This study explores the use of a corpus of classroom discourse data (Singapore Corpus of Research in Education or SCoRE) to facilitate the professional development of English language (EL) teachers in Singapore. A survey was first conducted to probe the knowledge base and belief system of EL teachers in three key domains: epistemology, pedagogy,…

The field of L2 pragmatics demonstrates the effect of instructional intervention on the development of L2 learners' pragmatic competence. Nevertheless, effective instruction requires knowledge of pragmatic performances of L2 learners in naturally occurring conversations, in comparison to those of the target community speakers. This study, using a…

This article focuses on research carried out in a private school in Bogotá with a group of English as a foreign language fourth-graders. The study aimed to analyze interaction in the English classroom through action research, based on tasks that promoted collaborative work and involvement of the students and their teacher. The instruments to…

U.S. public schools are required to establish policies ensuring that English language learners have equal access to "meaningful education." This demands that districts put into place mechanisms to determine student eligibility for specialized English language services. For the most states, this federal requirement is fulfilled through…

As an important yet intricate linguistic feature in English language, synonymy poses a great challenge for second language learners. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool, this article compares the usage of "learn" and "acquire" used in natural…

In the recent years, globalization prepared a ground for English to be the lingua franca of the academia. Thus, most highly prestigious international journals have defined their medium of publications as English. However, even advanced language learners have difficulties in writing their research articles due to the lack of appropriate lexical…

Transmission-based language classrooms have been mostly dominated by teachers' authority, as reflected in IRF (Teacher Initiation, Student Response, Teacher Follow up/Feedback) architecture of their discourses. By contrast, Critical Pedagogy (CP) has been after fostering multivocality in and out of classroom borders. Which qualities of teacher…

Teletandem is a telecollaborative learning context that involves pairs of native (or competent) speakers of different languages interacting through voice, text and webcam image. Using Skype, each participant plays the role of learner for half an hour, speaking and practising the language of his/her partner. This paper focuses on a teletandem…

Research on the routines of doctor-patient consultations has been conducted in language and culture concordant dyads and in dyads where either doctor or patient uses a foreign language; yet there is an absence of scholarly engagement with consultations where both participants are using a foreign language. In seeking to address this gap, this…

This study investigates how transnational women construct their social relations by telling stories in a lingua franca environment (Firth 1996). My main interest lies in naturally occurring and interactionally achieved stories (Bamberg 2004; Georgakopoulou 2007) told during break time of an adult English as a Second Language (ESL) class in…

This study examines how Korean ethnic identity can be represented differently by Korean early study abroad undergraduates in the U.S. and by their parents. The data were collected from in-depth individual interviews with 22 Korean early study abroad undergraduates and 10 of their parents, and the collected data were analyzed using critical…

Opportunities for language learners to access authentic input and engage in consequential interactions with native speakers of their target language abound in this era of computer mediated communication. Synchronous audio/video calling software represents one opportunity to access such input and address the challenges of developing pragmatic and…

Taking a psycholinguistic orientation within task-based language teaching scholarship, this study investigated the effects of mode (oral vs. written) and task complexity on second language (L2) performance. The participants were 78 Catalan/Spanish learners of English as a foreign language. Half of the participants performed the simple and complex…

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) once meant principally text-based communication mediated by computers, but rapid technological advances in recent years have heralded an era of multimodal communication with a growing emphasis on audio and video synchronous interaction. As CMC, in all its variants (text chats, video chats, forums, blogs, SMS,…

This paper presents results from an ethnographic study of language policy as it is enacted in everyday interaction in two language profile preschools in Sweden with explicit monolingual language policies: English and Finnish, respectively. However, in both preschools, children are free to choose language or code alternate. The study shows how…