The magazine for English language teaching and English medium education
New research has revealed fascinating insights into the interplay between the different types of anxiety individuals can experience and their effect on oral test results, Federica Tedeschi reports.
The researcher, Danny Huang, was surprised to find that both male and female EFL learners experienced similar levels of anxiety and this resulted in the same negative impact on their test scores.
Research on university students shows how L2 learners use features of their first language to help with remembering events, Federica Tedeschi writes.
Late bilinguals use features of their first language to help them remember while writing or speaking in their L2, a study of 95 university students suggests.
Research showing the majority of EFL students plan to use their English alongside other languages in the future could have implications for teaching.
The majority of adult EFL students believe they will use English in close conjunction with other languages in their future lives and careers, a study conducted in the United Kingdom has found.
The best predictor of Iranian EFL learners’ willingness to speak (WTS) in class is whether they suffer from language learning anxiety, research finds.
Teachers go native
The most common teachers’ technique for repairing a breakdown in communication with students is to switch back to the class’s native language, a small study in Vietnam has suggested.
The speed at which English-speaking bilingual toddlers learn vocabulary in their other language is determined by its linguistic distance from English, researchers have shown for the first time.
‘Findings show that children’s production of additional language words was improved when this language was phonologically close to English – such as Dutch, Welsh, German – as compared to more distant languages – such as Cantonese, Polish and Greek,’ their study concludes.
But performance dropped substantially under new testing regime, researchers say.
Young Hispanic English students took an average 3.6 years to reach English proficiency, an extensive longitudinal study of Texan pupils in Grades 1 to 8 has found.
The report, covering more than 71,000 students, confirms the findings of smaller studies, but it also highlights the differences in the speed of progress of separate subgroups of Hispanic pupils.
