The main purpose of the study reported in this paper was to examine the interrelationships between L2 risk-taking, English learning motivation, L2 speaking anxiety, linguistic confidence, and low-proficiency English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). A secondary purpose was to test whether task repetition can influence the level of the mentio...

This study investigated the effects of blog-mediated instruction on English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing performance and anxiety. In addition, it aimed to probe into the EFL learners’ attitudes towards blog-mediated writing instruction. The participants of the study included forty-six Iranian EFL learners from two intact university classes, who were randomly assigned to the Con...

Introduction How human brains acquire second languages (L2) is one of the fundamental questions in neuroscience and language science. However, it is unclear whether the first language (L1) has a cross-linguistic influence on the processing of L2. Methods Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activities during L2 word reading tasks of phonographic Japanese Kana bet...

The effect of motivational self-regulatory strategies on L2 learners’ achievement has scarcely been examined within the context of our country, Iran. This study is concerned with examining the relationship between motivational self-regulatory strategies and their L2 reading and L2 writing achievement. It also explores the relationship of motivational self-regulatory strategies and use of langua...

Drawing on Norton Peirce's (1995) theory of investment and Darvin and Norton's (2015) expanded the model of investment, the present study aims to research investment in second language (L2) learning among Iranian English language learners. The participants included 852 male and female English language learners belonging to different age groups and English language proficiency levels. A ...

although story mapping strategy has been shown to be beneficial in many reading comprehension classes, the benefits of this technique have not been thoroughly investigated in l2 writing research. the small number of previous studies (e.g., li, 2007; brunner, 2010) have found the potential benefits of using story mapping strategy on students’ writing performance, but they did not focus on differ...

Millions of Foreign Language (FL) learners spend many years learning English in the classroom. Most FL learners learn English in their countries with local teachers, with little or no native L2 input. The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best, 1995, 1999) and Speech Learning Model (SLM) (Flege, 1995) are the most widely used L2 models in L2 speech analysis. However, ...

This study reports the results of two behavioral and two event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments examining the processing of inflected words in advanced second language (L2) learners with Russian as their native language (L1) who learnt German as an L2 after childhood. Two different subsystems of German inflection were studied, participial inflection and noun plurals. For participial fo...

Based on the Competition Model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1978; MacWhinney, 2005; MacWhinney, 2012), the present study investigates L2 cue strategies in the acquisition of Chinese notional passives by English-speaking and Japanese-speaking learners. Two experiments were conducted to examine both the comprehension and production of Chinese notional passives. The main findings included: 1) L2 learners’...