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 la...

The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between the perceived social self-efficacy of the students of English and their foreign language classroom anxiety. The required data were gathered through the application of the original versions of two standard questionnaires: Smith and Betz’s (2000) 25-item Scale of Perceived Social Self-Efficacy (SPSSE) and Horwitz, Horwitz and...

Audiovisual material accompanied by interlingual subtitles is a powerful pedagogical tool which can help improve the vocabulary learning of second-language learners. This study was intended to determine whether or not the mode (standard and reversed) of subtitling affects the incidental vocabulary acquisition of Iranian L2 learners while watching TV programs. Forty-five participants were random...

Willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second language (L2) is believed to have a direct and sustained influence on learners’ actual usage frequency of the targeted language. To help overcome the lack of suitable environments to increase L2 learners’ WTC, our approach is to implement a WTC model based conversational agent. In this paper, we focus on the dialogue management aspects of our approac...

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 ...

the present study is an attempt to explore any significant relationships between learners’ preferences for error correction, demotivation, and language proficiency (lp). one hundred iranian efl students, including both males and females, studying at the departments of foreign languages of shahid bahonar university of kerman and tehran university took part in this study. in order to obtain the r...

It is widely believed that adults cannot learn a foreign language in the same way that children learn a first language. However, recent evidence suggests that adult learners of a foreign language can come to rely on native-like language brain mechanisms. Here, we show that the type of language training crucially impacts this outcome. We used an artificial language paradigm to examine longitudin...

the present investigation was designed to study the production and comprehension of specific means for information highlighted by advanced iranian learners of english as a foreign language. the study focused on the discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, pre-posing, it- and wh-clefts. after taking the nelson test, a homogeneous group was settled. ...

This study reports on an experiment in which a group of 14 American learners of Spanish as a foreign language performed two monologic production tasks with and without time for planning. Several hypotheses were tested concerning language complexity, grammatical accuracy, lexical complexity, and degree of fluency. As predicted, it was found that learners produced more complex, but not more accur...