English language tutoring and/or self-access centers are services commonly offered as curricular support to English language program students in educational environments worldwide. This paper argues that the theory of self-directed learning (SDL) from the field of adult education should be considered alongside the equally-important areas of…

Peer assessment has been widely applied to actively engage students in learning to write. However, sometimes students resist peer assessment. This study explores reviewers' attitudes and other underlying factors that influence students' participation in online peer assessment. Participants were 234 Chinese undergraduates from two different…

Purpose: A coursebook is ranked among the fundamentals of language teaching, which directly affects the success of classroom activities. Therefore, investigations into the nature and efficiency of this relationship should yield invaluable insights to improving language teaching. In this regard, this study aims to investigate EFL teachers' views…

The faculty and administration at Drake University made the decision in 2001 to alter radically how language instruction was delivered and received, beginning by disbanding the long-standing Modern Language Department. The dissolution of the department and the new pedagogy caused ripples of concern and shock among language instructors and…

The terms "interactional competence" and "learning" are discussed in the context of recent research in the areas of cognitive science and ethnomethodological conversation analysis studies of language learning. Two data excerpts from a longitudinal case study of a beginning learner of English are presented to illustrate (1) the…

In this conversation, two U.S.-trained German language and culture educators discuss their approaches to intercultural communicative competence (ICC). Working in different educational settings -- in a German and Global Studies program at a public university in the U.S., and at the Institute for Intercultural Communication of a German university…

The Scandinavian countries currently face their largest ever wave of immigration. The immigration wave increases the need for immigrants to learn the host language to be able to participate in work life and become a citizen of the host country. Yet, the language training programmes -- 'Swedish for Immigrants' in Sweden have come under great…

Considering the controversy about the nature of ergativity, the issue of whether a case morpheme is theta assigning or just structural case-marking, the present study tried to provide an evidence for either side or both. To this aim, the acquisition and use of ergative verbs were studied and possible explications of the errors were presented.…

At a time when language programs around the United States are in crisis--the University of Rhode Island's Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures is realigning its curriculum to emphasize proficiency and intercultural competence within a strong liberal arts context. The result of the department's recent initiatives? More than…

This paper describes a project-based oral activity trialled with Year 1 and Year 2 students of the Spanish Degree Programme at the University of York. The objective of the activity aimed to develop students' speaking confidence through the completion of an authentic task based on the concept of authentic assessment. This task was implemented…

This study seeks to investigate the effect of pre-service foreign language teachers' interactions on their continuing professional development (CPD), using a theoretical instructional design framework consisted of the three presence indicators of a Community of Inquiry (CoI) model and the Jigsaw teaching technique. The investigation was performed…

This study aims to determine lifelong learning dispositions of faculty members who teach foreign languages in terms of gender and academic title variables. Although it was intended to reach the whole population which consisted of 62 faculty members who teach in the faculties of English Language and Literature, German Language and Literature,…

The present study aims to explore Turkish EFL students' major writing difficulties by analyzing the frequent writing errors in academic essays. Accordingly, the study examined errors in a corpus of 150 academic essays written by Turkish EFL students studying at the Department of English Language and Literature at a public university in Turkey. The…

This paper explores the unique contribution of content modules towards the development of criticality (Barnett, 1997) and intercultural competence (Byram, 1997) in Modern Languages (ML). It draws upon the findings of a PhD study investigating the implications of the division between language and content, as experienced by German Studies students…

A wide variety of technologies combined with traditional classroom methods can make learning easier in the digital age. This paper studied undergraduate students' learning performance and satisfaction after they had studied in a blended setting and investigated if variables of learner characteristics and course features would be predictors for…