This article describes a transcription task cycle that was designed to facilitate the development of skills for the IELTS (International English Language Testing System) speaking test at a language school in Japan. The cycle involved practice test, transcription, student correction, teacher correction, and retrial of the original test and…

This study looks at the real and perceived effects of inter-candidate variation in linguistic ability during pair-tested oral examinations in a southern Italian context. Pair testing has not been taken up in schools and universities in southern Italy despite its wide use in international testing systems. Colleagues and prospective candidates often…

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.…

This paper surveys some of the changes in teaching the four language skills in the past 15 years. It focuses on two main changes for each skill: understanding spoken language and willingness to communicate for speaking; product, process, and genre approaches and a focus on feedback for writing; extensive reading and literature for reading; and…

This article examines the relationship between spoken language research and ELT practice over the last 20 years. The first part is retrospective. It seeks first to capture the general tenor of recent spoken research findings through illustrative examples. The article then considers the sociocultural issues that arose when the relevance of these…

While it is common for teachers to focus on learners' errors in the EFL classroom, little attention is given to the "errors" that native English speakers make in their mother tongue. This paper reports on a study to assess the reaction of Japanese university students to an activity that primarily required identifying "ungrammatical" forms in audio…

This paper introduces Philosophy-based Language Teaching (PBLT) as a new approach to developing productive language and thinking skills in students. The approach involves posing philosophical questions and engaging students in dialogues within a community of enquiry context. To substantiate the approach, the paper reports a study in which 34…

This paper describes a study comparing chatroom and face-to-face oral interaction for the purposes of language learning in a tertiary classroom in the United Arab Emirates. It uses transcripts analysed for Language Related Episodes, collaborative dialogues, thought to be externally observable examples of noticing in action. The analysis is…

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 uses the interactional spoken data contained in the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS) to investigate "friendly" language and shows how its principles can inform a model of language for learners of English as a second or foreign language. Pragmatic markers used in local speech varieties are in danger of being neglected in an…

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,…

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…

This article presents three strategies for teaching students who are taking the IELTS speaking test. The first strategy is aimed at improving confidence and uses a variety of self-help materials from the field of popular psychology. The second encourages students to think critically and invokes a range of academic perspectives. The third strategy…

Over the last two decades, research has suggested that candidates' test performances and scores are collaboratively achieved through interviewing/scoring processes and there could be unfair situations caused by the inter-interviewer variation. To investigate a precise picture of the impact of inter-interviewer variation, this research examines the…

Discourse intonation attempts to explain how intonation patterns in English affect the communicative value of speech, through the use of falling and rising tones along with changes in pitch. The teaching of intonation seems to sit naturally with communicative language learning, but it is not an easy aspect of English to incorporate into the EFL…