Over the past decade, lexical theory, corpus statistics, and psycholinguistic research have pointed to the pedagogical value of lexical phrases. In response, commercial publishers have been quick to import these insights into their materials in a bid to accommodate consumers and to profit from the "lexical chunk" phenomenon. Contemporary British…

This article reports work to assist learners in acquiring insights into certain grammatical and lexical areas of English by drawing on their awareness of fairly elementary mathematical concepts--and shows how often English structures can behave in ways parallel to numbers. For learners with an appropriate background and learning style, it is…

This paper reports on a review of the teaching and assessment of oral language in Western Australian secondary schools. Results show that teachers have considerable difficulty in incorporating oral language tasks into their pedagogy because of a curriculum biased towards developing writing skills. Teachers also revealed that they do not have the…

EFL students of English literature face the substantial challenge of making sense of literary texts written in a foreign language. EFL teachers working with these students need to understand the problems that they face and develop ways of helping them to overcome them. This article focuses on metaphor in literature and on whether awareness raising…

In this article, "Fragebogen" (1992) by Max Frisch is shown to contain appropriately challenging linguistic constructions for use in courses as a supplement to traditional anthologies in conversation/composition courses. Frisch's eleven questionnaires on topics ranging from "Heimat," marriage and private property to humor, money and death serve as…

A variety of trends in second language teaching have left many English Language Learners (ELLs) in the United States with well-intentioned teachers who, unfortunately, have limited understanding of the second language acquisition or cultural diversity issues that affect the ELLs in their classrooms. In this article, the authors present the current…

This article introduces an approach to planning sequences of communication tasks that require learners to become personally involved in their learning. By drawing on their own ideas and experiences, as a product of earlier tasks in a given sequence, learners generate the content and resource material on which subsequent tasks operate. The article…

English is the lingua franca of the Internet and as a consequence the World Wide Web offers a rich bounty for ESL and EFL teachers and learners. It also represents a vast repository of misinformation, poor language use, and potentially offensive material. There are any number of possible approaches to avoiding the pitfalls of the Internet while…

In philosophy, authenticity has been used with two meanings: one entails the notion of correspondence; the other entails the notion of genesis (Cooper, 1983: 15). As in certain branches of philosophy, language teaching has perhaps clung too long to the first of these notions of authenticity at the expense of the other. This paper reviews four key…

This paper examines how and why learner resistance (to the teacher's goals and expectations) occurred in a metacognition-training (MT) project, which aimed to enhance reflection and autonomy in EFL learning. MT was integrated into a regular EFL reading course for second-year BA TEFL undergraduates at a Chinese university. Learner resistance in the…

Meta-analytic research of experiments conducted on the effects of native-language (L1) glosses on second-language (L2) reading comprehension have revealed a significant difference between groups of studies with traditional and computer-assisted L1 glosses. This means that learners provided with L1 glosses comprehend significantly more…

This article addresses a pervasive problem of concern to teachers of many foreign languages: the use of Web-Based Machine Translation (WBMT) by students who do not understand the complexities of this relatively new tool. Although networked technologies have greatly increased access to many language and communication tools, WBMT is still…

The cognitive skills of beginning German students in high school and college outstrip their linguistic ability in the target language. In a proficiency-based curriculum, students communicate about familiar matters and everyday culture although they are intellectually prepared to consider more complex cultural issues. As a result, deeper culture is…

This article describes model units for an in-depth cultural analysis of "Das Versprechen" in undergraduate college courses including intermediate German, German culture and civilization, advanced conversation and composition, and film. Practical suggestions for pre-viewing, viewing, and post-viewing activities as well as assessment in…

This paper presents empirical results from an analysis of English and German conversational fillers produced by bilinguals. They reveal that even accomplished bilinguals do not display an overall native-like realization of conversational fillers in their second language (L2). Along with the findings of L2 studies showing that the comprehension and…