Posters, either as promotions by various ELT publishing houses or prepared by ELT teachers and students, are widely used on the walls of many foreign language classrooms. Many of them consist of colourful pictures along with L2 vocabulary, grammar, and texts in order to contribute to the foreign language learning process. However, many ELT…

Learners' and teachers' evaluation of what constitutes useful, appropriate, and goal-relevant English may well shift in view of the globalization of English and its dominance in non-native contexts, business, and new media. Against this background, this study explores the extent to which a specific Business English university programme meets…

A major issue that continues to challenge language teachers is how to ensure that learners develop accuracy and complexity in their speaking, as well as fluency. Teachers know that too much corrective feedback (CF) can make learners reluctant to speak, while not enough may allow their errors to become entrenched. Furthermore, there is controversy…

Negotiation of language form is thought to engage learning processes by helping learners to notice gaps in their developing L2 and find target-like ways of filling them. Self-transcription, where learners work together to find language errors in recordings of their own oral output, is an awareness raising exercise that encourages such negotiation.…

In this article, I examine some of the ideas about task-based language teaching (TBLT) which have emerged over the 17 years of the current editorship of ELTJ, focusing in particular on grammar and vocabulary, and enquiring to what degree these ideas take adequate account of classroom context. Over this period, TBLT scholars have built up a…

This article reports an empirical study that examines to what extent learners can identify and understand the grammatical structures they produce when they speak spontaneously. In the study, 20 upper-intermediate Polish learners of English were interviewed in English by the researchers. The structures used accurately by each learner were isolated…

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…

Student self-transcription can greatly enhance the power of tasks to promote language learning, for it allows students to re-examine their experience freed from the pressure of performing the task itself, so they can notice and reflect on the language used and encountered. This is a powerful step in language development because it allows for…

This paper reports on a study which examined students' attitudes to learning grammar in autonomous contexts and their preferences for the learning materials with which to do so. In all, 38 students were surveyed and 13 of these then spent some time working in a language resource centre (LRC) with web- and paper-based materials. Students then…

English language teachers' opinions on the pedagogic relevance of spoken grammar are beginning to be reported, yet the voices of teachers in East Asia are rarely heard. In this article, the views of teachers from China and Singapore expressed in an online discussion are compared. The discussion, which was part of a taught postgraduate course,…

It is now generally agreed that some form of focus on the target code is necessary in adult L2 instruction. One question that remains to be answered is whether all aspects of L2 grammar are equally amenable to pedagogic intervention. A number of researchers have examined the effectiveness of instruction with regard to simple vs. difficult grammar…

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…

Grammar has often found itself at the centre of innovations in English language teaching. In the last forty years the role of grammar has gone through three main stages: absolute prominence, exclusion, reintroduction with caution. These three stages have been associated respectively to three different approaches to instruction: "focus on forms",…

The idea of grammar as a "liberating force" comes from a paper by Henry Widdowson (1990) in which grammar is depicted as a resource which liberates the language user from an over-dependency on lexis and context for the expression of meaning. In this paper, I consider the implications for second language teaching of the notion of grammar as a…

This article critically reviews the usefulness of grammar correction in second language writing instruction through the eyes of five second-language writers. It first examines the validity of four teaching principles that appear to influence how writing instructors approach error correction in classrooms and concludes with discussions as to why…