This exploratory study seeks for understanding the relationship between Turkish elementary school English teachers' espoused beliefs about the effective ways of teaching English and their self-reported practices. 6 teachers, who were working at different state schools in a town located in the Northwestern part of Turkey, were interviewed.…

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) at the Brigham Young University website has been used in the English as a Foreign language (EFL) classroom to help learners better understand how language works at different levels of analysis and also to develop their writing skills. However, it also allows learners to explore culture-related…

Beginner students often have difficulties using adjectives when they write descriptions in English. This article focuses on the procedures used to help my sixth grade students understand and use adjectives in the correct order by using a blog. To achieve the objective of the project I decided to implement an innovation in and out of class…

The PISA 2000 study found large differences between countries in terms of quality of learning. In some countries, students prefer rote learning to meaningful learning. However, such memorisation of the material does not lead to recallable and usable knowledge in the long run. Ausubel's (1968) well-known theory serves as a basis for several…

This study analyzes the writing performance levels of 352 students to determine the extent to which business students are achieving written communication competency and whether differences exist among the business majors. Although most students met or exceeded expectations in format and content on a common writing task, students were weakest in…

The aim of this paper was to investigate the role of linguistic and intelligence factors in L2 writing. The sample included 347 Iranian learners of English. Six tests were administered to measure the participants' grammar knowledge, depth of vocabulary knowledge, breadth of vocabulary, verbal intelligence, narrative intelligence, and writing…

Want a quick way to get your students happily conversing more in the target language? This practical book shows you how to use formative assessments to gain immediate and lasting improvement in your students' fluency. You'll learn how to: (1) Imbed the 3-minute formative assessment into every lesson with ease; (2) Engage students in peer formative…

Students who are deaf and use sign language frequently have language delays that affect their literacy skills. Students who use American Sign Language (ASL) often lack fluent language models in both the home and school settings, delaying both the development of a first language and the development of literacy in printed English. Mediated and…

Odlin (2003) observes that there is no consensus among researchers regarding the importance of L1 transfer in second-language acquisition (henceforth SLA). To test whether L1 transfer is a significant factor in SLA of English relative clauses (RCs), an English-language acceptability judgment task (AJT) with a four-point rating scale was…

This article presents a qualitative study demonstrating how teachers who are non-native speakers (NNS) of the target language and who have learned the target language in a similar environment as their students can use their past learning experiences as pedagogical tools in their classes. An analysis of transcripts from classrooms with NNS and…

Contrastive rhetoric studies the writing of second language learners to understand how it is affected by their first language and culture. The field of contrastive rhetoric is as multidimensional as second language writing is complex. It draws on the work of contrastive analysis, anthropology, linguistics, pedagogy, culture studies, translation…

This study investigated the English writing skills developed by 42 children participating in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program for approximately 315 hr, spread over 18 months. The English writing abilities were measured 3 times in terms of grammar, content, coherence, spelling, and text length. A repeated measures multivariate…

This study analyses the behavior and the preferences of the Greek learners of Turkish language, who use a particular e-learning website in parallel with their studies, namely: http://turkish.pgeorgalas.gr. The website offers free online material in Greek and English language for learning the Turkish language and grammar. The traffic of several…

This article reports on a study which took place in the context of the design and development of an online dictionary prototype for learners of French. Aspects of the "usability", i.e. the quality of the "learner-task-dictionary interaction" of the prototype were tested. Micro-tasks were designed to focus on learners'…

Assessments developed and field tested for the mainstream student population may not be accessible for students with disabilities (SWDs) as a result of the impact of extraneous variables, including cognitive features, such as depth of knowledge required, grammatical and lexical complexity, lexical density, and textual/visual features. This study…