When it comes to teaching vocabulary in foreign language classes words are often taught in isolation, without regard to the context in which they appear. The paper draws attention to the importance of teaching words in context so that the meaning of a word often results from the meaning of a larger construction it is part of. After presenting the…

This paper describes a research study that investigated foreign language students' collaborative practice in a blended, authentic learning environment. A group of intermediate and advanced level students of Italian at an Australian university interacted and collaborated with each other and with a group of native speaker mentors through a web-based…

The focus of this research is on an international distance discussion class carried out in Chinese between university students in Japan, China and Taiwan using videoconferencing. Smiling was used as an interactional index in an analysis of the archival footage of the recordings of the discussion between native speakers (NS) of Chinese and…

This paper investigates ESL learners' awareness of pragmatic skills utilizing an activity-theory driven approach to perform an inquiry task into problem-solving service call conversations (PSSCs) between native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers of English (NNSs). Eight high-intermediate ESL learners, from five different language backgrounds,…

The present study evaluates the relative effectiveness of three types of input-based approaches for teaching English polite request forms to sixty Japanese learners of English: (a) structured input tasks with explicit information; (b) problem-solving tasks; and (c) structured input tasks without explicit information. Treatment group performance…

In this article, we explore one aspect of language awareness that has rarely been explored--awareness (i.e. perception) of the language proficiency of the "other learner" in pair work settings. We examine how Mai, a Japanese ESL learner, perceives her peer's L2 proficiency during pair problem solving, and how her perception of learner proficiency…

Chinese characters are used in both Chinese and Japanese writing systems. When literate speakers of either language experience problems in finding or understanding words, they often resort to using Chinese characters or "kanji" (i.e., Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) in their talk, a practice known as "brush talk" ("bitan" in Chinese,…

The present study investigated the effects of deductive and inductive teaching approaches to the acquisition of pragmatic competence on learners of English as a foreign language. In this study, 60 adult native speakers of Japanese with intermediate-level proficiency in English were each randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups, which consisted of 3…

Drawing on native/non-native speaker discourse data from goal-oriented interaction in Australian workplaces, it is argued that modality is inherently a centrally important function in such discussions, and that appropriately nuanced expression of modality is often crucial to "getting the job done," and that emphasis should be given to…

This study compared the performances of four groups of Hong Kong teachers of English as a Second Language on a language teaching task. Subjects were two groups of native English-speaking teachers, one of expert teachers and one of novices, and two groups of non-native English-speakers, one of experts and one of novices. All were asked to preview…

This exploratory study examines corrective feedback in native speaker-nonnative speaker (NS-NNS) and NNS-NNS dyads while participants were engaged in communicative and problem-solving activities via "Yahoo! Instant Messenger" (YIM). As "negotiation of meaning" studies of the 1990s have shown, linguistic items which learners negotiate in…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…