This study explores the verbal engagement strategies that EFL instructors adopt when teaching English over Instagram. These instructors create videos where they teach English and share them on Instagram. Twenty-five highly engaging English teaching videos on Instagram were used as the data of this study. To discover the engagement strategies that…

In countries such as the United States and Canada, an increasing number of non-native English speaking graduate students work in the capacity of university teaching assistants. Over the past several decades, a number of communication challenges between non-native English speaking International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) and native English-speaking…

Widespread incorporation of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in higher education has created the need for teacher development initiatives (EMITD) to prepare university lecturers whose first language is not English to teach their content subjects in English. The planning and implementation of such initiatives has frequently been assigned to…

This article addresses the questions: why is the development of conversational competence important within higher education? And how might this goal be pursued? We offer answers that may aid a broad range of stakeholders (language learners, course designers, lecturers, language development managers, and policy makers) in thinking through these…

Opportunities for language learners to access authentic input and engage in consequential interactions with native speakers of their target language abound in this era of computer mediated communication. Synchronous audio/video calling software represents one opportunity to access such input and address the challenges of developing pragmatic and…

The present contribution focuses on Benigni's auteur film "La vita è bella" (Italy, 1997) as a tool for the development of language competence in L2 English, Spanish and German, as well as of translation skills from Italian into these languages. The project, developed at the CLASS Language Centre at the University for Foreigners of…

In recent years, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Helsinki has systematically developed and synchronized its teaching technology, and new iPad-based tools have been an important part of this development. The aim has been to provide the students and teachers in the faculty with synchronized tools that can be used as a basis of a shared…

This article reports our findings on using WebCEF as a CEFR familiarization and self-assessment tool for oral proficiency. Furthermore, we outline how we have implemented Skype as a tool for telecollaboration in our language programmes. The primary purpose of our study was to explore how students and teachers would perceive the potential benefits…