Drawing on recent developments in linguistic description and applied linguistics, it can be concluded that learning a language necessitates getting to know something and being able to do something with that knowledge: competence, and performance. Structural approach to language description attaches importance to the former; communicative approach to the latter. Appropriate classroom discours...

Since the late 70s, investigations into the language learning strategies used by successful learners in the field of second and foreign language learning attracted attention with the studies of Rubin (1975), Stern (1975), and Naiman et al. (1978), which aimed to figure out what good language learning strategies might be and to share those strategies with unsuccessful language learners. Previous...

This paper presents the results of a comparative investigation into the learning styles and strategies of effective and ineffective language learners. Subjects for the study were one hundred and ten undergraduate university students in Hong Kong. They were categorized as ‘more effective’ or ‘less effective’ learners, on the basis of their scores on a standardized public English examination admi...

The Use of Educational Humor in the Process of Learning and Teaching: A Special Facilitator for Second Language Learners A. Zeyaa'ee Mehr, Ph.D. Research on educational humor during the past two decades demonstrates both the role and the impact of humor on the processes of learning and teaching, especially in the area of second/foreign language learning. There are a number of theories...

This study focuses on exploring poor and good learners’ language beliefs and their language strategy use in an attempt to see whether there is any significant relationship between the poor and good learners. This paper particularly seeks to examine to what extent language beliefs as a construct are reflected in learners’ language behavior, which consequently may provide some pedagogical implica...

Artificial language learning experiments provide a unique opportunity to observe learning under controlled conditions. We cannot, however, observe what learning strategy participants use; we can only carefully design the language and observe the response. This poses an inference problem that I name "the poverty of the experiment." I use computational learning models to address this inference pr...