This study investigated the application of "WriteToLearn" on Chinese undergraduate English majors' essays in terms of its scoring ability and the accuracy of its error feedback. Participants were 163 second-year English majors from a university located in Sichuan province who wrote 326 essays from two writing prompts. Each paper was…

There is cumulative evidence suggesting that hyper-glossing facilitates lower-level processing and enhances reading comprehension. There are plentiful studies on electronic dictionaries for English. However, research on e-dictionaries for languages with no boundaries between words is still scarce. The main aim for the current study is to…

Despite the number of articles devoted to the topic of content-based instruction (CBI), little attempt has been made to link the claims for CBI to research in cognitive science. In this article, I review the CBI model of foreign language (FL) instruction in the context of its close alignment with two emergent frameworks in cognitive science:…

This study aimed to explore the effects of explicit teaching on the acquisition of spoken discourse markers (DMs) on EFL learners' presentation production. It also aimed to measure the impact of two different treatments on the acquisition of a set of DMs. This study is an experimental study and focuses on the overall production of spoken…

Ten adult readers, advanced in their control of two languages, Korean and English, were recruited for a study of academic literacy practices to examine the various linguistic repertoires on which they drew. Analysis of their language use revealed many instances of "translanguaging," that is, a flexible reliance on two languages to serve…

To investigate the influence of L2 proficiency and syntactic similarity on English passive sentence processing, the present ERP study asked 40 late Chinese-English bilinguals (27 females and 13 males, mean age = 23.88) with high or intermediate L2 proficiency to read the sentences carefully and to indicate for each sentence whether or not it was…

This study explored the pedagogical benefits of flipped online kanji (i.e., Chinese characters used in Japanese) instruction integrated into college-level introductory and intermediate Japanese language courses. Using a quasi-experimental mixed design, the investigation looked at the effects of two instructional approaches: (1) a flip approach in…

Foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) has been the subject of several studies aimed to optimize learning of a foreign language in the classroom. However, few studies provide specific curriculum-based methodological strategies to be used in the classroom in order to lower the anxiety level. In this article, two experimental classes of 8th-grade…

The growing number of young children around the world learning English has resulted in an increase in research in the field. Many of the studies have investigated approaches to learning and teaching, with a particular emphasis on effective pedagogies (e.g. Harley 1998; Shak and Gardner 2008). Other studies have focused on the linguistic gains of…

Although internet-assisted language teaching (IALT) has been recognised by the rapid progress of internet, there is a lack of published studies concerning the perceptions and perspectives of English Foreign Language (EFL) teachers on the integration of the internet into language learning and teaching. This study compares the differences between…

The CEFR French profiles have been widely used to teach and evaluate language instruction over the past decade. The profiles were specifications of vocabulary that have been largely untested from a corpus-based, empirical perspective. The purpose of this dissertation was to evaluate the CEFR profiles by comparing their content with two sizable…

In this article, the author reminisces the time he went to Georgetown University to interview Dr. James Alatis and compares the career of Dr. Alatis with his own. The first comparison is that Dr. Alatis and the author both have taught in their home country, the United States, and in other countries. Second, Dr. Alatis and the author are both…

In the present study, we examine the effects of prompts and recasts on the acquisition of two new and different grammar structures in a task-based learning environment. Sixty-four 14-year-old 9th grade students (low intermediate) learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to three conditions: two experimental groups (one…

The present study investigated the effects of instruction on the use of the definite article "the" by Japanese learners of English by implementing two instructional treatments that varied in the extent to which they emphasized identifiability and accessibility. One instructional treatment, referred to as the traditional (TR) treatment,…

Native-speakerism is an ideology in English language teaching (ELT) in which so-called "native speaker" teachers, and the culture they are believed to represent, are perceived to be norm-providing both for the English language and for the ways in which English is taught around the world. While native-speakerism has been written on…