The article analyzes the research literature regarding the role of imagination and languages in creating real and imagined communities of practice for non-native speakers of English. Throughout our lifespan we inadvertently become members of numerous imagined and real communities; while some of them are crucial in our identity formation and life goals, others may be just fragmented and insignif...

Previous research has found that listeners understand talkers who speak with the same accent as themselves better than others. The aim of the current study was to investigate how speech intelligibility is modulated by this talker-listener accent interaction when native and non-native listeners hear spontaneous speech. To this end, native Southern British English listeners and native Korean list...

Relatively little is known about differences in English-administered, clinical neuropsychological test performance between native versus non-native English speakers, with prior literature yielding mixed findings. The purpose of this study was to examine the performance of native and non-native English speakers with similar age and educational backgrounds on a variety of cognitive tests. Partici...

pragmatic assessment and consistency in rating are among the subject matters which are still in need of more profound investigations. the importance of the issue is highlighted when remembering that inconsistency in ratings would surely damage the test fairness issue in assessment and lead to much diversity in ratings. our principal concern in this study was observing the criteria that american...

Abstract: Over the last few decades, several aspects of pragmatic knowledge and its effects on teaching  and  learning  a  second  language  (L2)  have  been  explored  in  many  studies.  However, among  various  studies,  the  area  of  interlanguage  pragmatic  (ILP)  assessment  is  quite  novel issue and many features of it have remained unnoticed. As ILP assessment has received more atten...

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...

The development of English language learners (ELLs) was explored from kindergarten through eighth grade within a nationally representative sample of first-time kindergartners (N = 19,890). Growth curve analyses indicated that, compared to native English speakers, ELLs were rated by teachers more favorably on approaches to learning, self control, and externalizing behaviors in kindergarten and g...

This study investigated whether Iranian EFL learners are aware of different varieties of English spoken throughout the world and whether they have tendency towards a particular variety of English. Likewise, it explored the attitudes of Iranian EFL learners towards the native and non-native varieties of English. Moreover, it made an attempt to investigate whether such attitudes are gender-orient...