This article probes Thai tertiary students' perspectives on kind teacher characteristics. The Thai word "jaidee", which means kind, is commonly used by Thai students, in an institution under study, to describe a desirable quality in teachers with whom they select to enroll. While it is appreciable that empathy is a trait expected in good…

The ultimate goal of any academic program is to educate and bring up thoughtful citizens in societies. By "thoughtfulness" we mean paving the spectrum from simply applying the rules (lower order thinking) to finding proper solution to authentic novel problems (higher order thinking). It is helping the practitioners pave the continuum of…

Drawing on the framework of Modality from systemic functional linguistics, the present study aimed to explore adolescent ESL learners' interpersonal meaning-making. Data were collected from 10 writing tasks completed by a group of 50 adolescent ESL learners in China. Functional text analysis was utilized to analyze the data, including Modality…

This article offers an analysis of how refugee youths from Africa used and shifted languages and discourses in the United States. Drawing on sociocultural theories of language and utilizing ethnographic discourse and classroom observation data, the author illustrates the varied ways in which three high school--aged refugee youths used languages to…

Although world Englishes and various teaching practices in English as an international language (EIL) have been recommended for English language curricula, the effectiveness of including a variety of Englishes in such curricula has not been fully examined. This small-scale study investigated the effectiveness of exposure to world Englishes among…

The study was a humble attempt at cross-analyzing court decisions drafted in American, Philippine, and Indonesian Englishes in the perspective of world Englishes (WEs). Using the contrastive genre analysis framework of Le, Kui, and Ying-Long (2008), and Cheng, Sin, and Li (2008), the study examined three authentic court decisions taken from the…

Enabling pedagogy and andragogy is discussed as a form of lifelong learning in which learners attain competences and skills as children (pedagogy) and as adults (andragogy) that enable them to engage in independent learning in the 21st century. Throughout the article the author avoids as much as possible the labels "deaf" and…

Despite the increase of Spanish heritage language (HL) courses in response to the linguistic needs of HL learners, these courses often combine this student population with advanced second language (L2) learners. This common scenario presents a challenge to many instructors who lack the training to negotiate intercultural and linguistic issues in…

The challenges and opportunities facing Spanish and Portuguese faculty, students, and programs in the twenty-first century are both numerous and significant. A careful consideration of the realities of teaching and learning in this sector, combined with an examination of current and future trends and statistics, provides a framework for…

Linguists are an increasing presence not only in graduate programs but at undergraduate institutions as well, and this could lead to positive interdisciplinary changes in curricula. Literary/cultural texts contain masterful examples of how linguistic features are used to communicate meaning, and learners need to notice these features in order to…

This study investigates the multicomponential nature of L2 Arabic writing by adapting a number of direct measures of linguistic "complexity," "accuracy," and "fluency" (CAF) to the measurement of written Arabic texts produced by L2 Arabic learners and Arabic Native Speakers (NSs). Previous studies of L2 writing have…

In an attempt to better understand the role of relationship between the use of English indefinite article and L1 transfer in L2 countability judgments by speakers of non-classifier languages, the current study investigates how Saudi EFL learners judge noun countability in English. The current study aims to find; (1) if countability judgments…

Motivational factors play an important role in (language) learning processes and research indicates that this is also true for telecollaboration exchanges (Jauregi, de Graaff, van den Bergh, & Kriz, 2012; Melchor-Couto, 2017; in press). This short paper will introduce a study into how motivational factors play a role in telecollaboration…

We integrate insights from research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Computational Linguistics (CL) to generate text-based questions. We discuss the generation of wh- questions as functionally-driven input enhancement facilitating the acquisition of particle verbs and report the results of two crowdsourcing studies. The first study shows…

This paper reports on the potential of Oral Elicited Imitation (OEI) as a format for output practice, building on an analysis of picture-matching and spoken data collected from 36 university-level learners of German as a second language (L2) in a web-based assessment task inspired by Input Processing (VanPatten, 2004). The design and development…