This study examined the effects of explicit instruction on the development of pragmatic competence in L2 English. The study is based on Taguchi's (2012) study conducted in an English-medium university in Japan, which revealed patterns of change in Japanese EFL students' production of requests in high- and low-imposition situations. Students showed…

In some settings, medium of instruction (MOI) policies in multilingual education break out into public debates in mass media involving politicians, business leaders, government officials, parents, and school children. These public discussions of MOI often index struggles over the distribution of political power and economic resources, and issues…

We argue that Latino/a students are more likely to major in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in college if they were educated in high schools where they studied with satisfied teachers who worked in collaborative professional communities. Quantitative results demonstrate that collaborative professional communities in high school…

The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the views of exchange students from Asia about their academic and social experiences at an American university. The participants were eight exchange students from Japan (four men and four women). This study was descriptive-qualitative (Patton, 2002). The data sources were a demographic survey…

As an important and a challenging source-based writing task, synthesizing offers rich opportunities to explore the connections between reading and writing. In this article, we report findings from a qualitative study of two Chinese students' learning experiences with academic synthesis writing in a university ESL composition course. Specifically,…

This paper discusses the complex and competing language ideologies that Korean educational migrant families in Singapore hold about the normativity and legitimacy of English language varieties. During their educational migration in Singapore, Korean families show ambivalent attitudes toward the local variety of English in Singapore, Singlish.…

Legitimate teacher authority is fundamental to effective teaching, but is often a thorny issue that teachers need to grapple with when teaching in cross-cultural teaching contexts. By interviewing 18 pre-service Chinese language teachers on their understanding of legitimate teacher authority throughout teaching practicum at international schools…

The study reported in this article aims to capture the possible changes to the discursive mode of College English (CE) teaching in China by comparing teachers' questions, feedback, and teaching exchanges across two levels of quality courses constructed at different years. Based on transcribed data of 20 videos, it reveals that the general…

This paper analyses how the impact of international student achievement studies and the recent economic crisis in Europe are influencing the development of educational policy transfer and borrowing, from East to West. This is contrasted with education reform movements in East Asia, which have long legacies of borrowing from so-called…

The Academic Motivation Scale (AMS) is a comprehensive and widely used instrument for assessing motivation based on the self-determination theory. Currently, no such comprehensive instrument exists to assess the different domains of motivation (stipulated by the self-determination theory) in mathematics education at the pre-tertiary level (grades…

The ability to recognise words from the aural modality is a critical aspect of successful second language (L2) listening comprehension. However, little research has been reported on computer-mediated development of L2 word recognition from speech in L2 learning contexts. This report describes the development of an innovative computer application…

Socialization as a theoretical concept has been increasingly applied to higher education over the past several decades. However, little research examines international visiting scholars' overseas academic socialization experiences. Rooted in socialization theory, this one-year qualitative study explores 15 Chinese visiting scholars' lived…

We report a study that uses retrospective analysis to understand the relationships between American and Chinese participants' utterances during a conversation and the moment-by-moment feelings and reactions they subsequently described. Intercultural and intracultural pairs of Chinese and American participants talked about a fictional crime story…

The stratification of opportunities and disparate outcomes for Black and Latino boys and men has been well documented. However, there remains a lack of awareness about the extent to which these issues are relevant for the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. This brief focuses on key status and leading indicators for the mobility…

This article draws on research carried out in a Chinese complementary school in Scotland. The research focused on children's experience of learning to read Chinese and on the strategies that they used to support their learning. Here, I provide an account of one particular aspect of this research, namely the creation of a dialogic space for…