This article reports on mixed methods classroom research carried out at a British university. The study investigates the effectiveness of two different explicit teaching frameworks, Illustration--Interaction--Induction (III) and Present--Practice--Produce (PPP) used to teach the same spoken discourse markers (DMs) to two different groups of…

The focus of the present study is on identifying categories of learning strategies that are mostly used by Russian university students in an English Linguistics Program with a TEFL concentration. The more specific goal of the study is to offer a model of evaluation of the effectiveness of TEFL-oriented programs in terms of the language learning…

This study investigates the acquisition of discourse markers by Chinese learners of English in terms of gender, style and individual identity. The subjects of the study are 15 female university students and 15 male university students. The data is collected by means of audio recording in the classroom discussion and in the interviews. The examined…

The new requirement placed on students in tertiary settings in Spain to demonstrate a B1 or a B2 proficiency level of English, in accordance with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL), has led most Spanish universities to develop a program of certification or accreditation of the required level. The first part of this…

In recent years increasing research attention has been devoted to the definition and development of presentation skills. As an interactive oral discourse type, the presentation is characterised by specific speech acts, of which cooperative acts have proved to be of a highly developmental nature (Sazdovska, 2009). The aim of the present paper is to…

The present study is a corpus-based analysis of a selection of polysemous lexical verbs used to express modality in student argumentative writing. Twenty-three lexical verbs were searched for in three 100,000-word corpora of argumentative essays written in English by American, Filipino and Spanish university students. Concordance lines were…

There is a significant world-wide apprehension concerning perceived deficiencies in university students' performance and a resulting decrease of knowledge level and competency development. This paper analyses the benefits of using a portfolio as a means of evaluating student progress and the beliefs from which students draw their learning and…

The aim of this work is to analyse how Spanish readers react to English discourse markers in a text. We carry out an empirical study in which we ask three research question: (a) if there is any relationship between presence of discourse markers or absence of discourse markers and reading comprehension in English as a foreign language, (b) if there…

Analyzes the relation between the revision skills of 53 Japanese university English-as-a-Foreign-Language students and the factors of language proficiency and second language writing experience, while exploring the possible effects of prior explicit instruction on participants' revision performance. (Author/VWL)

Examines whether targeting instruction to students' weak points has an effect on their writing quality. Upper intermediate students in an English for academic purposes course were asked to write a composition before and after the instructional treatment. Comparison of results from the two tasks shows a significant increase in scores on both…