Teachers/lecturers typically adapt their teaching to respond to students' emotions, e.g. provide more examples when they think the students are confused. While getting a feel of the students' emotions is easier in small settings, it is much more difficult in larger groups. In these larger settings textual feedback from students could provide…

A question commonly raised by teachers is the extent to which task-based language teaching (TBLT) is suitable for young beginners, but to date, very little research has examined how TBLT can be implemented with complete beginners. The purpose of this article is to document my attempt to introduce a task-based approach in order to see if such an…

Communication mobility has been suggested as an element of the complex construct of professional communicative competence, with a shared core of English in the oral mode, for professional international communication. This study aims (1) to investigate the possible correlation between the perceived level of communication mobility, and the influence…

Metacognition appears to be a significant contributor to success in second language (SL) and foreign language (FL) learning. This study seeks to investigate empirical research on the role metacognition plays in language learning by focusing on the following research questions: first, to what extent does metacognition affect SL/FL learning? Second,…

The overseas immersion environment has long been considered a superior context for language learning, supposedly providing unlimited exposure to target language (TL) input and countless opportunities for authentic interaction with expert users. This article focuses on immersion programmes (IPs) for in-service language teachers--a relatively…

This article investigates overt language attitudes and linguistic practices among French-taught university students in Morocco, showing the relationship between language behavior and attitudes. The results reveal a class-based divide in respondents' patterns of language use, in their support of the French monolingual sanitized classroom, and in…

In this study perceptions of post-compulsory school studies in Iceland were investigated through semi-structured interviews. While colloquial English suffices for entertainment, hobbies and Internet use in Iceland, a high level of proficiency is required for employment and tertiary study. School learners and young people in tertiary study and…

This article looks at France's Loi Toubon, which mandates the use of French in private companies, to illustrate how macro-level language planning reaches a dead end if it fails to consider local contexts and involve micro-level agents. The motivations, limitations and contradictions of France's language policy in relation to companies are…

This paper reports our experience in using a parallel corpus to teach Cantonese, a variety of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong, as a second language. The parallel corpus consists of pairs of word-aligned sentences in Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, drawn from television programs in Hong Kong (Lee, 2011). We evaluated our pedagogical approach with…

This article features personal narratives that condemn ideologies that work to render invisible the identities of translingual individuals. The author engages members of the language and literacy field, particularly teachers and researchers, in conversations that will not only denounce antiminoritized groups rhetoric but also counter prejudiced…

Writing is often seen as having a minor role in second language learning. This article explores recent research that suggests that writing can have a facilitative role in language development. In particular, it focuses on three features of writing: (1) its slower pace, and (2) the enduring record that it leaves, both of which can encourage…

This study suggests that Intermediate High and Advanced speakers produce aspectually valid constructions in Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) in large part because they are doing more than assigning aspect to lexical categories (Lexical aspect hypothesis), but because they are assigning lexicalized meaning to discrete verbs, for example…

Sowden's article raises a number of questions concerning English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and criticizes it as a simplified and culturally neutral means of communication. In this response, I address the issues concerning the conceptualization and use of ELF as well as the implications for ELT. I provide up-to-date evidence of ELF research and show…

Cultural awareness (CA) has emerged over the last few decades as a significant part of conceptualizing the cultural dimension to language teaching. That is, L2 users need to understand L2 communication as a cultural process and to be aware of their own culturally based communicative behaviour and that of others. However, while CA has provided a…

This study investigates the syntactic errors in speaking among an Arab L2 post-graduate student in an academic speaking context. Specifically, the objectives are to describe the syntax error patterns committed by the student while engaging in speaking and to explore the contributing factors that may affect the errors. To address these objectives,…