Suggests English teaching in Iran has been a failure, partly because the language is not used as a means of communication, but is taught in isolated fragments. Discusses methods for testing writing, recommending essay tests over multiple-choice ones so the washback effect will encourage teachers and students to change their attitudes about…

Investigates the relationship between redundancy and transposition in scientific texts. Highlights different traditional and discoursal theories of redundancy. Analyzed 20 self-contained scientific texts; results show that most of the sample texts follow similar organization. (Author/VWL)

Examined time spent in interaction by students and teachers in the classroom and patterns of question and answer through classroom observations. Results showed that much of class time is devoted to teacher talk rather than to student talk. The majority of questions asked by the teacher were of the display type, while the responses of the students…

Reviews, analyzes, discusses, and suggests possible uses of dictation on foreign language classes. Types and selections of dictations rediscussed and introduced. Results obtained through interviews with both teachers and students show dictation is useful learning device. (Author/VWL)

Argues that learner attitudes and motivation are equally important for the improvement of students' proficiency in a second language. Used pre- and post-test results in the Use of English course at a university in Nigeria. (Author/VWL)

Presents three major types of language awareness elicited during a pilot study, using data collection instruments, such as interviews and tape recordings of the conversations of two groups of Iranian children living in the United Kingdom. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the effects of definitional information in the form of dictionary entries, on second language learners' vocabulary learning in an instructed setting. Indian students (Native Hindi speakers) of English received monolingual English dictionary entries of five previously unknown words from four different learner's dictionaries. Results…

Investigated the probable effect of different contexts on learning idioms, as well as the interaction between learning idioms in different contexts and English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners' language proficiency. Findings revealed that different contexts and proficiency levels had significant effects on EFL learners' acquisition of idioms;…

Presents the results of a study investigating the acquisition of English tense and aspect by Persian speakers. A cross-sectional study of 45 second language learners at three levels of proficiency was conducted using a grammaticality judgment task. Findings showed that the acquisition of tense and aspect followed the universal entailment of…

Describes a new model for teaching academic English-as-a-Second-Language/Foreign-Language reading. The model emphasizes considering texts, function, meaningfulness, and rhetoric, rather than sentence, form, grammaticality, and logic, as expressed by systemics. (Author/VWL)

Based on a combined study of system science, washback theory, and a data-driven analysis of China's college English teaching system, suggests a new concept--the College English Teaching Evaluation System. This evaluation system consists of three subsystems. Problems with each subsystem are illustrated with newly published data, and corresponding…

Examined the effect of the gender of the speaker and listener on second language listening comprehension. Iranian English-as-a-Foreign-language students listened to four short passages and answered some multiple-choice questions. Results clearly indicate that only the gender of the speaker had an influence on foreign language listening…

Examines lexical interference from the perspective of language proficiency in a study of Iranian English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners. Subjects were given two tests--a proficiency test and a test on similar lexical forms--to investigate whether there is any relationship between the two variables in question. Results indicate that there is a…

Discusses the notion of communicative competence and more specifically, strategic competence. Examines problems Arab learners of English face and looks at problems specific to Arab World University (Jordan) English language majors. Concludes with the pedagogical implications of communicative strategy use. (Author/VWL)

Attempts to reinterpret the threshold hypothesis, which states that low second language (L2) proficiency blocks the transfer of first language (L1) reading strategies to the reading of L2 texts. Results indicate that it is not only low foreign language proficiency but also text difficulty in terms of register complexity that negatively affect the…