This study examines the representation of cultures across three sets of national English textbooks currently used in China by conducting a synchronic content analysis to explore what and how cultures are represented in the textbooks. Data analysis was conducted based on a newly constructed framework focusing on the content (countries and…

Text classification and text gradation are important for language teachers. Profiling and readability studies examine textual and linguistic features that determine text difficulty. Arabic, as an under-resourced language, suffers from a lack of such studies which results in material developers and textbook writers relying on their intuitions and…

Studies examining culture representation in language textbooks have rarely adopted the semiotic approach, despite its potential for presenting and (re)creating cultural meanings at their various levels (i.e. cultural, intercultural, multicultural, and transcultural) in the co-instantiations of texts, tasks, and images. To address this issue, a…

Though reports of pedagogic materials production point to the range of compromises authors make when writing language teaching textbooks, many accounts are retrospective in nature. This study sought to expand the research perspective by interrogating writing episodes via qualitative content analysis to discover how two expert ELT (English language…

Textbook development plays an important role in teacher development and educational reforms. Although research has examined how textbook creation may afford teacher identity (re)formation, attention has rarely been given to how this process informs leadership identity construction, especially in times of educational change when leaders often serve…

Although the ELT (English Language Teaching) materials development literature points to the influence of classroom experience on materials design, the literature is less specific about "how" such experience affects skilled textbook writing. Drawing primarily upon concurrent verbalization and pre- and post-concurrent verbalization…

This study looked into Saudi female English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' perception of their motivational practices in the actual classroom in public and private schools. Forty (n=40) EFL teachers filled out a questionnaire consisting of forty-four motivational strategies that were based on a five-point Likert scale ranging from…

Language ideologies are the practices of culturally, socially, and historically shaped views, images, and attitudes toward language. The political characteristic of English is certainly a sort of cultural hegemony, embodying the use of the target language into experiences, interpretations, and reciprocally confirmed assumptions. This study aims to…

Recent literature on the use of exemplars in the context of higher education has shown that exemplar-based instruction is implemented in various disciplines; nevertheless, how exemplar-based instruction can be implemented in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing classrooms in higher education institutions remains under-explored. In this…

The increase of international exchange in education triggers strong demand for learning English language skills in various academic disciplines among Chinese students, which brings up a wide implementation of EAP (English for academic purposes) learning in universities in China. However, the teaching and learning result do not seem to be as…

Writing a coursebook is a demanding task and more important than writing is how to evaluate it in order to pin point its weaknesses and improve them. If we yearn to produce a quality and useful coursebook, we need to consider how to develop and evaluate it. The study reported in this article describes the process in which the researcher developed…

A brief discussion of traditional Latin textbooks is followed by a survey of the first attempts at new materials (emphasizing integration of audiovisual aids and texts) at the William Penn Charter School and at the University of Michigan. The body of the article considers the structural approach, using "Latin: A Structural Approach"…

Papers in English, French, and Portuguese address topics of creativity and its relationship to: native language instruction by television; conditions of language production at the moment of the emergence of creativity; comparison teaching; foreign language teachers; modern language instruction; psychological, pedagogical, and cultural…

This volume includes papers presented at the 1998 Japan Association for Language Teaching Conference. Section 1, "Voices of Experience," includes: "Towards More Use of English in Class by JTEs" (Midori Iwano); "Paperless Portfolios" (Tim Stewart); "Textbook Creation in Reverse Order for Chinese" (Chou Jine…