Misuse of English conjunction related to incoherent writing, according to the literature, comes from learners' first language interference, improper mechanical exercises, and misleading lists of connectors in textbooks demonstrated as if mutually interchangeable without contextual constraints. Form-focused instruction with explicit semantic,…

Although it is recognized that ESL students often need assistance to become more comprehensible speakers, their teachers usually have limited time to devote to pronunciation instruction. Research should help teachers set priorities for pronunciation teaching to address these students' needs as efficiently as possible. Here we test the usefulness…

Success at university depends to a large extent on students' ability to read expository texts effectively in order to access and understand information, and study it for exam purposes. An important component of the comprehension process is the reader's ability to connect current information with information mentioned previously. One aspect of this…

Tasks with adult learners have been discussed extensively in the language learning literature whilst studies about children using tasks are less widespread. Children's ability to interact on tasks with each other grows steadily with age. This paper reports on the differences observed in the interactions of 10-year-old children and adult learners.…

Until recently, research in applied linguistics has tended to treat learners in relative isolation from their context, and to study primarily classroom and other educational contexts. This paper in contrast focuses on the contexts which frame learning, and in particular the resources which these contexts provide. A model is outlined which includes…

In the field of SLA, there have been various attempts to define second language learning motivation and to discover relationships between motivation and gender. Using two well-known motivational models: Expectancy-value theory, and Gardner's Socio-educational model, the present study sought to (1) first define foreign language learning motivation…

This paper reports on the findings of an investigation into the perceptions held by English students aged 16-18 years regarding listening comprehension in French and how they view the reasons behind their success or lack of it in this skill. The study suggests that listening comprehension is the skill in which students in the post-compulsory phase…

The transition from the teacher education institution to life in a real classroom has been characterized as a type of reality shock in which beginning teachers realize that the ideals they formed while training may not be appropriate for the realism they are faced with during their first year of teaching. Unfortunately, teacher education programs…

"Interest" is a widely used term not only in language education but also in our everyday life. However, very little attempt has been made to investigate the nature of "interest" in language teaching and learning. This paper, using a definition of interest proposed in the field of educational psychology, reports on the findings of a study conducted…

The goal of the study was to test whether student teachers trained using a peer coaching training program after teaching practicum sessions in teaching of English as a foreign language would demonstrate greater improvement on measures of a number of identified instructional skills and self-efficacy than those just receiving traditional supervisor…

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…