My first encounter with English for specific purposes (ESP) teaching was in the late 1980s. I was asked to lead a small team of teachers in designing a new English course for university students of art and design. We had just a few weeks to devise a teaching plan and materials. ESP was famously described at that time as 'essentially a materials…

East (2014) presented a largely qualitative study that uncovered how beginning teachers of languages other than English developed their understandings about task-based language teaching (TBLT) as they took part in a year-long initial teacher education programme in New Zealand. This paper reports a comparative re-production. It complements a recent…

In her position article, Lee (2019) compellingly argues for focused written corrective feedback (FWCF) and offers clear guidelines for teachers to shift their feedback approach. As English language teaching practitioners in Chinese universities, we share Lee's view against any unthinking adherence to comprehensive written corrective feedback…

This article reviews a purposive sample of 16 doctoral dissertations in second language (L2) education, completed between 2014 and 2018 and published in German, in Germany. Among the 103 relevant dissertations found from this period, a total of 12 thematic strands were identified, of which five were chosen as being particularly common and thus…

This article presents research on teaching English in Israel, a vibrant multilingual country, in the period between 2014 and 2020. After a brief introduction to the current approach to English language teaching around the world, it outlines the studies investigating: (a) learners of English, (b) English teachers, and (c) methods that are used in…

This paper examines the emergent identities of three STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) lecturers, focusing especially on how they construct themselves with regard to their disciplines and how researchers construct them as potential English language teachers. It begins with essential background information before discussing…

Practitioner research is a fourishing area with a signifcant body of theoretical and empirical research, but often researchers remain isolated, unaware of impactful work by colleagues in related felds. Exploratory Practice (EP) is one innovative form, uniting creative pedagogy and research methods. The potential contributions have hitherto been…

This article reviews a selected sample of 70 empirical studies in journal articles and doctoral dissertations on language assessment in China between 2011 and 2018. Following a brief introduction to the history and current state of language assessment in China, the article presents a critical review of language assessment research on six themes…

The production-oriented approach (POA) has been developed over ten years to overcome the weaknesses in English instruction in tertiary education in Mainland China. The POA tries to integrate the strengths of Western instructional approaches with Chinese contextual features and consists of three components: (a) teaching principles; (b) teaching…

The Center for Language Teaching Advancement (CeLTA) at Michigan State University (MSU) was awarded a U.S. federally funded two-year grant in 2014 to investigate the status of proficiency, and the promotion of proficiency, in foreign language programs. The grant was awarded to Paula Winke and Susan Gass, as principal investigators. The purpose of…

As one of the two "educational special zones" in China, Shanghai is launching a new round of curriculum reforms centring on "lide shuren," viz. "fostering integrity and promoting rounded development of people" (Hu 2012). Apart from piloting a new plan for "Gaokao," the national college entrance examination…

This article is a personal view of the application of results from three areas of research that I believe are relevant to developing second language speaking in the classroom: task repetition, pre-task planning and communication strategies. I will discuss these three areas in terms of level of research application--where research is not applied…

In this "First Person Singular" essay, the author describes her education, teaching experience, and interest in understanding the learning of language. Anyone reading this essay will not be surprised to learn that the author's questions about language learning and optimal teaching methods were only met with further questions, and no…

With the advent of globalization and the increasingly multilingual and multicultural nature of nations, institutions and classrooms, the fundamental nature of foreign language instruction is changing. Such traditional notions as: "native speaker", "target culture", "standard L2" are becoming problematic with the…

This article reviews a selective corpus of empirical and theoretical texts on foreign language pedagogy and teacher education, produced in Portugal between 2006 and 2011. A descriptive and interpretative approach is adopted to inquire into the transformative potential of research, with a focus on its scope, purposes, conceptual and methodological…