The current study aims to investigate the discursive construction and navigation of agency in oral narratives of English learning by Chinese college English majors. Based on the theoretical framework integrating Bamberg et. al.'s theory of identity dilemma and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, the study has addressed two research…

Lack of knowledge in the conventional use of vocabulary and multiword patterns in one's respective field of expertise causes Taiwanese students to produce academic writing that is markedly "non-nativelike." This is because Taiwanese students are first and foremost second language readers and often have difficulty "picking up…

This year's conference theme, "Be Seen, Be Heard," reflected not only our goal of celebrating our achievements but also represented our intent of making sure everyone's voices are heard, especially during 2017's difficult political climate. The conference opened with a motivating address from Dean Laura E. Lyons, followed by an…

Second language (L2) classroom research has sought to shed light on the processes and practices that develop L2 learners' abilities [Nunan, D. 2004. "Task-based language teaching." London: Continuum; Verplaetse, L. 2014. "Using big questions to apprentice students into language-rich classroom practices." "TESOL…

Culture-loaded words and expressions are loaded with specific national cultural information and indicate deep national culture. They are the direct and indirect reflection of national culture in the structure of words and expressions. The improper use of culture-loaded words often leads to misunderstanding in cross-cultural communication. However,…

This study investigated English teachers' use of learners' L1 (Arabic) in college classrooms in Kuwait. The purpose of the study was three-fold: (1) to describe the functions for which L1 was employed by the teachers, (2) to explore the affective, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic factors that may have led teachers to use L1 in L2 teaching,…

This qualitative study investigates discourse-level patterns typically employed by a Turkish lecturer based on the syntactic patterns found in the collected data. More specifically, the study aims to reveal how different native and non-native speakers of English perceive discourse patterns used by a non-native lecturer teaching in English. The…

The growth of English into a lingua franca has inevitably created linguistic deviations and innovations in the use of English. These emerging uses that result from the needs and preferences of speakers whose mother tongues are all different can be broadly identified as lexico-grammatical and pronunciation features and they compose one of the main…

The present paper examines the oral performance of Hindi language learners during practice Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI) conducted during workshops hosted by New York University and sponsored by STARTALK. The most salient characteristics of the heritage language learners' output are compared with the output of foreign language learners who are…

This study reports a small-scale experiment that was set up to estimate the extent to which (i) the use of formulaic sequences (standardized phrases such as collocations and idiomatic expressions) can help learners come across as proficient L2 speakers and (ii) an instructional method that emphasizes "noticing" of L2 formulaic sequences can help…