Vocabulary Repetition Following Multisensory Instruction Is Ineffective on L2 Sentence Comprehension: Evidence From the N400.

Putting the principles of multisensory teaching into practice, this study investigated the effect of audio-visual vocabulary repetition on L2 sentence comprehension. Forty participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. A sensory-based model of instruction (i.e., emotioncy) was used to teach a list of unfamiliar vocabularies to the two groups. Following the instruction, the experimental group repeated the instructed words twice, while the control group received no vocabulary repetition. Afterward, their electrophysiological neural activities were recorded through electroencephalography while doing a sentence acceptability judgment task with 216 sentences under acceptable (correct) and unacceptable (pragmatically violated) conditions. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and a Bayesian repeated-measures ANOVA were used to compare the behavioral and neurocognitive responses [N400 as the main language-related event-related brain potential (ERP) effect] of the two groups. The results showed no significant N400 amplitude difference in favor of any of the groups. The findings corroborated the ineffectiveness of two repetitions preceded by multisensory instruction on L2 sentence comprehension.

Examining the Role of Teachers' Stroking Behaviors in EFL Learners' Active/Passive Motivation and Teacher Success.

Due to the important role that teachers' professional success plays in the effectiveness of their students and the education system in which they are involved, the present study investigated whether teacher stroke can predict teacher success through the mediation of students' active and passive motivation. For this aim, a group of 437 Iranian university English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students were targeted to respond to the teacher success, teacher stroke, and student motivation questionnaires. The main results of the study, obtained through running correlation and structural equation modeling (SEM), were first, while positive stroke showed a positive correlation with teacher success, it did not directly predict success; yet mediated by active motivation, it was a positive predictor of success; second, while teacher success had no significant relationship with total motivation, it was positively correlated with active and passive motivation, separately; third, in terms of gender differences, for the female participants, stroke, mediated by active motivation, was a better predictor of teacher success; fourth, high scores in positive, verbal, and conditional stroke were in association with high scores in active motivation, which significantly predicted teacher success. Based on the results, it can be concluded that teacher stroke, as an instance of positive teacher interpersonal communication behaviors, increases students' active motivation for foreign language learning, which in turn results in their higher perceptions of English teachers' professional success.