In recent years, university-based Intensive English Programs (IEPs) have expanded to serve the growing population of international students who wish to earn their degrees at U.S. universities. Many of these IEPs have shifted their focus to assist these academically bound international students by functioning as a bridge to enrollment in American…

This article illustrates one professor's experiment with using Snapchat in a university EFL classroom. Snapchat has become impossible to ignore and this study proves that it can be beneficial to students. This study shows how the use of Snapchat can engage students and encourage them to practice English outside the classroom.

Educational experiences during childhood are critically important for development, but migrant children often experience unique challenges. To ameliorate these, extra training in English language--such as provided by the intensive English language programme in South Australia (IELP)--is frequently offered to children taking on English as an…

There is considerable interest in teacher collaboration across mother tongue and second language curricula. However, cross-curricular collaboration in reading strategy instruction has seldom been investigated. We report a two-year study involving collaboration between the French first language (L1) and English second language (L2) teachers in an…

This study examines how international graduate students in a Malaysian public university perceive and overcome academic reading difficulties. The target population included all graduate students from Yemen, an Arab country, studying at Universiti Sains Malaysia. Data were collected using questionnaires, focus group interviews, and journal writing.…

This dissertation study focused on a feature of emergent interactions in the L2 classroom called unanticipated student utterances (USUs), which is defined as utterances spoken by the student that the teacher has not anticipated as part of the discussion at hand. The purpose of the study was to demonstrate why USUs are significant in the L2…

This article reports a study that investigated how two Saudi Arabian men negotiated their positionality vis-à-vis a host community in the United States and how they engaged in different discursive practices in order to achieve fuller participation in the various worlds that became important to them. The study takes data from a larger research…

Though research has established a relationship between vocabulary knowledge and academic success and identified features to guide the L2 word learner through academic tasks (see Nation, 2013), less is known regarding student perceptions of academic vocabulary and the conscious decision-making process of these learners while they are writing. In…

With classroom observation and stimulated recall interviews as research instruments, the present study investigated some of the factors that affected learners' attention to teacher talk in nine English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms. The results revealed five such factors, namely, learners' self evaluation of their language knowledge, the…

This mixed methods classroom research examined if accountability groups in the lower proficiency levels of a university intensive English program would improve students' language acquisition. Students were assigned partners for the study period with whom they completed assignments inside and outside of class, as well as set goals for use of…

This research focuses on speaking proficiency and successful second language speakers' traits using a survey and an interview. The participants in the study were in a short intensive course between four and six months, depending on the language they studied. The successful learner was defined as someone who received 1+ or above on the Interagency…

This study investigated the use of blogs in an intensive English program at a university in Lebanon. The paper reports on how blogs can contribute to language acquisition and the development of related literacy skills. Blogs were incorporated into the required curriculum as supplemental material over two semesters. The aim of the strategy was to…

Concordancers are software programs that allow users to search for all occurrences of a word or sequences of words. Early descriptions of the potential for student concordancing were given by Tim Johns, who called it Data Driven Learning (DDL). Johns (1991) explains DDL as an investigation allowing students to form their own questions about the…

This article reports on a study examining the language practice opportunities that occurred during a range of paired and small group interactive tasks in an intensive English as a Second Language (ESL) class of francophone Grade 6 students. The analysis focussed on the opportunities the tasks provided for the use of two complex and challenging…

Past research has found that many pre-university L2 learners, having completed an Intensive English Program (IEP) still have difficulty in undertaking various disciplines in English-speaking tertiary institutions and continue to exhibit numerous linguistic problems (Bialystok, 2001, Celce Murcia 2001). The purpose of this paper is to present the…