As the number of students learning in online and flipped contexts grows, an important question arises: to what extent is it necessary to have places or activities where students interact regarding course content? The present paper looked at three flipped learning environments: one with no online collaboration, one featuring an online discussion…

This study applied Edmodo as a supplementary environment for additional language practice in a semi-technical English course in an EFL context, with a quasi-experimental between-subjects (control versus experimental group) design. In addition to conventional classroom instruction and practice, the experimental group practiced additional language…

Syntactic complexity is a crucial aspect of linguistic proficiency and thus understanding and supporting such development in learners is a keen concern for language teachers. Research conducted has shown growing sophistication of noun phrase structures by writers of different abilities in academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010; Liu & Li,…

With digital literacies becoming an essential competency for teachers across the world, recent educational policies in India emphasize teachers' ability to use digital technologies for pedagogic purposes and the use of digital technologies by teachers as one of the evaluation criteria for ranking institutions. In the absence of any properly…

In the digital era, university instructors working in English for Technical Sciences (ETS) have opportunities, some might say obligations, to use audio-visual resources to motivate students. Such materials also call on cognitive and constructivist mechanisms thought to improve uptake of the target language (Tarnopolsky, 2012). This chapter reports…

Comparative studies in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) often show CLIL students to be at something of an advantage over their non-CLIL peers. However, such studies are often difficult to interpret given problems of cross-group comparability (different schooling systems, different number of instructional hours, bias attributable to…

This paper reports on part of an evaluation of a 2-year program providing preparatory support for 430 Cantonese Chinese-native-speaking students switching from Chinese to English-medium instruction late in their secondary schooling, mainly because of aspiration to English-medium tertiary study. Focusing quantitatively and qualitatively on…

The determiners in English include three categories: predeterminers, central determiners, and postdeterminers. The focus of the present study is the central determiners because they comprise the largest group and because a minimum of one central determiner is required in the generation of any noun phrase. Furthermore, the central determiners have…

Determines that the complexity of syntax does not significantly affect reading comprehension of native and non-native English speakers when reading technical writing. Finds no significant differences between subgroups reading an authentic computer science text and those reading a syntactically adapted text, either in comprehension or in speed. (MG)

Describes ongoing research aimed toward finding a minimum discourse grammar to help Brazilian students learning English for special purposes to cope with the sort of texts they have to read in their own disciplines. The research has involved review of scientific philosophy, a reading miscue study, and a comparison of English and Portuguese…

Forty-eight American (L1) and 48 Dutch students (L2), half of whom had computer science backgrounds and half of whom did not, were tested for their use of either scientific text (ST) syntactic structures or the less difficult common syntax when writing technical discourse (in Appendix). Results indicate that both L1 and L2 technical writers wrote…

This article compares the communication strategies used by representatives of two generations of French scientists (pre- and postcommunicative language teaching) in the writing of research articles in English-language scientific journals. It focuses on the relationships between general argumentative language and hard-core mathematical language in…