Out-of-School Exposure to English in EFL Teenage Learners: Is It Related to Academic Performance?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I found the manuscript to be interesting and extremely well written and thought out.  The ideas mostly flowed in a logical manner.  The lit review was well developed and complete.  The methodology was clearly explained, and the findings effectively discussed.  For the conclusion, I was expecting to see something about how the findings of the study could be connected to the classroom.  

Author Response

Reviewer 1

1. The link to the questionnaire does not work.

https://ubgral.wordpress.com/gral-materials/

We apologize for the inconvenience caused. The research group website, which housed all materials, experienced technical diGiculties when Weebly transitioned to Square, necessitating a swift migration to WordPress. We inadvertently provided the old link instead of the updated one. We have rectified this error by replacing the

old link with the new one in the article (p. 16):

On this website you will find the Spanish version of the questionnaire. We have included the English version at the end of this document (p. 3 onwards). We intend to upload the English PDF onto our website as soon as possible, positioning it directly beneath the Spanish version. We apologize for the delay in this process: currently, our administrative secretary, responsible for website management and passwords, is traveling abroad. We have submitted the request to her, and she may address it at any time. However, due to the limited timeframe for revisions, she might not have had the opportunity to see our emails requesting the upload of this secondary questionnaire. We anticipate having the English version of this questionnaire available on our website very soon. By doing so, readers will be able to access both the Spanish and English versions once the article is published. Thank

you for your understanding.

2. The graphics are hard to read, with white font on light greyscale. This should be revised for ease of reading and to enhance readers’ attention to the data.

We have now used diGerent shades of blue, combined with black font, and we think they are much better in this version, many thanks for the comment.

For readability,

we have not included percentage values on the bars for extremely low figures (below

2%), preventing graph numbers from overlapping. For instance, see Figure 1 on page

9, which shows “Talking FTF in English with friends”:

56.53%: never
17.19%: less than once / month 10:43%: between 1-3 times / month 10.83%: between 1-3 times / week 3.28%: between 4-6 times / week

As illustrated, there is a small segment of the sample represented in darker blue at the end of the chart bar who engage in the activity daily. However, we have omitted the '1.74%' label from the bar to avoid overlap with the adjacent '3.28%' figure, which would have rendered both numbers illegible. Decreasing the font size was also not a viable option.

We think that this solution ensures clarity for readers in gauging the frequency of each activity without cluttering the graph with percentages that are nearly negligible.

3. An important recent paper of relevance (Laufer & Vaisman, 2023) is missing.

It has been included now, thank you very much for the suggestion. It is mentioned in the literature review (p. 2) and in the conclusion section (p. 15). It is reference [13].

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Manuscript: Out-of-school exposure to English in EFL teenage learners: is it related to academic performance?

Review

It offers a comprehensive literature review that covers important and relevant studies in a clear and pertinent manner. The article is well written and informative, with interesting results.

 A large sample is used which increases the reliability of the findings. Methods such as PCA and instrumentation appear rigorous. I could not get the link to the questionaries to work so could not conduct due diligence on that, however.

I find the graphics quite hard to read, with white font on light greyscale. This should be revised for ease of reading and to enhance readers attention to the data.

Also, at least one important recent paper of relevance was missing:

Laufer, B., & Vaisman, E. E. (2023). Out‐of‐classroom L2 vocabulary acquisition: The effects of digital activities and school vocabulary. The Modern Language Journal, 107(4), 854-872.

Author Response

Reviewer 2

1. It was expected to see something about how the findings of the study could be connected to the classroom.

We have added three paragraphs (p. 15) reflecting on how the findings could be related to classroom practices (in yellow in the article). Thank you.

Please note that, for this reason, three new references have also been introduced:

41.Nation, P. Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

42. Hu, M.; Nation, P. Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language 2000, 13 (1), 403–430.

43. Suter, L.; Berthele, R.; Thomas, A. L’apprentissage du vocabulaire en français L2 avec Netflix: effet des activités de pré-/post- visionnage. Journal of French Language Studies 2024, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269523000273.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I would like to thank the author for an impressive study. There are not that many large-scale studies in this field of research. In addition, there are not many studies from this part of Europe, so this is a welcome contribution. It is a bit unfortunate that “only” grades were used to measure proficiency, but the author admits this limitation openly.

Overall, this is an excellent study and I look forward to seeing it published after a minor revision.

Below, please find some feedback (section by section) that I hope the author will find helpful.

Introduction

Add some references in the introduction to back up the claims that are made.

Section 2

The two sections of theoretical background/previous research is a good summary of the research that has been carried out, and the findings are reported in a nuanced way. Only very minor changes will be necessary. For example, state that Warnby’s study was also set in Sweden, as this is not clear in the current version of the text.

Section 3

The research questions are relevant and well formulated.

Section 4

The author should be commended for collecting data from an impressive number of participants and, in addition, in a geographical location that needs more research.

Please add the approximate age(s) of the participants and not only which grade in school they attend; not all school systems are alike and students’ ages differ depending on regions/countries.

What does ESO mean? Please explain the acronym. If it is in Spanish, then also please add a translation into English.

It would be interesting to know how many participants chose to answer the questionnaire in Spanish and English, respectively. Please add the corresponding numbers (at least the percentages).

It is noted that Reading was divided into two variables depending on the medium, so there is “Reading books” and then there is “Reading materials online”, where “reading eBooks” is one example that is listed. What was the reason for splitting up reading books into reading physical books and reading eBooks in the questionnaire? It would be interesting to hear the author’s rationale for doing so.

The data analysis is clearly presented and appropriate statistical methods were employed in the study.

Section 5

All results are clearly presented in figures and tables. The findings are interesting, especially that there is no positive correlation for gaming. 

APA7 recommends reporting exact p-values, so Table 3 should be revised in accordance with APA7.

Section 6

Comparing the results of this study with Kuppens (2010) may be a bit misleading, since the participants in Kuppens’ study were younger than the participants in the present study (page 13). Hedge a little bit more!

Regarding gaming: It has been shown in previous studies that gaming appears to relate to English proficiency in some settings but not in others, and the author’s discussion on why this might be the case is insightful and an important contribution to the field.

The author suggests future research examining the cause-effect relationship. Please add a suggested research design for such a study.

It is very good that the author highlights the need for output at the very end!

The link to the questionnaire did not work when I tried it, so please check.

Detailed comment: Replace the ampersand (&) with the word “and” for in-text citations that are not in brackets.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf