Peer observation of teaching often occurs at a local level or national level, seldom internationally. Victoria University, Australia, and Chinese institutions Henan University and Central University of Finance and Economics have a transnational partnership involving local students studying courses originating in Australia and Chinese students who…

The traditional division of conditionals into four main types (zero, first, second, and third) has long been called into question. Unfortunately, the awareness that this description does not reflect conditional patterns in actual usage has not generally been reflected in EFL coursebooks. This article re-examines the arguments for a description of…

Most learners experience the teaching of reading in the classroom in the form of intensive reading activities, where learners are provided with support, typically by the teacher, to make sense of texts that are too difficult for the learners to read successfully by themselves. After reading, learners are usually expected to answer a series of…

In line with a communicative curriculum for English, it is claimed that communicative competence involves knowledge about when and how to display affectivity in talk-in-interaction. Typically, interjections have been described as a lexical means for expressions of emotion. A survey of textbooks canonical of EFL at German elementary and secondary…

A major issue in the field of L2 acquisition is the role that language learners' L1 plays in the acquisition of an L2. This article shows some of the salient linguistic features of Chinese that may present communication challenges for Chinese-speaking learners of English as an additional language. Instructors' awareness of such features will…

Much scholarly and pedagogical attention has been devoted to corrective feedback. In this paper, we turn to positive feedback, and in particular, call for a reconsideration of teachers' use of explicit positive assessments such as "very good". Based on examples from an ESL classroom, we show that utterances such as "very good" may have the…

"Process-oriented pedagogy: facilitation, empowerment, or control?" claims that process-oriented pedagogy (POP) represents the methodological perspective of most practising teachers and that outcomes-based education (OBE) poses a real and present danger to stakeholder autonomy. Whereas POP may characterize methodological practices in the inner…

The paper presents a notional account of the challenges facing the introduction of English as an international lingua franca (ELF) curriculum in the state schools of the expanding circle, taking Greece as a case in point. It broadly delineates an ELF curriculum as one focusing on the skills necessary for carrying out successful communication…

How can teacher educators gauge what participants have learnt after taking a course in teaching English as a second language (TESL)? One method that can help both language teacher educators and their students trace conceptual changes as a result of taking a course is the use of concept maps. This paper examines the conceptual changes of a group of…

A feature of language teaching in recent decades has been the development of process-oriented approaches. This orientation towards processes encourages us to facilitate learner choice and individual development. However, it is challenged by the current educational climate, which prioritizes accountability and assessment. In this situation, a new…

When teachers hear the word "cohesion", they usually think of grammatical cohesion--an aspect of cohesion reasonably well covered in student books and teacher materials. However, occupying an area that straddles both lexis "proper" and cohesion lies "lexical cohesion". In what follows, it is argued that the teaching and learning of certain aspects…

As a basis for a systematic approach to investigating the effects of written corrective feedback, this article presents a typology of the different types available to teachers and researchers. The typology distinguishes two sets of options relating to (1) strategies for providing feedback (for example, direct, indirect, or metalinguistic feedback)…

Despite long-standing recognition of the importance of sociocultural context in meaning making, criticisms have been levelled at communicative language teaching (CLT) for failing to effectively address this at the level of classroom practice. In fact, it has been argued that the way CLT presents content reveals a fundamentally reductionist view of…

Corpus-based grammars, notably "Cambridge Grammar of English," give explicit information on the forms and use of native-speaker grammar, including spoken grammar. Native-speaker norms as a necessary goal in language teaching are contested by supporters of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF); however, this article argues for the inclusion of selected…

The National Education Act of 1999 in Thailand mandated a transition from teacher- to learner-centred instruction for all subjects including English. This shift was associated with the development of communicative ability in English to meet the needs of globalization. The current study investigated the policy behind and implementation of the…