This study examines the effects of an online workbook and a paper workbook on L2 vocabulary acquisition. Participants consisted of 549 L2 learners of Spanish enrolled in a large language program at an American state university. The participants received 4 hours of classroom instruction per week and worked with an online or a paper workbook once a…

Process-oriented writing instruction stresses the value of between-draft revision. Yet current literature and traditional pedagogy have provided little guidance for motivating student writers to look beyond surface errors to develop and to refine their communicative intentions. Based on the assumption that this deep-level revision is most…

Vygotsky proposed the concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) but did not elaborate the concept of "peer," leaving open the question of how capable a peer should be and how practice or outcome might differ according to a peer's level of capability. These issues were investigated in a sociocultural study of first-year Vietnamese…

From 1969 to the late 1980's, most French programs in schools were based on a traditional foreign language instructional model, usually offering 30 minutes a day of French language instruction in elementary grades, increasing to 50 minutes a day in middle school. Contingent on funding and political swings over time, programs expanded from…

This article explores the role which the social context of learning plays in the development of learner strategies. It is based on longitudinal foreign language classroom research in state comprehensive schools in the UK. It is built on the premise that the development of learner strategies is linked to the type of learning context in which they…

The role of instruction to develop learners' pragmatic competence in both second and foreign language contexts has recently motivated a great deal of research. However, most of this research has adopted an explicit instructional approach with only a few studies attempting to operationalise a more implicit condition for pragmatic learning. In order…

Within the field of second language acquisition, the acquisition of phonetics and phonology has generally taken a back seat to studies of morphological and syntactical acquisition. Although the lacuna is slowly being remedied by a growing interest in the phenomena of second language (L2) phonology, investigations into the acquisition of…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the durability of the effect of explicit and implicit instructions on beginning EFL learners' learning of the copula "be". The study intends to examine whether or not the effect remains after the auxiliary "be" of the progressive is introduced. Three groups of 89 Japanese junior high…

The aim of this study was to learn from students' frame of reference how they experience foreign language classes. Data include learning diaries written during 2005 for more than 35 weeks (March to November). Subjects were 95 Argentine, Caucasian, mostly female, middle-class, Spanish-speaking College students between 19 and 21 years of age who…

In this study, the Felder learning styles inventory was administered to students who were non-English majors in a Chinese University. Descriptive statistics identified that participants do vary in their preference for particular learning styles with a great variety of learning style preferences distributed unevenly among the sample population. A…

Literacy today is characterised by rapidly changing and emergent forms of meaning making in the context of increased cultural and linguistic diversity, giving rise to the multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group. This article responds to these imperatives, reporting findings from a critical ethnography investigating the interactions…

Grounded in culturally relevant pedagogy, this case study explored the practices of a general education classroom teacher teaching middle grade English language learners (ELLs). The purpose of this study was to examine the teacher's beliefs about her role in teaching ELLs, and the relationship between her teaching approaches and the students'…

This paper presents some considerations on teaching L2 rhetorical conventions in university-level multilingual classrooms. It is claimed that if L2 students need to acquire versatile writing skills in L2 to be given a voice in the discourse milieu of the receiving society, they should also have the right to preserve their L1 cultural perspective.…

Current guidelines on teacher--student rapport, while providing helpful suggestions, fail to address the question of how rapport building can be achieved in contextualised classroom interaction in which a balance needs to be reached between rapport and instructional tasks. Using discourse analysis informed by a conversation analytic approach and…

Using a case study approach, the authors describe how a teacher used the tools of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to teach her fifth grade English Language Learners how to use academic language to challenge school policies regarding recess. In reflecting on these data, we discuss the potential of SFL to support teachers in responding to…