in the classroom, this article provides a systematic review of literature on the effect…

The L2 learning potentials of massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) have been established in various studies; however, the fine-grained dynamics of digital game-based L2 learning are yet to be uncovered. A potential cause of this limitation is a limited understanding of the interconnected, situated, and dynamic nature of digital gaming as a…

Virtual Reality (VR) offers language learners a valuable environment for practicing language skills and other aspects essential for language development, interaction, and negotiation of meaning. For example, speaking practice in VR using avatars can reduce speaking anxiety and increase users' sense of agency. Social spaces in VR present…