This study assessed the relationship between exposure to classmates with visible impairments in primary and secondary schools with later attitudes toward people with disabilities. Fifty college students (mean age = 20.28 years; 76% female) completed measures assessing the extent and quality of recalled exposure to classmates with disabilities in…

Anxiety and L2 self-confidence have been suggested as vital determinants of willingness to communicate (WTC) in a foreign-language (FL) learning environment. Studies also demonstrate that it is a concern over pronunciation mistakes that is particularly likely to cause embarrassment and apprehension in FL students. Linking these two facts may lead…

This study compares learners' writing in an impromptu, timed writing (ITW) exam and in a process-based, timed writing (PBTW) exam to investigate the differences between these two types of assessments. A secondary objective of this study is to examine the test takers' attitudes towards the two exams. Forty participants taking ESL writing classes…

Face-to-face computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) was used extensively to facilitate learning in classrooms. Cloud services not only allow a single user to edit a document, but they also enable multiple users to simultaneously edit a shared document. However, few researchers have compared student acceptance of such services in…

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g. "The child ate the candies" following after "The child…

The purpose of this study was to examine college students' perspectives on dating a person who stutters (PWS). One hundred and thirty-two college students responded to a 19-item survey questionnaire. Survey items included questions about participants' familiarity with persons who stutter, family and/or personal history of stuttering, knowledge of…

Previous research has shown that high frequency lexical items, such as AWL words and formulaic expressions, may differentiate between texts written by expert and novice writers (Chen & Baker, 2010; Hancioglu, 2009), and that lexical features related to breadth, depth, and accessibility differentiate among texts from L2 writers of different…

Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide new opportunities for mentoring, eliminating the need for a synchronous meeting. We report the findings of a survey that measured university student perceptions of the roles and expectations of online mentors and the likelihood of using an online mentor if given the opportunity.…

We explored the notion of what constitutes literacy, particularly as it pertains to individuals who are blind or with visual impairments, including those that do not use Braille as their primary way to access and produce text. Four groups of stakeholders participated in the study: a) college students who were blind or with visual impairments, b)…

The rapid development of the Internet along with increasing computer literacy has made it easy and tempting for digital natives to copy-paste someone's work. Plagiarism is now a burning issue in education, industry and even in the research community. In this study, the authors concentrate on plagiarism detection with particular focus on the…

Novelty is inherent to creative processes. A positive effect of novelty on creative task performance was therefore predicted. However, creativity can benefit from divergent, as well as convergent thinking. Subsequently, novelty may benefit creative performance when divergent thinking is required, but it could inhibit creative performance when…

Research examining the importance of surface-level information to familiarity in recognition memory tasks is mixed: Sometimes it affects recognition and sometimes it does not. One potential explanation of the inconsistent findings comes from the ideas of dual process theory of recognition and the transfer-appropriate processing framework, which…

Individuals' feelings, beliefs and attitudes toward people with disabilities have an influence on their willingness to engage in the social relationship with people with disabilities such as forming friendship at the workplace or romantic relationship with people with disabilities. This study explored the attitudes of students toward people with…

The study aims to discover whether audio or video modality in a listening test is more beneficial to test takers. In this study, the posttest-only control group design was utilized and quantitative data were collected in order to measure participant performances concerning two types of modality (audio or video) in a listening test. The…

Teacher's conceptions are important as they could have a strong influence on their professional practices. This study set out to explore Fijian teacher's conceptions of assessment. Seventy teachers enrolled in an assessment course at a university in Fiji were involved in this study. Data was collected by asking teachers to write a reflection on…