How to identify whether students are satisfied with clickers-aided EFL class might be largely a mystery for most researchers since satisfaction is deeply hidden in human psychology which is subtle and intangible. This study, by using bivariate correlation analysis and structural equation modeling, survey scales claimed both valid and internally consistent, and data collected from randomly selec...

BACKGROUND Expiratory flow limitation (EFL), determined by the negative expiratory pressure (NEP) technique, can exhibit overlapping patterns in COPD, obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and non-OSA obesity. We assessed the ability of a quantitative method to assess EFL to discriminate COPD from obese and OSA patients during NEP (-2 to -3 cm H(2)O) testing. METHODS EFL was quantified by measuring t...

By means of the metaphoric language used by parents and young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners to describe the English learning process, this study aims to reveal the perceptions of 109 young EFL learners in the 8th grade of secondary school and 66 parents in Turkey about learning English. To elicit these participants’ metaphors, they were asked to complete the gaps in the sentence ...

Educators must reassess overall western teaching approaches in English teaching students in different language and cultural backgrounds. Although a westernized communicative teaching approach is ideal to implement language teaching, some Asian students are conservative to adopt or adapt it in their own English language learning. Accordingly, an adapted English teaching approach may be innovated...

This study explores 19 Taiwanese students’ writing in weekly online forum posts and traditional essays. Results drawn from discourse analysis of students’ writing in both types of writing tasks showed that the semesterlong online writing accompanied by explicit instruction on essays and basic academic writing conventions appeared to help raise EFL students’ consciousness of register in the two ...

in teaching a foreign language (fl), some cultural specificities (defined under the rubric of ‘little-c culture’) may totally conflict with the cultural norms of the learners’ first language (l1). to prevent such imminent problems, this paper recommended that the fl syllabus be designed in a way so as to equip learners with an intimate knowledge of the target language culture, and that language...

Foreign language (FL) knowledge has been shown to contribute significantly to FL reading performance. Studies have contrasted the contribution of FL vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, following a dichotomous view of these components, producing mixed results. Despite the increasingly recognized formulaic nature of language, the contribution made by phraseological knowledge to reading ability ha...