The researchers in this study aimed to demonstrate how impossible it could be for a language teacher to take fixed, systematic routes of action in recent Action Research designs.  This was instantiated in an L2 (here, English) 'essay writing' course among some Persian speaker university students majoring in Hygiene Sciences (Family and Environment). Evidences regarding individualistic progress ...

Literature is replete with the studies focusing on the role of vocabulary knowledge in second language receptive skills. However, the relationship between the aspects of vocabulary knowledge and productive skills in general, and the speaking performance in particular has remained scanty in the related literature. This paper examined the relationship between knowledge of L2 vocabulary size at di...

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the brain regions underlying language task performance in adult second language (L2) learners. Specifically, we identified brain regions where the level of activation was associated with L2 fluency levels. Thirty Japanese-speaking adults participated in the study. All participants were L2 learners of English and had achieved v...

Researchers have extensively compared different L2 learning contexts, such as EFL versus study-abroad, for their impacts on oral production; however, scant attention, if any, has been paid to comparing EFL settings in terms of input factors such as textbooks, amount of contacts in L2, and teachers. Accordingly, the effects of these factors on the oral production skills were investigated in this...

Abstract Task-based language teaching has received increased attention in second language research. However, the combination of structured input-based approach and task-based language teaching has not been examined in relation to L2 grammar learning. To address this gap, the present study investigated how the structured input-based tasks with and without explicit information impacted learners’ ...

This study investigated how English learners of Korean weigh multiple acoustic cues, namely VOT and f0, in perceiving the Korean stop laryngeal contrast. This question is of interest because VOT is more central to this contrast in English relative to Korean. Our goal was to examine whether L2 cueweighting strategies were influenced by individual differences in cue-weighting strategies in L1 and...

Although L2 writing has attracted salient attention and monopolized many studies in EFL contexts, there is still no full image of its complicated nature.  Trying to play a supplementary role in achieving that image, this study aimed at finding whether Persian and English argumentative and descriptive academic writings were inter/intra-lingually associated and if genre played a role in p...

Language is a system of verbal elements that makes communication of meaningspossible in the manners the users intend by employing certain linguistic deviceswhich are partly language-specific. Once communicating cross-linguistically, thereis always a risk of negative transfer of techniques or processes from the firstlanguage (L1) to the foreign language (L2). The current study investigates the“e...

Abstract Task-based language teaching has received increased attention in second language research. However, the combination of structured input-based approach and task-based language teaching has not been examined in relation to L2 grammar learning. To address this gap, the present study investigated how the structured input-based tasks with and without explicit information impacted learners’ ...