This paper investigates four teachers' efforts to innovate during a semester of English language teaching at a university in China. At the end of a mentor-facilitated action research cycle, the teachers wrote their 'Story of Innovation' in order to construct deeper understandings of their experiences. These stories were examined for themes and are…

Purpose: Although action research (AR) is considered essential for teacher development in second/foreign language (L2) education, no validated scale has been designed for its measurement. With that in mind, this study attempted to develop and validate an Inventory on Teachers' Beliefs about Action Research (ITBAR). Design/methodology/approach: For…

Of the major aspects of language use, perhaps the least frequently taught and the least understood by teachers is the system of turn-taking Wong and Waring [2010. "Conversation Analysis and Second Language Pedagogy: A Guide for ESL/EFL Teachers." New York: Routledge]. For second language learners, this may be an important contributing…

Purpose: Attempts to cultivate a multilingual mindset in education in South Tyrol find an obstacle in educational norms, structures and policies that divide students into linguistically distinct schools based on their self-identified main language. Education in the region is administered through three separate educational authorities --…

This study explores whether and how interactions with art works can amplify and enrich language-and-culture learning in foreign and community language contexts with a focus on Arabic and the work of artist Ali Omar Ermes. The central cross-curricular orientation draws significantly on a range of other theoretical perspectives, both general and…

How can Japanese teachers of English go about introducing more communicative activities suitable for their contexts? This article discusses an attempt by a high school teacher to implement communicative language teaching (CLT) in her classes while responding to institutional pressure to use "yakudoku" (a traditional grammar translation…

Language teachers constantly create, adapt and evaluate classroom materials to develop new curricula and meet their learners' needs. It has long been argued (e.g. by Stenhouse, L. [1975]. "An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development." London: Heinemann) that teachers themselves, as opposed to managers or course book writers,…

Much research regarding listening strategies has focused on assembling lists of reported strategies and gaining better understanding of differences in strategy usage between less- and more-skilled listeners. Less attention has been given to how the accumulating knowledge based on listening strategies informs listening strategy instruction as…

Learners often anecdotally report preferring live instructors to videotaped lectures, but few controlled comparisons exist, and none have been conducted for foreign language learning. College students experienced a single foreign language lesson in an unknown foreign language, Samoan, either from a live instructor or from a videotape of the same…