Adopting a decompositional approach to items in the lexicon, this article reports on an empirical study investigating Chinese speakers' second language (L2) acquisition of English "wh-on-earth" questions (i.e. questions with phrases like what on earth or "who on earth"). An acceptability judgment task, a discourse-completion…

In educational research, it is well-known that collaborative work on core conceptual issues in physics leads to significant improvements in students' conceptual understanding. In this paper, we explore collaborative learning in action, adding to previous research in engineering education with a specific focus on the students' use of free body…

This paper addresses the issue of corrective feedback (CF), a topic widely investigated in the last few decades (Sheen, 2011), and instructional context. We observed and recorded the oral interaction of an intact class of thirty Spanish intermediate-level high-school learners and two teachers in two settings: a traditional form-oriented English as…

The aim of this study is to examine the strategies majority language-speaking parents use to support the development of the minority language in families who follow the pattern of exposure known as one-parent-one-language (OPOL). In this particular pattern of raising a child bilingually, each parent speaks only their own native language to their…

The present paper examines negotiation of meaning and language-related episodes in Chinese-German eTandem interaction, focusing on Chinese as target language. Against the background of the interactionist approach to language learning and drawing upon Swain and Lapkin's (1998, Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French…

Higher education institutions are increasingly interested in offering more flexible teaching and learning delivery methods that are often independent of place. Where foreign language learning is concerned, telecollaboration is gaining ground. This paper focuses on synchronous webconferencing-supported teaching and examines how different semiotic…

Research suggests that identity matters for school success and that language and identity are powerfully intertwined. A monolingual solitudes understanding of bilingualism undermines children's bilingual identities, yet in most bilingual education classrooms, academic instruction is segregated by language and children are encouraged to engage in…

Immediately after President Obama's successful campaign, many hypothesized that the United States had entered a post-racial era. This study uses critical race theory to examine how high-achieving Black and Latinx college students make meaning of and navigate affirmative action policy discourses in an era of colorblind racial politics.…

This dissertation study focused on a feature of emergent interactions in the L2 classroom called unanticipated student utterances (USUs), which is defined as utterances spoken by the student that the teacher has not anticipated as part of the discussion at hand. The purpose of the study was to demonstrate why USUs are significant in the L2…

Dialogic talk, in which different ideas are considered, promotes conceptual understanding in science, and is in line with South Africa's school curriculum. The problem is that dialogic talk is difficult to facilitate and may run counter to cultural norms. As a result, classroom talk is often not dialogic. This paper reports on the nature of…

This paper reports on the results of a study that analyzed second language practitioners' and researchers' on-line interactions about six published articles written by the researcher participants. The project used Lavis et al.'s (2003) knowledge transfer framework and Graham et al. (2006) knowledge to action framework as foundations to create a…

Drawing from a social constructionist perspective to written scholarly communication, this paper argues that training in academic writing for students in higher education especially in second language contexts should go beyond emphasis on grammatical correctness and paragraphing strategies, and also focus on the rhetorical character of academic…

In this article we consider how the roles of learner and teacher are configured in a teletandem exchange between two students working in a university language centre with no external tutor present. Teletandem is a multilateral exchange (Lewis et al. 2011) via desktop videoconferencing. It is based on the tandem method, where two learners with…

This paper represents some suggestions towards discourse-analytic approaches for ESL/EFL education, with the focus on identifying the textual forms which can contribute to the textual difficulty. Textual difficulty/comprehensibility, rather than being purely text-based or reader-dependent, is certainly a matter of interaction between text and…

As the diagnosis of AD/HD becomes more frequent in our schools, and as many individuals across ages embrace an AD/HD identity, scholars need to account for the lived experience of the disorder to understand the meanings individuals give to it. This paper analyses the relationship between ethical practices of self-formation, power, and knowledge…