This essay illuminates adaptable and multimodal ways of teaching with etymology and idiomatic origin stories in the composition classroom. I model my pedagogical approach with a topic central to my rhetorical research--pigeons in histories of human communication--and the rich etymologically-linked concepts of homing in, pigeonholing, and…

This article traces the history of college writing and suggests a different way ahead. To show why we need this approach, the article historicizes the start of postsecondary English as a paradoxical one, committed to egalitarian ideals while privileging narrow and exclusive English usage. To offer an alternative approach, the article synthesizes…

Escape games are an increasingly popular leisure activity involving a group of players completing tasks to achieve a pre-defined goal, which is usually escaping from a room. In this chapter, I briefly outline the educational potential of escape game activities in language classes within the frameworks of gamification, pervasive learning, and…

This article reports on a language learning system and a program designed to help students with academic vocabulary in the New Zealand university computer science department. The system is a learner-friendly corpus-based tool that allows students to look up lexico-grammatical patterns of a given word in academic writing. The program, based on a…

In Inner Mongolia, those Mongolian students face lots of difficulties in learning English. Especially the English translation ability of Mongolian students is a weak point. It is worth to think a problem that how to let our students use the English freely on a certain foundation. This article investigates the problems of Mongolian English learners…

The following article aims to revisit Selinker's theory of Interlanguage by analysing a group of undergraduates' written scripts in L2. The initial outcomes of the study establish a linguistic parallelism between students' Interlingua and English as a lingua franca in the academic world. In the light of this comparison, certain theoretical…

Experimental evidence suggests that pictorial elucidation helps learners comprehend and remember the meaning of second language (L2) idioms. In this article we address the question whether it also helps retention of the form of idioms, i.e. their precise lexical composition. In a small-scale experiment, the meaning of English idioms was clarified…

Studies on classroom interaction have typically focused on relationships between turn-taking patterns and some larger unit of analysis of varying length and nature. However, two questions still left unanswered are how teachers talk differently from students in general and how linguistic variation between two participants might relate to…

This paper discusses the possibility of using newspaper genres and genre-based pedagogy to teach intermediate ESL learners to write school genres. Students' typical writing problems reveal the inadequacy of the typical composition classroom instruction. Then two texts regarded as typical representations of the editorial and the school…

In the first part of this study, we measured the alignment (relative to segmental landmarks) of the low F0 turning points between the accentual fall and the final boundary rise in short Dutch falling-rising questions of the form "Do you live in [place name]?" produced as read speech in a laboratory setting. We found that the alignment of…