Journal of Language Horizons
Volume:7 Issue: 1, Spring 2023

The current study strived to delve into the response behavior and perceptions of examinees while taking a test in light of cognitive load theory. The empirical data were collected from 60 MA English major graduates and students, with a high level of language proficiency. The participants were required to answer 60 multiple-choice language items (i.e., grammar and vocabulary questions), taken from the high-stakes tests of the MA English majors of the Iranian university entrance examination (IUEE), as fast and as accurately as possible. After completing each test item, they rated their perceptions with regard to the difficulty of test items (Bratfisch et al., 1972) and the amount of mental effort (Paas, 1992). Their response time spent on each language item and their selected options were also stored by the Psychopy software (Peirce et al., 2019). Through running Pearson and Spearman rho correlations, the findings revealed that response time enjoyed a strong positive correlation with mental effort, meaning that both objective and subjective cognitive load measures matched in terms of sensitivity to cognitive load changes in language test items. Further, the subjective measures of perceived mental effort and perceived level of difficulty revealed to be the sound indicators of cognitive load changes. As predicted, response time also indicated that more difficult language test items imposed a greater amount of load. The implications of the study will be explained.

The emerging technologies and their applications in education necessitate attempts to establish and test theories that can affect the optimal benefit of student learning and teacher training. Self-regulated learning theory is one of the most influential theories that recognize the interconnections of different factors for optimal learning as an ongoing process. Therefore, this study attempted to probe the efficiency of self-regulated learning to develop learners’ reading comprehension and willingness to admit wrongness in an online learning context in addition to the face-to-face learning environment. To address this issue, a quasi-experimental design was utilized. The experimental groups were instructed to be self-regulated through receiving self-regulated learning strategies, while the control group received no self-regulated instructions. The statistical analysis of the paired sample t-test indicated that just the experimental groups exhibited significant improvement in being empowered with higher levels of reading comprehension and willingness to admit wrongness. Additionally, as the ANCOVA analysis showed, the online group had a better performance compared with the control and face-to-face group regarding reading comprehension skills. The findings tend to direct the attention of researchers, teachers, and course designers toward the importance of using self-regulation models as a possible way to move away from traditional teaching.

With the growing access to new types of reference tools, today’s L2 writers have a plethora of choices when completing an academic writing assignment. Such resources are absent in most high-stakes academic writing exams, making the two situations dissimilar. Aimed to compare the performances of ESL writers in Exam and Non-exam (real-life) academic writing situations, the present study recruited seven ESL university students who had previously taken an IELTS test. The students completed two analogous writing tasks: an exam-setting and a Non-exam writing test which aimed to simulate the real-life setting. Coh-Metrix analysis of the linguistic features of syntactic complexity, lexical sophistication, and text cohesion of the writings suggested that the students improved the textual quality of their writings in real-life academic writing situation. In addition, FACETS analysis of the quality of the writings, as assessed by the human raters, showed that the students did not benefit equally from the merits of the real-life settings compared to the Exam settings. The findings suggest that the students spent different amounts of time and used different types of queries to consult with external resources. Students’ background training and writing strategies can highly affect their performance in real-life academic writing compared to the writing exams, warning against the validity of such tests.

In order to follow the contours of Wordsworth’s ideological development and the role played by the sublime in the growth of his mind, one is well-advised to follow the temporal and narrative progression of The Prelude (1799). Through a Žižekian analysis of Wordsworth's magnum opus, this study argues that the sublime can be approached from two different points. First, it can be conceived as the symbolic intrusion into the imaginary world of the subject, rifting the sense of unity and perfection, and relocating the object of desire from the imaginary to the symbolic order. Next, it can be perceived as the intrusion of the real into the symbolic order, as the lack at the heart of the Other, making a perfect correspondence of the signifying elements and the ultimate achievement of the object of desire impossible. What links these two different significations of the sublime together is the crucial realization that, in both cases, the sublime holds the place of illusory and non-existent states.

The present study investigated the possible effects of proactive form-focused instruction on Iranian EFL learners’ explicit and implicit grammar knowledge improvement in a flipped and a traditional class and also examined the effect of flipped class on explicit and implicit knowledge retention. Two classes were randomly assigned to an experimental (n = 31) and a control (n = 28) group.  The former received proactive form-focused instruction through metalinguistic explanation in a flipped class, whereas the latter attended a traditional grammar class. Two implicit and two explicit knowledge tests were used to evaluate the learners’ explicit and implicit grammar knowledge development and retention. A set of pretests and two sets of posttests were administered immediately and four weeks after the last treatment session. Two mixed 3x2 multifactorial ANOVAs and post hoc tests were run to spot the differences in the measures between and within the groups. The results showed that both classes improved significantly in terms of learners’ implicit and explicit grammar knowledge. Furthermore, the experimental group showed a higher rate of knowledge retention. The findings can help and ensure language program designers, educational policymakers, and language teachers to capitalize on flipped courses to teach grammar effectively and help language learners retain both explicit and implicit grammar knowledge longer.

Academic self-regulation is a process in which learners use cognitive, affective, behavioral, and motivational feedback to adjust or modify their behaviors and strategies to reach their objectives. Similarly, self-regulated learning (SLR) is the process of defining objectives, planning strategically, choosing and utilizing strategies, monitoring one’s efficiency, and self-evaluating oneself. Accordingly, this research explored the influence of self-regulation teaching based on Think Before, While, and After reading (TWA) strategy with self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) on intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ self-regulation of their EFL reading of expository texts. SRSD for TWA strategy was implemented in the EFL reading sessions of the intact experimental group, but the intact control group was given routine EFL reading instruction, i.e., to read the texts and answer its comprehension questions. The self-regulation data was collected utilizing the adjusted Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire Parametric (MSLQ) before and after the instruction. Through one-way analysis of the covariance, it was shown that self-regulation instruction based on TWA with SRSD could foster self-regulatory reading skills of EFL learners. These findings can urge teachers to teach EFL readers SRSD for TWA to improve their ability to self-regulate their EFL reading process.

Different factors such as the writing genre, writing prompt, and/or test length can influence the raters’ mental processes while scoring writing tests. Accordingly, whether an increase or a decrease in test length has any impact on how raters evaluate test-takers’ writing performance was the motive underlying this research. For this purpose, 12 EFL students who scored between 5.5 to 7.5 on the writing section of a mock IELTS test were selected based on availability sampling. The participants wrote three argumentative essays (the original, longer, and shorter versions). The three versions from each test-taker were then scored by three raters using IELTS task 2 writing band descriptors. Meanwhile, the raters provided verbal protocols explaining in detail the reasons underlying their scores to each test-taker’s essay. Then, the verbal protocols were transcribed and content analyzed using Nvivo version 11 to extract the themes mentioned by the raters in scoring each writing test. The results showed that the raters paid more attention to certain factors in the band descriptors and ignored some other factors. However, there was a similar pattern among the raters in scoring the three writing tests. The results did not show any significant differences in the raters’ mental processes while scoring each of the three writing tests. The conclusion was that test length is not a determining factor influencing the mental processes of raters in writing tests. Therefore, raters and test developers do not need to worry about test length influencing the raters’ scoring.