BACKGROUND The impact factor (IF) is a common citation metric used for evaluating and comparing scientific journals within a certain field. Previous studies have shown that IFs are increasing. However, rates may depend on journal publication language. The aim of this study was to determine IF values and trends for general medical journals, comparing non-English-language with English-language jo...

Locus of control is said to affect learners' academic achievement. This effect has scarcely been examined within general English context. This study is concerned with examining the differences in General English (GE) course achievement among university students of humanities, sciences, and engineering. It also explores the effect of locus of control (LOC) in GE course achievement among these th...

Sociolinguistic research suggests that US Hispanic and Spanish consumers may differ in their response to ads with English and Spanish. An experiment with US Hispanic (N = 97) and Spanish (N = 132) participants showed that, although US Hispanic participants indicated that they used more English and less Spanish in various situations, and had a less positive general attitude to English than did S...

We report here trends in the usage of "mood" words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive and negative moods, underlain by a general decrease in the use of emotion-...

The present study concentrated on the relationship between self-concept and language learning strategies. Participants of the study were 157 students from one University in Shandong, China. Quantitative data was collected through two questionnaires. The first one was the revised Chinese version of self-concept scale modified by Pan (2003) from Marsh’s (1992) SQDII. Another inventory based on Ox...

Background & Aims:  Recently, the role of English has shifted from the more general perspective of every day usage to a narrower situation and task specific perspective. Many experts in the field argue that Learners need English for a particular task or a field of study and successful courses are those that concentrate on one particular area in teaching English.  Accordingly, the pr...

In higher education in Taiwan, mandatory general English courses like Freshman adopt ability-grouping practices to assign students classes of different proficiency levels. However, little research has explored the efficacy criteria and standardized language-proficiency description for Thus, this study recruited 806 Taiwanese undergraduates from advanced, intermediate, basic levels take Oxford O...

Developing appropriate resources for a language learning programme, including those English as general course, is pivotal in order the students’ to be successful. Prior development, needs should assessed so that materials developer obtains comprehensive view of what students need. This study aims investigate develop course non-English Department students. The research was conducted at Universit...