The Australian field of English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching is globally respected for its research and practice achievements over a period of some 30 years. However, this essential field of pedagogy is being diluted in the current Australian reform agenda which is firmly founded on a traditional vision of English as first language, and…

South Korean English language teaching (ELT) has typically been represented as an arena dominated by excessive competition, test preparation, and the mastery of linguistic forms (Choi & Park, 2013; Park, 2009). These notions have been compounded by stereotypical depictions of Korean students as passive learners incapable of critical thinking…

Teachers' professional identity influences the way they think and teach. For pre-service non-native English speaking teachers (NNESTs), they are at the crucial stage of constructing self-image and self-perception as English language teaching (ELT) professionals, their beliefs about English teaching and learning and their attitudes towards…

The ways in which literacy in English is taught in school generally subscribe to and perpetuate the notion of a homogenous, unvaried set of writing conventions associated with the language they represent, especially in relation to spelling and punctuation as well as grammar. Such teaching also perpetuates the myth that there is one…

Chilean youth are currently demanding access to better-quality education for all: greater democracy and curricula that respect the country's indigenous cultural roots form part of their petitions. This article puts forward a twofold pedagogical proposal for English Language Teaching intended to foster intrinsic motivation and democratic…

This study investigated how the critical language awareness (CLA) framework can be implemented with an emphasis on writing and how English-language learners respond to CLA. The findings suggest that the students directed their attention away from the sole emphasis on reading for learning vocabulary and grammar to other dimensions of texts and…

The status of English as a global language has played a significant role in contemporary language education policies across the world. In East Asia, the hegemony of English has been reflected in a number of central governments' policies of recruiting native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) to participate in English language education. This…

This narrative article analyses three Korean undergraduate students' experiences conducting a linguistic landscape research project. Linguistic landscape research, the study of publicly displayed language such as billboards and other signs, is a relatively new area of scholarly interest. However, there has been only limited study of using…

This paper discusses a study conducted in the Ledra/Lokmaci Milieu in Cyprus, the area in the centre of the divided walled city of Nicosia where Greek and Turkish Cypriots have to use English to communicate with one another. The aim of the study was to locate the effects of a learning space on language learners, teachers and syllabus designers.…

Traditional, cognitive-oriented theories of English language acquisition tend to employ experimental modes of inquiry and neglect social, cultural and historical contexts. In this paper, I review the theoretical debate over methodology by examining ontological, epistemological and methodological controversies around cognitive-oriented theories. I…

What is the journey of acquiring language? What is the journey of sharing it? These are the questions that compelled the hermeneutic phenomenological investigation (Gadamer, 1960/2004; van Manen, 1997) that led to this paper. Guided by the voice of Heidegger (1954/2008), I discovered the necessity of "un-learning to learn" in order to hear the…

Since any standards-based reform is made to bring about an improvement in students' learning, it requires changes in teachers' practices as well. This study examined how a standards-based communicative curricular reform in general secondary school English in Egypt has changed teachers' classroom practices, and the factors influencing such…

This paper concerns the conceptual and pedagogical issues that revolve around target language (TL) only instruction and teacher code-switching in the context of TL classrooms. To this end, I first examine four intertwined ideas (that is, monolingualism, naturalism, native-speakerism, and absolutism) that run through the monolingual approach to TL…

This paper presents an account of the author's firsthand experiences between 2006 and 2010, relating to his involvement in the establishment of the English Language and Literature department at the International University of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of the difficulties and challenges of the venture in the post-war country, whose…

This paper discusses what intercultural English learning/teaching (IELT) is in English as a world Englishes (WEes) and how IELT can contribute to the development of proficiency/competence among WEes and can be fitted into actual WEes classrooms. This is to claim that IELT be a pivotal contextual factor facilitating success in…