This article is structured around four questions related to the arts, language and intercultural education. Are the claims for the value of the arts over-stated? Does the use of the arts in the service of non-art outcomes run the risk of distorting the art form itself? Is there a danger that incorporating the arts in language education will…

Offered as a conceptual and programmatic piece, this article suggests that, due to its explicit educational orientation, the domain of instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) is challenged to align theoretical choices, research preferences, and educational practices in the interest of improving instructed L2 learning. It addresses the…

English language teaching takes place in a variety of different contexts around the globe, contexts that are affected by the megatrends of global competition, population mobility, and technological interconnectedness. These trends have resulted in increased demand for English as a tool for advancement individually and nationally. However, because…

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is a recent teaching approach widely adopted in numerous international contexts, especially in Europe where it was promoted as a way to promote language learning within the educational system. When implemented, CLIL predominantly involves subject content teachers using English to teach their subject.…

Inspired by the recognition of teachers and teacher learning in the knowledge base and the calls for greater attention to the pedagogies and development of teacher educators, in this brief essay we posit that a deeper understanding of the teacher educator as scholar, as practitioner, as researcher, is critical to the LTE knowledge base.

New audiences, new theoretical understandings of cognitive development and teaching, and the moral imperative to reach all learners and teachers require reframing how we assess our effectiveness in ELT. In this article, I present four areas of LTE that require reframing: (1) Who we prepare (2) with what content (3) to competently participate in…

The growing need for professional development requires the language teachers not to be mere consumers of commercial instructional materials or implementers of sets of mandated or recommended techniques, but to attempt to generate their own classroom materials, seek innovative pedagogical approaches, explore the contexts in which their designed…

The listening comprehension skill is frequently cited by both teachers and learners of a second language (L2) as perhaps the most difficult to deal with in any systematic way. One possible approach is to use the dictogloss task. This involves learners reconstructing a short text they have listened to. Originally developed to draw learners'…

This article reports the efforts of an elementary school teacher of Spanish as a second language to implement principles of dynamic assessment (DA) in her daily interactions with learners. DA is neither an assessment instrument nor a method of assessing but a framework for conceptualizing teaching and assessment as an integrated activity of…

This article focuses on the use of conversation analysis (CA) to help teaching interactional competence in English to adult second language learners from lower to intermediate levels. To set the context, this article gives a brief overview on the use of CA in second language research as well as considering the construct of interactional competence…

This article serves as the introduction to this special issue of "Language Teaching Research" on content-based language teaching (CBLT). The article first provides an illustrative overview of the myriad contexts in which CBLT has been implemented and then homes in on the five studies comprising the special issue, each conducted in a…

Many teacher training programs, including MATESOL programs, encourage their trainees to be reflective practitioners. The MATESOL program at The American University of Sharjah (AUS) is no exception and offers the students many opportunities for reflection. This article discusses my experience with a recent cohort's reaction to being asked to…

This article overviews current research on second language vocabulary learning. It concludes that a large vocabulary is necessary to function in English: 8000-9000 word families for reading, and perhaps as many as 5000-7000 families for oral discourse. In addition, a number of word knowledge aspects need to be learned about each lexical item.…

Researching language teachers requires intensive involvement of both the researcher and the researched. Yet, the available methodological literature in the field often paints a blurred picture of the nature of such involvement and provides little advice on dealing with challenges inherent in this type of research. Our doctoral research projects…

Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development (ZPD)" has become associated with the individual "scaffolding" of learners. As a result, because teachers need to teach the whole class, many public school teachers have had to dismiss the concept as unworkable. Yet Vygotsky himself was chiefly concerned with public school teaching and…