Purpose: The lack of attention given to administrative staff calls for a study to consider their concerns regarding the learning and use of English to communicate in internationalized universities. This case study aimed to investigate how adequately administrative staff have learned and used English to communicate with international students in an…

Informed by ecological approaches to second language development (SLD), the current study looked into three adult English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners' quests of engaging in lifelong, informal language learning in the digital age. Data from in-depth interviews revealed that popular culture presented in different media forms offered…

English as a lingua franca (ELF), a shared contact language of communication for speakers from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, has become a common phenomenon in a globalized world. Central to ELF interactions is the ability to negotiate meanings drawing on a broad range of cultural repertoires and linguistic resources. Helping ELF…

This study examined the effects of pretask training to promote peer collaboration, encourage learning opportunities, and foster individual L2 writing development in web-based L2 collaborative writing (CW) tasks. The participants were 48 students from two junior English composition classes at a Taiwanese university. One class (n = 24) was assigned…

With the internationalisation of higher education, many universities in non-English-speaking countries have started offering English-medium instruction (EMI) courses. In Asia, in addition to the challenges caused by instructors and local students not being L1 speakers of English, the recent study-abroad trend has added more complexity to…

Adopting the approaches of "pattern hunting" and "pattern refining" (Kennedy & Miceli, 2001, 2010, 2017), this study investigates how seven freshman English students from Taiwan used the Corpus of Contemporary American English to discover collocation patterns for 30 near-synonymous change-of-state verbs and new ideas about…

This paper explored a less-studied preposition, "after," and its uses in a corpus. The analysis included an inspection of dictionary senses, followed by the distributional patterns of parts-of-speech, the co-appearing verbs of "after," the contextual uses of [-"ly after"] and [-"ly after"+NOUN], and finally…

This study investigates Taiwanese university students' experience of English use, aims of learning English and attitudes toward English as a lingua franca (ELF). The notion of ELF has been researched in the field of English language teaching. However, English teaching practice targeting native-speaker (NS) norms is still prevailing in English…

Although research has investigated laughter in professional communication settings, fewer studies have explored laughter-talk in second language (L2) classrooms. This study examines L2 university students' use of laughter-talk in peer group conversation to understand the linguistics of affect and its interactional effects. The author draws upon…

This paper aims to identify how Taiwanese and Mandarin (the two dominant languages in Taiwan) are used as interactional resources by Vietnamese female spouses in bilingual Taiwanese families. Three Vietnamese-Taiwanese transnational families (a total of seventeen people) participated in the research, and mealtime talks among the Vietnamese wives…

This study investigates the different learning opportunities enabled by text-based and video-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) from an interactionist perspective. Six Chinese-speaking learners of English and six English-speaking learners of Chinese were paired up as tandem (reciprocal) learning dyads. Each dyad participated…

Students seldom think about language unless they are instructed to do so or are made to do so during learning activities. To arouse students' awareness while learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP), this study formed a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) community to engage teachers and students from different domains and…