This study examined the development of text complexity for the past 25 years of reading comprehension passages in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in China. Text complexity of 206 reading passages at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels has been measured longitudinally and compared across the years. The natural language…

Research writing is an important part of doctoral study. Previous studies suggest that students who speak English as an additional language (EAL) may experience difficulties in writing a thesis in English. This study investigated the nature of the writing challenges experienced by EAL doctoral students. Drawing on data collected from individual…

This case study explores the challenges that Master's students encounter when learning to write in academic English as part of a UK postgraduate course, after having achieved the required IELTS entry score. Interviews with six Chinese and Japanese learners at different stages of the Master's study revealed more sophisticated writing difficulties…

Technology has been called to the rescue on a number of occasions, be it in large classes, under-resourced contexts, after earthquakes or other natural disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic which struck the whole world in Spring 2020 afterwards necessitated a sudden shift from face-to-face to distance teaching. With no preparation, no training and very…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

We investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining the relationship between age of onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie implicit learning (phonological short-term memory and implicit statistical learning), and performance on an auditory grammaticality…

This study investigates the effects of early second-language (L2) acquisition on introduction of characters in narrative discourse by comparing 5- and 7-year-old monolingual (first-language [L1] = Turkish) and bilingual (L1 = Turkish, L2 = English) children. Turkish does not have a grammaticalized article system like English which enables to…

This paper describes one approach to focusing on Connections, one of the five Cs from the World Readiness Standards for Learning Languages, as a means of exposing introductory language students to culturally diverse authentic texts through drama-based pedagogy. Our approach focuses on an instructor working within an established departmental…

Prosody communicates pragmatic meaning far beyond that which is evident at the surface level of an utterance and can pose challenges to learners' pragmatic comprehension. The current study investigated how second language (L2) English learners made decisions about speaker intent when communicated through prosody. Seventeen English L2 learners took…

This paper explores the practices of division in operation in primary schools in England in response to the pressures of high stakes tests at age 10/11, known as SATs. Using data from interviews with 20 primary headteachers and information from a survey of nearly 300 primary heads, we argue that the organisation of pupils in preparation for SATs…

Traditionally, pronunciation is taught through recognition- or repetition-based mechanical drills. Upon the arrival of the communicative approach, pronunciation has been neglected in the ELT classroom because these types of activities are considered uncommunicative and form-focused. The teachers and coursebooks, however, have failed to replace…

This study draws upon Mindful L2 Teacher Education (Johnson & Golombek, 2016) to explore how volunteer community tutors of adult English as a Second Language (ESL) conceptualize and enact their roles as creative teachers. Through three case studies, I explore community language teachers' preunderstandings, contradictions, and growth points.…

This study aims to determine the relationship between cultural interaction and language in teaching Turkish as a foreign language and reveal its contribution to the learning process. Therefore, in this study, the cultural exchange of a Lebanese international student studying at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University was evaluated in the context of…

This article hypothesizes that one of the reasons for Chinese EFL learners' rigid use of nominalization and insufficient use of hedging in academic writing can be attributed to the unclear understanding of the relationship between these two expressions. The aim of the research is to first prove and then explain the possible co-occurrence of…

The current paper is a mixed method study which aimed to find out teacher written feedback preferences of a group of prep-class students at a public university in Turkey. The written corrective feedback preferences of 37 students with high level of proficiency in English were examined via a questionnaire and an interview. The study lasted for two…