Although research about the effectiveness of second or foreign language collaborative writing for jointly written products has proliferated in the last few decades, there has been less examination of whether and how pre-task preparation could maximize the language learning opportunities that collaborative writing can afford learners. Informed by…

This article reports a project that I carried out with prospective Maltese language teachers in order to give them the opportunity to examine their linguistic landscape (LL), to develop an awareness and a curiosity about how languages are used in house names, and to reflect on their own learning. The student-teachers adopted visual ethnography to…

This article focuses on qualitative self-report data from a mixed-methods study which investigated Grade 5 and 6 (n = 274), 11-12-year-old, Irish-medium (IM) immersion students' improvement in linguistic accuracy in response to an explicit-inductive approach to form-focused instruction (FFI). A series of typographically enhanced PowerPoint slides…

This study is a report on the learning processes and outcomes of a reading course with a critical literacy orientation. Twenty-seven BA freshman English literature students (four males and 23 females) at the age range between 18 and 21 participated in a "Reading Comprehension 1" course at Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran. Throughout…

Previous research has shown that learners of English might experience considerable difficulty when giving constructive criticism to peers in instructional settings. Unlike native speakers, they tend to soften their criticism far less frequently while aggravating it far more often, and thus require pedagogical help in this area. The present study…

We examined the relationship between the quality of second language (L2) learners' language awareness (as shown through dialogue journal entries) and the quality of their L2 pronunciation (as assessed through listener-based ratings of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency). The participants were 10 students enrolled in a 13-week…

Grounded in sociocultural theory, this article outlines a small-scale study exploring metacognitive awareness of second language (L2) listening. In each of five lessons, six pairs of advanced-level, adult, Japanese, EFL learners participated in a sequence of tasks involving the explicit verbalisation of strategies as part of a pedagogical cycle…

Pragmatic ability has been recognised as an essential component of communicative competence (Canale & Swain, 1980; Hymes, 1972). However, it has been largely neglected in today's second/foreign language (L2) instruction and teacher education; few curricular attempts for teaching pragmatics have been made. This paper describes a web-based…

Discusses the use of student journals as a means of assessing the intellectual journey taken by students through a postgraduate course in critical language awareness. Shows how students construct their multiple identities in their journals and how these identities are transformed or conserved as they enter a new discourse community. (Author/VWL)