This classroom study evaluates the effectiveness of pre-teaching communication strategies before learners undertake an information-gap speaking task. A convenience sample of 67 first-year students taking mandatory English classes at a private Japanese university was subject to one of two instructional approaches. The experimental group (n=37)…

This qualitative study aimed to examine Iranian language teachers' mindsets about language learning and teaching, and the ways in which their mindsets influenced their educational practices. The participants of this study were 20 Iranian language teachers who taught general English courses at private language institutes in a city in central Iran.…

There are grounds for believing that prompting language learners to infer the meaning of new lexical items is beneficial because inferring the meaning of lexical items and verifying one's inferences invites more cognitive investment than simply being presented with the meanings. However, concerns have been raised over the risk that wrong…

This study explores students' participation in English for Academic Purposes classrooms from both teachers' and students' perspectives. Data were collected from videotaping of 11 English for academic purposes classes, semi-structured interviews with 12 teachers and stimulated-recall interviews with 33 students. The results indicate that three…

Task-based language teaching research has investigated the impact of planning on task performance, but little has been reported on the processes that take place while planning is undertaken. This study builds on previous planning research by providing a detailed analysis of four Japanese university learners' collaborative pre-task planning (two…

Translanguaging as pedagogical practice and a theory of language has gained increasing importance in recent years. However, little research has reported Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language students' perceptions of translanguaging; neither has research examined the predictive effects of the factors contributing to the amount of student…

Literature has long been used as a tool for language teaching and learning. In the New Academic Structure in Hong Kong, it has become an important element in the senior secondary English language curriculum to promote communicative language teaching (CLT) with a process-oriented approach. However, as in many other English as a second or foreign…

Professional development is an activity in which language teachers should have ongoing and sustained involvement. There are many ways in which language teachers can pursue professional development, and reading journals is one of these ways. This article reports on a survey of 465 English Language Teaching (ELT) professionals, largely drawn from…

At the implementation level of the national project "Teaching and Learning Foreign Language in the Public-Sector Educational System for the 2008-2020 Period," the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) provided large-scale general English proficiency training for key English teachers and classroom English training for a…

This study investigated the impact of metacognitive pedagogical sequence on development of less-proficient Thai EFL listeners' L2 listening metacognition and listening comprehension achievement over a semester. Sixty-four university students who were enrolled in a listening course participated in a quasi-experimental study. Both the intervention…

This research investigates non-native English teachers' engagement with the native speaker model, i.e. whether they agree/disagree with measuring English teaching and learning performance against native speaker standards. More importantly, it aims to unearth the impact of teacher education on teachers' attitudes and beliefs about…

Developing students' communicative competence became the primary goal of the current College English Curriculum Requirements in 2004 in China. There has been increasing concern, however, that this goal has yet to be realized, particularly in relation to the teaching of writing. This study investigated the potential of a Systemic Functional…

Anxiety is a dimension of L2 speaking that has been heavily investigated over the past several decades, but there is a paucity of research investigating instruction aiming at lowering anxiety. While research suggests drama lowers L2 learners' anxiety, it is unclear to what extent anxiety is affected by drama. This article reports results from a…

Developing English for communicative purposes is a key objective of language classes in many parts of the world. As a logical prerequisite to communication practice, learners need to have Willingness to Communicate (WTC) before they will engage in L2 interaction (Macintyre et al., 1998). Teachers can play an important role in helping learners to…

This article provides a qualitative inquiry into the influences of immediate family members (i.e. parents and siblings) on a group of Gulf Arab EFL students regarding their language learning experiences and strategy use in their Arab homelands. The participants came from financially comfortable families, with different levels of education. The…