This study explores the impact of students' beliefs on teachers' beliefs regarding oral corrective feedback through a targeted professional development programme. The programme comprised a one-day seminar during which eleven high-school EFL teachers were presented with and discussed the findings of a study of their students' feedback beliefs, and…

It is now relatively straightforward to program software to detect words and phrases containing errors in the free-form writing of L2 learners of English. This article, however, reports on progress in the development of software which not only detects errors but also provides feedback explaining the nature of each error and how to correct it. Such…

Corpora have the potential to support the L2 writing process at the discourse level in contrast to the isolated dictionary entries that many intermediate writers rely on. To take advantage of this resource, learners need to be trained, which involves practising corpus research and referencing skills as well as learning to make data-based…

Despite the recent development of automated writing evaluation (AWE) technology and the growing interest in applying this technology to language classrooms, few studies have looked at the effects of using AWE on reducing grammatical errors in L2 writing. This study identified the primary English grammatical error types made by 66 Taiwanese…

This article describes a transcription task cycle that was designed to facilitate the development of skills for the IELTS (International English Language Testing System) speaking test at a language school in Japan. The cycle involved practice test, transcription, student correction, teacher correction, and retrial of the original test and…

A major issue that continues to challenge language teachers is how to ensure that learners develop accuracy and complexity in their speaking, as well as fluency. Teachers know that too much corrective feedback (CF) can make learners reluctant to speak, while not enough may allow their errors to become entrenched. Furthermore, there is controversy…

Negotiation of language form is thought to engage learning processes by helping learners to notice gaps in their developing L2 and find target-like ways of filling them. Self-transcription, where learners work together to find language errors in recordings of their own oral output, is an awareness raising exercise that encourages such negotiation.…

This article critically reviews the usefulness of grammar correction in second language writing instruction through the eyes of five second-language writers. It first examines the validity of four teaching principles that appear to influence how writing instructors approach error correction in classrooms and concludes with discussions as to why…

Large corpora such as the British National Corpus and the COBUILD Corpus and Collocations Sampler are now accessible, free of charge, online and can be usefully incorporated into a process writing approach to help develop students' writing skills. This article aims to familiarize readers with these resources and to show how they can be usefully…

The research reported in the study was undertaken to measure English language teachers' ability to interpret second language learners' intended meanings in idiosyncratic utterances in written English. In doing so, it also aimed at verifying Corder's (1981) speculation that language teachers can correctly guess the intended meanings of learners in…

A study of six adult learners of English as a Second Language provides some evidence to suggest that pushing learners to produce more accurate output contributes to acquisition. The data also demonstrate how this might be achieved through focused communication tasks. (Contains 11 references.) (Author)

Illustrates the problems inherent in an extreme focus on form and accuracy or meaning and fluency in English-as-a-Second-Language classes. Notes that current language teaching theory views a dual, simultaneous focus as desirable and proceeds to analyze the features of an authentic example of dual focus. (20 references) (Author/CK)

Investigates the degree to which teacher cues help students correct their own errors in English-as-a-foreign-language written compositions and what kinds of cues are more effective in self-correction. Sixty-two Japanese college students were sampled. (Contains nine references.) (JL)

Considers the functions of teaching guides, and suggests why their evaluation is a worthwhile activity. The evaluation process is examined, and a set of model criteria for a detailed evaluation are provided. (14 references) (JL)

This paper describes a project involving EFL learners in synchronous electronic discussions. The output of the students' interactions was analyzed qualitatively to uncover the main linguistic and interactional features. It was observed that the students' discussions contained a large number of spelling, usage, and grammatical errors, an almost…