This study was conducted at a university based in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The purpose of the study was to determine if the explicit instruction of selected grammar aspect, modal auxiliary verbs, improved students' ability to write English. The study was qualitative in nature and a case study design was adopted. The focus was in relation to a…

This study aimed to investigate how international students enrolled on medical and surgical bachelor's degree programs (MBBS) in China perceived online medical education course, compared to native Chinese students during the Covid-19 pandemic. The perceptions of 38 MBBS and 31 Chinese sophomores were surveyed using the Chaoxing platform. The…

This paper reports on a pilot course responding to facilitating academic writing for an academic writing program implemented at a provincial key university in China. Taken from an activity theoretical perspective, it discusses the practical experience collected during a pilot process of designing, implementing, and assessing a genre-based approach…

The article presents and discusses a study that focuses upon discursive representations of sustainability in English Language Teaching (ELT) that are found on the official web-site of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The study involved a corpus of texts related to sustainability in ELT that were collected on the website of the…

Universities in English medium instruction (EMI) settings are generally reticent about the linguistic diversity of their student body. Very often, a monolingual mindset dominates institutional thinking that casts linguistic diversity as obstacle rather than asset for the EMI curriculum. This has given rise to deficit models of English language…

With the expanding role of English medium instruction (EMI) worldwide there has been an increasing use of English to teach content subjects at tertiary level. In implementing EMI a common assumption has been that the primary issue affecting successful EMI is the English proficiency level of the EMI instructor. This paper reviews this assumption by…

The Purpose: The purpose of this study is to take a fresh look at language education from the perspective of positive communication (PC) as it contributes to the well--being of language learners. It explores a context that has received little attention: older learners. The lessons drawn from older learners can help practitioners in other contexts…

English is a compulsory course for students in China from primary education to postgraduate education. Recently more and more policymakers at Chinese universities have been forcing English education to be performed using a one-way English immersion approach. In their views, the more English practices in English classes, the better the learners'…

Twenty-first-century skills are considered to be critical to student development. The present study aimed to validate a scale that reflects 21st century skills in education. The participants were 982 students in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades at two primary schools in a large city in Shandong, China, who were all asked to learn English in a…

This study proposed a set of measures for assessing noun phrase (NP) complexity in second language (L2) Chinese writing and compared the predictive power of these measures for L2 Chinese writing quality to that of a set of syntactic complexity measures based on the topic-comment unit (TC-unit). Our data consisted of 101 narratives written by…

This study focuses on the social presence framework (Rourke et al., 2001), in order to examine the ways that university-level international students develop social interaction and support in a virtual asynchronous learning community in an online class during the COVID-19 pandemic. English language learners (ELLs) participated in weekly online…

In this study, we propose a hypothesis that domain-general auditory processing, a perceptual anchor of L1 acquisition, can serve as the foundation of successful post-pubertal L2 learning. This hypothesis was tested with 139 post-pubertal L2 immersion learners by linking individual differences in auditory discrimination across multiple acoustic…

The acquisition of a second language (L2) may be challenging in adulthood, as the phonological system of the native language (L1) can sometimes limit the perception of phonological contrasts in L2. The present study aimed to (a) examine the influence of an L1 (Hebrew) that lacks a phonemic contrast for vowel length on the ability to discriminate…

This paper presents the findings of a study that intended to seek the content validity (CV) evidence of an instrument to measure the reading ability of university students in Sri Lanka. The reading passages and items were adapted from CEFR aligned Learning Resource Network (LRN) materials. The items were designed based on the cognitive processing…

After the exceptional circumstances the whole world has experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students have become digital natives who seek learning that overcomes the barriers of place and time. This mixed-methods study aimed at investigating EFL learners' perceptions regarding the application of Busuu in language learning, by applying the…