Competent L2 writing has been described in research in terms of an increasing incidence, variety, and length of clauses; a countervailing compactness and tightness with reduced number of clauses even as clause length expands; and various interrelationships between syntactic realizations of texts and the genres they represent. These partly…

After the publication of the "CEFR Companion Volume" in 2018, a revision of the curriculum in force for the English subject in the Bilingual Sections in the Community of Madrid has been implemented. One of the main changes is the inclusion of the concept of linguistic mediation in the subject 'Advanced English' in the last stage of…

Despite the fact that pronunciation is a vital aspect of language learning, previous research has shown that its instruction is limited in the classroom in terms of time and attention, due in part to the time constraints inherent in any curriculum. It then becomes essential for instructors to be strategic about the pronunciation features they…

Scholars in our profession have long called attention to the gap between language classes and upper-level content courses. Some current trends, such as decolonizing the curriculum and using the lens of social justice, are highlighting an additional gap, which they perceive in students' preparedness to deal justly with an unjust world. This article…

Symbolic competence is integral to intercultural teaching and learning, but limited research and teaching guidance exist in foreign language classrooms. This paper explores the use of critical incidents in developing the symbolic competence of advanced-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners at a Chinese university. Mixed methods…

Anticipatory completions can be a potential place in which the second speaker expresses disagreement with the first speaker. 'Doing disagreement' is a significant feature of group work interaction, and resolving such disagreements can pose an interactional challenge for students in classroom contexts (Sharma 2012). Examining disagreement episodes…

Despite a growing focus on positive psychology in recent years, negative emotions have not ceased to play a crucial role in learning additional languages in the classroom. This paper reports a study that investigated one such negative emotion -- boredom -- as experienced by 115 advanced learners of English. They were asked to write a descriptive…

How best to teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) has been a complicated issue that has bedeviled curricula designing. Starting from the argument that today's EFL curricula do need a complete overhaul to reflect the recurrent debate about culture clash and culture cooperation. This study offers an alternative to those who advocate either…

While the multiliteracies framework proposed two decades ago has had a considerable effect on the field of second language (L2) teaching and learning, its successful implementation has been found challenging, both on the conceptual and practical levels. In this paper, we discuss the main hurdles of putting the approach into practice and argue for…

There are grounds for believing that prompting language learners to infer the meaning of new lexical items is beneficial because inferring the meaning of lexical items and verifying one's inferences invites more cognitive investment than simply being presented with the meanings. However, concerns have been raised over the risk that wrong…

To test the predictive power of the SSARC (stabilize, simplify, automatize, reconstruct, and complexify) model of pedagogic task sequencing in second language (L2) writing development, the present study explores the performance of written decision-making tasks with varied levels of cognitive complexity in a simple-to-complex sequence in comparison…

In offering an account of teaching and performing Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje's "Verrücktes Blut" (2010) with advanced German students, this article reflects on the theme of cultural identity, particularly with regard to current issues related to migrant populations. As a play that showcases theater as a transitional space where…

Via two reading experiments, this exploratory study examined the effects of over- and under-specified linguistic input on L2 online processing of Chinese referring expressions (REs). In each experiment, a group of advanced L2 Chinese speakers (all with Uyghurs as L1) and a control group of native Chinese speakers read 48 sets of 4 sentence pairs…

Developing sociolinguistic competence in Arabic can be a complex process given how Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Colloquial Arabic (CA) are used within a changing sociolinguistic environment in Arabic-speaking communities. Findings from empirical research suggest that second language (L2) Arabic learners who receive multidialectal training in…

Purpose: This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian…