This article investigates the effectiveness of positive psychology interventions (PPIs) in an intensive English program for non-matriculated university students. Interventions based on the PERMA model were implemented through weekly 65-minute lessons given during the first class of each week. These were followed by short daily activities during…

Flexible learning in this pandemic combines a specific percentage of synchronous and asynchronous sessions. In this research, the adoption of Zoom as a discussion platform tool in teaching communicative English skills to tertiary education students in a public HEI is discussed; based on the Leapfrog Principle. The study investigated the…

In many English language teaching contexts, listening activities resemble listening comprehension tests. Scholars have argued that this product-oriented approach is not particularly effective in helping learners improve their listening skills and have advocated for the inclusion of instruction that targets specific features of spoken language. The…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning has automatically become a normal practice of the "Next Normal". Intensive English is a compact three-week course offered to get first-year students ready for university study. Online learning was something new for both students and instructors. A key challenge in online learning was how to…

Often, second/foreign (L2) language learners receive little opportunity to interact orally in the target language. Interactive, conversation-based spoken dialog systems (SDSs) that use automated speech recognition and natural language processing have the potential to address this need by engaging learners in meaningful, goal-oriented speaking…

Reading approaches in Japan and other EFL settings have typically focused on accuracy at the expense of fluency. However, reading rate and fluency are important components of reading that are currently being neglected. A review of the literature reveals growing interest in investigating the effectiveness of reading rate and fluency enhancement…

While the use of educational technology in online instruction has increased in higher education, it is still limited in intensive, academic English programs. Precipitated by COVID-19, U.S. Intensive English Programs (IEPs) quickly transitioned from face-to-face (F2F) instruction to the emergency remote teaching environment (ERTE) when the public…

Although the effects of different types of written corrective feedback (WCF) have been examined in great detail, learners' revision behavior in response to WCF has not been systematically investigated. The current study compared students' classroom revision behaviors when they worked in pairs and when they worked individually. It further compared…

This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided…

The study investigates to what extent English as a second language (ESL) learners develop explicit and automatised explicit knowledge of two target-forms (third person singular 's' and future conditional if-clause) after input and output based instruction and whether learning effects differ depending on the target forms. The study follows a…

This study attempts to determine whether the students who receive explicit instruction make more gains in their abilities to use topic-induced phrases in their writing than those who do not. Additionally, through interviews with a selected group of students from the treatment group, the study attempts to glean insights into the approaches learners…

The purpose of this study was to investigate university students' perspectives of effective teaching that helped them learn English better. Adopting an interpretative approach to the research, the data was collected in three phases. In Phase One an interview was used and 17 university students studying English in Intensive English programs were…

This article reports the findings of ethnographic classroom research on the deployment of literature circles in English reading classes in the vocational secondary education sector in Indonesia. Grounded in micro-interactional, thematic, and discourse analyses, empirical findings showed that the students engaged actively in text selection, role…

This study first briefly describes an instructional approach to teaching grammar known as X-Word Grammar and then compares its effectiveness in assisting students in achieving grammatical accuracy with traditionally taught grammar. Two groups of L2 pre-college students were taught using curricula and practice procedures in two different grammar…

Formulaic sequences (FS) are frequently used by native speakers and have been found to help non-native speakers sound more fluent as well. We hypothesized that explicitly teaching FS to classroom ESL learners would increase the use of such language, which could further result in increased second language (L2) fluency. We report on a 5-week study…