South Korean job seekers face pressure to produce high scores on standardized English tests, which leads to the prominence of test-oriented pedagogy. Though recent scholarship illustrates how materials reflect the values of society and how these are negotiated in classrooms it has mainly analyzed preexisting published books, leaving the potential…

With use of self-assessment (SA) of young language learners on the rise, educators of young learners often want to know what SA captures and how best to use it in order to assist their students' learning. This study focuses on understanding how young learners' processes for responding to SA items differ by age and by context of implementation…

This article aims to broaden the scope of language teacher identity research by investigating the emotional demands on teachers-in-training and nonnative English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in particular. We examined how our focal NNEST participant, Puja, was confronted with and successfully negotiated numerous emotional challenges in her first…

Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) are widely used to measure speaking ability in a second or foreign language. The Michigan English Language Assessment Battery (MELAB) Speaking Test is an OPI used for academic and professional purposes around the world. However, little research on this or other OPIs has quantitatively compared test takers' speech…

In order to understand teacher cognition--the thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge of language teachers--it is helpful to understand why people commit to language teaching in the first place. However, few studies of language teachers have directly examined the nature and development of commitment in language teachers, across their language learning,…

This article explores the identities of a group of elementary teachers who participated in a professional development (PD) project on multilingual language learners. We study how the participating teachers drew on different aspects of their identities to respond to encouragement to increase their attention to students' diverse multilingual…

This article, grounded in a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective, details the self-inquiry of a language teacher educator who examined her "emotional dissonance" regarding her mediation of the reflection journals of a teacher learner teaching an ESL class during an internship. Data from the teacher learner's reflection journals and the…

It is widely accepted that teacher cognitions--what teachers know, think, and believe--play a significant part in teachers' decision-making processes. The present study investigated the specific cognitions that 74 Dutch undergraduate and postgraduate student teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) had on grammar instruction and how these…

A growing number of studies have examined qualitative research interviews in terms of how researchers' own identities and agendas are implicated in the construction of interviewees' responses. Adopting the constructionist conception of research interviews, the current study introduces a comparative analysis of 2 interviews with a multilingual…

This article reports on a replication study of a substantial piece of research published in "The Modern Language Journal", carried out by Elaine Matties Phillips in 1992, and entitled "The Effects of Language Anxiety on Students' Oral Test Performance and Attitudes." The aim of both studies was to assess the influence of…

This article takes a broadly sociocultural perspective on the development of an Armenian English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher. It focuses on how experiences and actions outside the professional development classroom influence language teacher agency. The paper is framed within activity theory and specifically draws on Galperin's orienting…

This study investigates the relationship among Japanese high school teachers' beliefs, their practices, and socioeducational factors regarding communicative language teaching (CLT). A multimethods approach was used consisting of a survey, interviews, and class observations. A Teacher Beliefs Questionnaire was sent to 188 randomly selected Japanese…

This longitudinal study asks 2 questions. The first one is: What patterns of pragmatic development can we observe among different pragmatic functions and attributes in a second language (L2)? The second question is: In what ways do individual differences and learning context affect the course of pragmatic development? Forty-eight Japanese college…

The present study reports on the evidence of first language (L1) attrition in a population that may appear to be the most resistant to L1 changes. Russian monolinguals (n=3) and Russian-English bilinguals (n=10) participated in the study. The bilinguals were graduate students teaching Russian as a foreign language at a U.S. university. The data…

Unlike success in first language acquisition, success in learning a second or foreign language is considerably more variable. Recently, second language acquisition researchers have called for more integrative research on individual difference factors. With this goal in mind, this study followed a larger, quantitative study of the links between…