This paper analyzes writing tasks in academic writing textbooks for Japanese university students, focusing on the organization and difficulty of these tasks based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). A total of 411 writing tasks from 30 textbooks were coded by two experienced Japanese English teachers. The author…

Gratitude strategies used by EFL speakers have always been the focus of interest by researchers who observed the presence of pragmatic transfer strategies by which speakers express their gratitude. We have seen that several adapted versions of Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) by Eisenstein and Bodman (1986) are constructed based on the original…

Interacting with peers can be difficult for some students, due to their personality as well as to their learning styles. This paper shows how the Task-Based Approach (TBA) can be implemented and how digital resources can be used in language teaching and learning to enhance the students' experience and foster autonomy. To do so, I describe tasks I…

Background: The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) (Council of Europe 2001) has, over the past decade, come to be widely used as a reference tool for teaching, learning and assessment (Alderson 2002; North 2014). The focus of the current study is on scaling the China Standards of English (CSE) vocabulary descriptors for College English…

This article begins with a brief overview of the aims and activities of the CercleS CEFR/ELP Focus Group. It goes on to report on some of the outcomes of the 2015 CercleS CEFR/ELP seminar hosted by the Centre for Language and Communication Studies at Trinity College Dublin. The five examples presented during the seminar's plenary sessions are…

Oral language exams at university often consist of an individual or group conversation with the examiner about topics dealt with during the semester. A question-and-answer format is applied and vocabulary and structures tested. As a consequence, the oral exam does not reflect action-oriented approaches that often form part of classroom activities…

Projects related to the European Language Portfolio (ELP) carried out at the Language Centre of the University of Trieste are concerned to examine whether and to what extent "can do" descriptors can be extended to courses in Languages for Specific Purposes. The project reported in this article had two aims. The first was to explore what…