A great deal of research has focused on tasks, particularly for adult second language learners. In this paper we provide an account of studies that have investigated children and tasks -- an age group that have received far less attention. We consider, in particular, the impact of tasks on children's language learning, how their design features…

Migrants arriving in a country are not always welcome. Similarly, the arrival of new technologies can be perceived as a blot on the familiar landscape of established educational practices. This paper seeks a productive synergy between migrants' educational requirements with respect to learning the language of their host society; their valuable and…

The field of language testing has made great strides in measuring language use. It is a monolingual construct, however, that anchors standardized language testing operations and classroom practices. Language use and performance research, see for example the MLJ special issue of 2011, demands that language testing operations also consider…

The author presents strategies for successful team-bonding games along with descriptions of games and suggestions for building a collaborative atmosphere before, during, and after the games.

Research investigating incidental vocabulary learning through listening to songs has primarily relied on participants' self-report surveys on listening behaviors and its relationship with their vocabulary knowledge (Kuppens, 2010). Only one experimental study has investigated vocabulary learning gains from listening to songs (Medina, 1993). From…

Icebreakers are first-day activities that are meant to give students and the teacher an opportunity to get to know one another. They are helpful activities for taking a class full of strangers and turning them into friends (or at least acquaintances). However, icebreaker activities tend to be short and limited in the extent to which students can…

L1 and L2 writers attend to different aspects of the formulation subprocess of writing. L2 writers devote more time and attention to low-level aspects such as grammar correction and spelling (Barbier 1998; Fagan and Hayden 1988; Whalen and Ménard 1995), leading to better spelling performances than L1 writers (Gunnarsson-Largy 2013). In…

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to understand how creative writing practices affect the written expression skills of B2 level students. Method: In this study, a pretest-posttest control group semi-experimental model was used. While creative writing practices were implemented in the experiment group, instruction in alignment with the…

Erlam & Ellis (2018) published, in "Canadian Modern Language Review", an experimental study that investigated the effect of input-based tasks on the acquisition of vocabulary and markers of plurality by adolescent near-beginner learners of L2 (second language) French. The present paper reports an approximate replication of the…

Success in an increasingly globalized world sets requirements for versatile communication skills and understanding about other cultures. One of the keys to success is versatile language skills, on which the European Commission spoke out as early as in 1995, recommending that every European citizen should learn two foreign languages in addition to…

This study was an attempt at finding the improvement trend of the article use in Iranian learners of English regarding the implicit and explicit knowledge of the article system. In so doing, 154 participants were categorized into three levels of Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced using Oxford Placement Test. Then, each group of the participants…

Generally, people are apologizing after they make a mistake or do certain acts which offense others. But the context in which the apology needs to be said in every culture can be different. Therefore, EFL learners may fail to use appropriate apology strategy within the context since they are interfered by their L1 culture. However, the case of…

In this review article, we discuss the construct of second language (L2) comprehensibility, which refers to listeners' judgments of ease or difficulty in understanding L2 speech. We first briefly describe intelligibility and comprehensibility, two measures that capture listener understanding of L2 speech. We then present evidence that supports the…

With the emergence of different varieties of English in the world, the issue of intelligibility has attracted many researchers' attention. While a large number of studies have focused on the intelligibility of different English varieties for native speakers, few of them have involved Chinese learners of English as participants; yet, they…

This is a comparative study that examined the relationship between the Big Five personality factors and English language speaking anxiety among Moroccans (N=270) and Koreans (N=257), who completed the International Personality Item Pool Big Five Inventory and the English Language Speaking Anxiety Scale. The results indicate that Openness and…