Identifying students' reasons for learning a language is useful for every teacher who aims to help students achieve their goals. In addition, understanding how their language learning motivation is maintained through the class and to what extent this continues away from the classroom are equally important, especially in noncompulsory adult ESOL.…

Many second language pedagogy experts recommend that curricular and instructional planning should begin with needs analysis. Few, however, recommend assessing students' strengths, and those that do seem not to consider learners' strengths to be integral to planning or instruction. Teacher preparation programs and materials that foreground needs…

Investigating the foreign and second language (L2) motivational self system (L2MSS) of Turkish sixth graders, this study reports relationships among three components (ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self, and L2 learning experience) of the L2MSS and the variables of school type (public and private), gender, and intended effort. Data were collected from…

This article examines the role of self-efficacy beliefs in learning English as a foreign language in an Indonesian primary school setting. Self-efficacy is a significant motivational factor affecting the cognitive and behavioral engagement of learners (Linnenbrink & Pintrich, 2003). The study adopted a mixed-methods research design that…

This study investigated the interactive function of teacher-written feedback. To this end, 10 students from two English toward proficiency (ETP) classes in a private university in North Cyprus were asked to engage in "a letter to my teacher" (ALMT) activity during the feedback-revision process in the course of their study. Moreover, the…

This study investigated how a literacy buddy approach may influence the English learning and creative writing of adolescent learners in a rural Taiwanese school. A group of seventh-grade and eighth-grade students took part in a winter camp, wherein they read and wrote picture books collaboratively. Based on the students' feedback, this approach…

Sinclair (1991) found that lexical analysis can be overcomplicated, yet Johns (1994) called for investigation into whether corpus analysis can motivate beginners and near-beginners. The findings of this research suggest that young EFL learners can enjoy using corpus analysis tools (wordlists and concordances) to identify, classify, and generalize…

Using digital stories to have students tell about themselves, share their culture with the class, and learn from each other can help with establishing rapport, shows respect for different cultures, and can be motivating for students and their language teachers. However, what happens after that? After making their first video, students have some…

Learner motivation is considered a vital factor in second language instruction. An analysis of motivation types and degrees can reveal learners' expectations and learning objectives. The present study analyzes the motivational patterns of a group of English for academic and professional purposes (EAPP) learners while focusing on types and degrees…

This essay tells the story of a collaboration between an English education professor in a large urban university and a high school English teacher working in a school whose population consists almost entirely of new immigrants. The English education professor serves as a visiting teaching artist, introducing the students to studies of works of…

This article explores the impact of the teacher on student identities within the English language classroom. Based on an empirical study, the article posits that the teacher can play a significant role in the negotiation, co-construction, and legitimisation of student identities in the language class in a number of ways: by focusing on students as…

The article describes the agentive development of a group of first-year Japanese university students. They first individually wrote their language learning histories to grasp what they had been through in their junior and senior high school English education. They then analyzed the histories in small groups, discussing what motivated and…

In this piece, a teacher educator and two secondary teachers describe how they implemented the Learners' Lives as Curriculum model (Weinstein, 2004) with adolescent English language learners using a unit from a pilot secondary curriculum titled Lives Unfolding (Weinstein & Cloud, 2007). They discuss the development and adaptation of the Names unit…

This qualitative instrumental case study explores various factors that might influence upper-intermediate-level English as a second language (ESL) students' summarizing from a sociocultural perspective. The study was conducted in a formal classroom setting, during a reading and writing class in the English Language Institute at a university in the…

After noting the disconnect between students' passionate oral stories and their lifeless writing, an adult education instructor made specific instructional and curriculum changes in an ESOL reading and writing course. All changes served the purpose of teaching the element of voice in second language writing. The instructor used the issue of…