Among the barriers facing refugee-background students (RBS) in accessing Higher Education (HE) in the UK is reaching the required academic English standard, and accessing courses to support them with this (Ashlee & Gladwell 2020: 13). In response to these barriers, the Universities of Leicester and Leeds (both in the UK) have developed the…

Speaking is considered as a challenging skill to improve as it is a productive one which requires the learners to be unique and creative in the way they express themselves. Therefore, teaching speaking takes the attention of the researchers in the field of English language teaching. Therefore, the way "speaking" was integrated into the…

Short-term study abroad (SA) programmes are often promoted as an effective way of developing English language skills and accessing opportunities for intercultural learning. Whilst pre-departure intercultural training is thought to play an important role in enhancing the potential for meaningful learning, overemphasis on essentialist framings of…

This action research was conducted to investigate the efficacy of networking, an adjusted cooperative learning method employed in an English literature class for non-English majors in China. Questionnaire was administered online anonymously to college students after a 14-week cooperative learning in literature class in a Chinese university, aiming…

Students in Western university contexts require multiple literacies, numeracies, and critical capacities to succeed. Participation requires a blend of English language capacity, cultural knowhow, and cognisance of the often-hidden racialized assumptions and dispositions underpinning literate performance. Students from Culturally and Linguistically…

This paper reports the findings of an action research that was carried out to measure the effectiveness of integrating a social networking website "Edmodo" in students' writing performance in an EFL classroom at Arab Open University (Oman Branch). The participants were 25 students studying English in the Foundation Programme. Along with…

This report describes the opportunities, challenges and limits of evidence-based quality improvement in university language teaching. Using "treffpunkt sprachen"--Centre for Language, Plurilingualism and Didactics at the University of Graz as an example, it provides a brief explanation of the centre and then presents the prioritization…

For learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), fluency is one of the most difficult aspects to develop within the speaking skills. The Chilean teaching context has witnessed a gradual shift from the traditional grammar-translation approach to a more communicative one, thereby making it necessary to discover new strategies to develop…

In contrast with its high level of popularity in both research and practice for in-service teacher development, teacher research has received much less attention in pre-service language teacher education as a reflective learning approach, particularly in China's context. Action research, as a major form of teacher research, has rarely been…

The process toward academic literacy aims at developing academic reading and writing together with higher academic competences of increasing relevance for undergraduate students as future teachers and researchers. Such a process is even more complex in ELT vocational courses where non-English speaking trainees study English as a system while they…

This paper reports the findings of an action research that was conducted over the course of two years. The research investigated the role of using reading diaries and strategy instruction with English Language Teaching trainees to foster greater learner autonomy and looked into the language learning strategies used by these students. The findings…

Concepts such as teachers' professional development and students' achievement act as the driving force for the development of each in a causal relationship in EFL teaching, as in many other disciplines. The purpose of this study is to investigate the change Understanding by Design (UbD) made on teachers' professional development and students'…

This article explores the general patterns of interactions between the teacher and students during the different instructional steps when the teacher attempted to incorporate both conventional skill-based reading and critical literacy in an English as a foreign language (EFL) literacy class in a Korean university. There has been a paucity of EFL…

This action research is aiming at improvement of reading comprehension of College English teaching and learning, which is a major time-consuming course with low efficiency in colleges and universities in China. The research subjects were 134 first-year college students of science, engineering and liberal arts, who were from either developed…

Given the changing nature of literacy, there is an urgent need to develop alternative ways of assessment in support of students' new literacy practices in the digital age. While emergent models of multimodal assessment are being developed in theoretical contexts, the study reported in this paper illustrates how multimodal theories can be realized…