To find an easy-to-use, automated tool to identify technical vocabulary applicable to learners at various levels, nine statistical measures were applied to the 7.3-million-word "commerce and finance" component of the British National Corpus. The resulting word lists showed that each statistical measure extracted a different level of specialized…

Focusing on the implementation of a task-based curriculum at a Thai university, this paper examines the continuation stage of the innovation by looking at how and why the curriculum has changed in its first four years. Based on course documentation and teacher interviews, the major changes to the curriculum were a reduction in the number of tasks,…

Our study explores the similarities and differences between a discourse completion task (DCT) and corpus data and discusses potential implications for using the two in a pedagogic context. The DCT has traditionally been used as an instrument for the study of interlanguage pragmatics while both spoken and written corpora have mainly been used to…

The use of multimedia technologies in language teaching and learning has become very popular in the last few years. In the case of countries like Spain, multimedia language schools have experienced a great boom and a dramatic fall in the last 10 years. This study applies marketing research techniques to the study of Catalan learners' preferences…

This paper describes the linguistic forms used to perform the speech act of suggestions in both real language and ESL textbooks. Comparisons between suggestions in two authentic settings in a corpus, professor-student interaction during office hours and student-student study groups, and six popular ESL textbooks, three old and three recent, were…

This paper reports a re-interpretation of the data from an inquiry exploring changes in 14 Chinese learners' uses of language learning strategies after they moved from mainland China to Britain. Using a socio-cultural theoretical framework, the analysis of the learners' experiential narratives lends tentative support to the postulation that the…

In investigations of the second-language writing process the aim of interviews and questionnaires has often been to find shared difficulties among them. However, in practice some writers are more successful than others. The aim of this study is to examine how some writers succeed in mastering scientific discourse in English, in a non-English…

This study explored the beliefs about language learning of Lebanese English as a Foreign Language university students, compared their beliefs about learning different target languages, namely, English and French, and investigated within-group variation in these students' beliefs. A modified version of Horwitz's "Beliefs about Language Learning…

This paper argues for the influence of the distribution of instructional time on group cohesion in the foreign language classroom and postulates that concentrating classroom time enhances group cohesion. To test the hypothesis, a comparative classroom study of two groups of Spanish learners in their second year of learning, one following an…

There is a dearth of research involving advanced second language (L2) learners in the USA [Brantmeier, C., 2001. Second language reading research on passage content and gender: challenges for the intermediate level curriculum, Foreign Language Annals 34, 325-333; Young, D.J., 2003. Workshop on overcoming anxiety in the foreign language classroom.…

Examines the production of wh-questions in the speech of four monolingual child speakers of Catalan who were recorded longitudinally as part of an earlier study, obtained from the CHILDES database. Proposes that the early absence of wh-questions is a consequence of the early underspecification of tense. (Author/VWL)

Through sequential analysis of actual interactions, describes real-world discourse activities performed by competent native and nonnative speakers of English to handle complex academic tasks. Using data from a graduate seminar, details two interactional resources exercised by the seminar participants in the doing of disagreement and critique.…

Investigates the nature of cohesion, content, and grammar emergent in children's essays, with emphasis on understanding of cohesion and coherence. Conceptual definitions of these constructs are summarized into a picture-based narrative writing task for elicitation and scoring criteria for quantification. First and second graders from an immersion…

Includes an interview with a noted figure in the field of language assessment. Discusses his work on washback theory as well as his experiences with and views on the challenges and advantages of computer-based and Web-based testing. (Author/VWL)

Includes an interview with a noted figure in the field of language assessment. Focuses on a range of test development projects, including several related to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) scale. (Author/VWL)