Alice Chik, City University of Hong Kong The relationship between digital game play and second language (L2) learning is a particularly tricky issue in East Asia. Though there is an emerging presence of Chinese online games, many more young people are playing the Englishor Japanese-language versions of the most popular commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) video games. In other words, most Chinese ga...

Most research on second language and culture concentrates on learning the target culture in order to better understand the second language. This survey study looks at culture from a different perspective i.e., from the learners’ own culture point of view. It focuses on the relationship that exists between attachment to one’s home culture and comprehending written texts in a foreign language. Th...

PURPOSE Two studies were conducted to investigate the effects of classroom noise on attention and speech perception in native Spanish-speaking second graders learning English as their second language (L2) as compared to English-only-speaking (EO) peers. METHOD Study 1 measured children's on-task behavior during instructional activities with and without soundfield amplification. Study 2 measur...

Introduction From Guesswork to Inquiry: A Rationale “Why am I learning this language? How is my language learning affected by my attitudes and my context?” For the average second language (L2) learner, these questions are probably not often considered in such an explicit fashion. For L2 educators and L2 motivation researchers, however, these student-centered questions are urgent and ever-presen...

This study explores the impact of professional learning about Common European Framework Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR) on second language (L2) teachers’ classroom practice. Ninety self-selected French as a (FSL) teachers across Canada responded to an online survey their planning, teaching, and assessment/evaluation practices before versus after learning. The resu...

The individualism-collectivism syndrome has considerable impact on many aspects of a society. Basedon theoretical frameworks, classroom observations, and teaching and learning experiences in ESL/EFLclassrooms, this study investigates the cultural orientations in L2 settings where classroom interactionand discourse, the goal of education, and the roles that teachers and students play...

Language learning is one of the most rapidly changing disciplines. Along with changing perspectives in learning in the field of Second Language Acquisition, information communication technology (ICT) has also created many learning paths to assist the process of learning a second language (L2). In such an ever-evolving environment, teachers, researchers, and professionals in a diverse number of ...

For a variety of theoretical and practical reasons, dictation is a promising general procedure for promoting both conscious learning and subconscious acquisition of L2 grammatical structures. Although traditional dictation tends to be rather boring, the method allows a number of interesting and motivating variant techniques. This article describes four such variants, useful and effective dictat...

The current pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study attempts, firstly, to probe the effects of teaching formulaic sequences (FSs) on the second or foreign language (L2)  learners' oral proficiency improvement and secondly, to examine whether teaching FSs through different resources (i.e. animation vs. text-based readings) have any differentially influential effects in augmenting L2  l...