The importance of materials in learning and teaching has prompted a substantial number of studies on English language learning/teaching materials (ELLTM). To date, the field seems largely unstudied when it comes to identifying the focus, themes, and challenges. Hence the present study endeavored to systematically review, analyze, and synthesize…

Privatisation and commercialisation in education encompass a range of interrelated practices, including the outsourcing of educational services as well as increased reliance on commercially produced resources for the delivery of learning and assessment. An increase in these practices has accompanied the shift from centralised systemic management…

The goals of the article's authors are: to justify the need to teach students the skills of professional communication in a foreign language on the basis of a text-oriented approach; to demonstrate the possibility of conducting this type of training in reference to the discourse analysis of a particular institutional area. Achievement of the goals…

This paper reports on the development of constructive EAP CALL courseware, and its integration into blended learning contexts, as a solution to the problems in EAP courses in Chinese universities. A case study of a defining skills package, developed for undergraduates at the University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB), is used to…

Pronunciation has always been one of the most difficult parts of language learning. Since Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) seeks to make language learning easier, it can be found quite effective and helpful in teaching and learning pronunciation. So the present study aims at investigating the effect of using General English Training…

In this paper, a Chinese character educational system based on Kinect is proposed for guiding beginners to learn the basics of Chinese characters in a more intuitive way. It extracts 19 common components, denoted as alphabets, from Chinese characters. Nineteen postures were designed according to the shapes of these alphabets. Instead of memorizing…

This paper evaluates the affordability of "Quipper" as an online platform for teaching and learning English as a foreign language (EFL). It focuses on the extent to which features available in "Quipper" may correspond to fundamental components of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) pedagogy, as suggested by Chapelle…

Gateway courses in English challenge students to strengthen skills in critical thinking, reading, grammar, and writing structure and strategies -- skills that also help build competency in comprehension and composition. They can also prove to be a particular challenge to many community college students. This case study examines the efforts at…

The past decade has seen a growing interest in "flipped teaching", an inversion of traditional teaching methods, whereby instruction formerly taking place in the classroom is made accessible online and lesson time is spent on interaction. Until very recently, flipped learning was largely limited to the Science, Technology, Engineering,…

The implementation of interactive courseware within a task-based learning (TBL) approach was conducted for English Writing for Business to Chinese students in an applied foreign languages department housed in a university of technology. The development of the interactive courseware is based on Mayer's multimedia learning theory, which allows…

The paper describes development of the educational online web communication platform for teaching and learning foreign languages. The main objective was to develop a web application for teaching foreigners to understand casual fluent speech. The system is based on the time bank principle, allowing users to teach others their native language along…

Following the integration of an online homework tool--MyEnglishLab (MEL)--into their English courseware products, Pearson sought to explore how one of these products, Speakout, was being implemented with MyEnglishLab and perceptions about the impact it was having on learning. Speakout is a comprehensive eight-level General British English course…

Despite increasing attention on literacy-based approaches to foreign language instruction (e.g. Allen & Dupuy, 2013; Barrette, Paesani, & Vinall, 2010; Byrnes, 2005; Kern, 2004; Magnan, Murphy, & Sahakyan, 2014) the communicative approach's emphasis on oral proficiency continues to shadow reading practices. Although research findings…

The aim of this paper is to describe a blended learning model to be used in Egyptian schools when teaching reading classes in English as a foreign language. This paper is divided into three parts. The first part outlines the Egyptian context and describes the target learners. The second part describes the suggested blended learning model, which is…

This article highlights the importance of immediate corrective feedback in tutorial software for language teaching in an academic learning environment. We aim to demonstrate that, rather than simply reporting on the performance of the foreign language learner, this feedback can act as a mediator of students' cognitive and metacognitive activity.…