In recent years there has been a significant shift in the international school market in China, from educating predominantly the children of expatriates to educating Chinese nationals. This article will examine the problems such schools face in terms of putting together an international curriculum, not least in terms of the complex web of…

This paper presents one Colombian university English as a foreign language program's in-house teacher development program for curriculum renewal. This program is an innovative attempt to prepare teachers for implementing a new curriculum and, simultaneously, engages them in professional development activities. The program is a response to the lack…

In China, English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers seem to be in a dilemma because of the discrepancy existing in classroom teaching and assessment, the new curriculum requirement, and the paucity of language assessment knowledge. To tackle these problems, there is an urgent need to evaluate EFL teachers' language assessment literacy (LAL) and…

The globalisation of higher education and the resultant increase in the cultural and linguistic diversity of the student body has cast the spotlight on English language proficiency as never before. How universities best assess applicants' linguistic suitability for their future degree studies, set appropriate proficiency thresholds, and put in…

With the largest number of English learners in the world, the influence of the English language teaching (ELT) reform in China cannot be underestimated. This article explores the implications of the actual use of English in China's workplace for ELT reform in the context of English as a lingua franca (ELF). On the basis of cross-validated data…

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, it aimed to determine whether the application of backward design model has any significant effect on improving the writing ability of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Second, the study sought to evaluate the superiority of backward design to conventional forward models in the improvement of the…

Currently, a growing number of teaching approaches focus on aspects of variation in language (e.g. English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), World Englishes, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), genre theories, etc.); however, each of these approaches tends to focus on particular (specific) aspects of language variation and do not fully account for the…

Strategy-deficient language learners struggle to develop their language proficiency through limiting and inappropriate strategies. This study aims at exploring experienced teachers' perceptions of strategy deficiency syndrome among EFL learners. To this end, the perspectives of a purposive sample of experienced teachers teaching in private…

This paper highlights the importance of school principals in English Learners' academic achievement in the age of the Common Core State Standards. Revising the curriculum of administrator preparation programs to include a greater emphasis on curriculum and instruction is one approach to enhancing principal leadership for English Leaners. Another…

The flipped classroom method, particularly when used with digital video, has recently attracted many supporters within the education field. Now more than ever, language arts educators can benefit tremendously from incorporating flipped classroom techniques into their curriculum. "Applying the Flipped Classroom Model to English Language Arts…

This paper reports the results of a survey which involved College English teachers from three leading universities in the Philippines. The results point to one conclusion--College English teachers now have a changing and changed stance toward norm selection in Philippine Universities. The results give the impression that a good number of College…

This article focuses on the learning affordances of different language and communication curricula in the world. For reasons of space, only two national education systems (Finland and Singapore) and their language and communication curricula are referred to. The accounts of national education systems consist of the identification of mechanisms…

This study explores tensions between three Iranian EFL teachers' beliefs and practices with respect to teaching culture. The teachers were observed and interviewed over a period of eight weeks. The observations provided insight into how they taught culture in practice, while the interviews tried to elicit their beliefs. Drawing on the distinction…

Improvement of teachers' content knowledge has long been regarded as a priority in Indonesian school systems, and has been the goal for many teacher professional development programs. In this paper we report the evaluation of a professional development program to improve content knowledge for 147 Indonesian teachers. The teachers were divided into…

Bilingual education in Poland gained in popularity after the political changes in 1989 when Polish society started noticing the importance of foreign language learning. With the emergence of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in the 1990s, which in the Polish context is still termed as "bilingual education", foreign…