In industrialized societies, adults exhibit stable preferences for the types of people, animals, and entities they feel moral concern for (Crimston et al., 2016). Only one published study to date has utilized the moral circles paradigm to examine these preferences in children, finding that as children age, their preferences shift to become more…

English-speaking children use plural morphology from around the age of 2, yet often omit the syllabic plural allomorph /-[schwa]z/ until age 5 (e.g., "bus(es)"). It is not clear if this protracted acquisition is due to articulatory difficulties, low input frequency, or fricative-final words (e.g., "bus," "nose") being…

Because English is widely used as a lingua franca, language testers have started to consider the introduction of non-native accents into English listening tests. This study investigates how accents influence test-takers' performance, and also elicits test-takers' subjective perception of accents. Eighty adolescent L1-Mandarin test takers were…

Australian higher education institutions have struggled to develop clear strategies for developing and assessing graduate attributes within their specific disciplinary contexts. Using the example of the graduate attribute of social responsibility, this paper explores the outcomes of using assessment tasks to raise the awareness of development of…

The results of the study reported in this article found that primary-aged students used context knowledge in three broad ways: (1) to rationalise the data or their interpretations; (2) in taking a critical stance toward the data; and (3) in ways that were not necessarily productive or pertinent in addressing the task at hand. When teaching…

In this article we report on a study undertaken with ESL children between 7 and 8 years old. They carried out communicative tasks in pairs in second language classrooms. We examined patterns of their task-based conversational interactions while we manipulated their familiarity with the procedure and content of the tasks. We found that learners…