Recent developments in language teacher cognition research highlight the need to explore subject matter knowledge in relation to classroom practice. This study examines the impact of two foreign language teachers' knowledge about grammar upon their pedagogical decisions. The primary database consisted of classroom observations and post-lesson…

This paper reports on an investigation into metacognitive awareness of Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) student writers, under a threefold metacognition framework--person, task, and strategy variables, and within the broader domain of cognitive writing theories. Data were collected in a Chinese tertiary English language teaching (ELT)…

The paper investigates how a student on a master's-level teacher education course for English language teachers goes about constructing her grammar knowledge. The learner is a novice teacher with English as a foreign language. Learner diary, interview, and group interaction data were analysed thematically, revealing that she made relatively…

A major challenge for language teacher educators working in the area of teacher language awareness (TLA) is to develop pedagogical approaches that will go beyond merely enhancing L2 teachers' knowledge about language by enabling them to make the bridge between the declarative and procedural dimensions of TLA. This paper sets out to investigate the…

Previous research into student teachers' knowledge about language concluded that overall the picture was fairly bleak. Such research focused on the knowledge about language that the student teachers possessed when they moved from secondary school education into Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes. However, few studies have investigated…

Previous research has shown that learners of English might experience considerable difficulty when giving constructive criticism to peers in instructional settings. Unlike native speakers, they tend to soften their criticism far less frequently while aggravating it far more often, and thus require pedagogical help in this area. The present study…

This study explored some MA students' perceptions of a Grammar Awareness course for language teachers. The aim was to understand how group tasks might help students build Grammar Awareness. Two cohorts of students were surveyed and interviewed. In this paper, the survey responses are discussed in some depth. While the first cohort was left to…

It has been suggested recently that it may be useful for language teaching practitioners to have some knowledge of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics (CL) provides tools that may help the language-teaching practitioner to gain insight into the semantic potential of words and communicate the meaning of lexical chunks in greater detail…

A questionnaire study was conducted to examine how 120 highly experienced EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers in Japan adjust their pronunciation in order to facilitate and refine their students' learning skills to approach mutual intelligibility in second language (L2) classrooms (i.e. "pronunciation-specific teacher talk"). The results…

Within the Japanese English Language Teaching context and consistent with the dominant conversation role assigned to the native English speaker teacher, there exists a belief that the most effective manner in which to teach and promote multilingualism and intercultural understanding is through restricting students to monolingual practices and…

This paper reports on an investigation into the beliefs and practices of experienced teachers in the USA, UK and France relating to the application of a model of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) to English language programmes. Broadly, "intercultural" approaches to language learning and teaching are strongly advocated in both the…

Using a reactive approach to focus-on-form, this study explored the types of feedback and strategies that L2 learners used to draw attention to linguistic problems in a Spanish-American telecollaborative exchange. Data from the readily available transcripts of online postings were utilised and analysed to report the findings. The results showed…

Language learners and teachers' cognition in respect of learning and teaching plays a critical role in mediating their actual behaviour and decisions in the process. This study investigates the vocabulary learning and teaching beliefs held by pre-service and in-service teachers in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland so that teacher education…

The need for some form of explicit grammar instruction is recognised in most current approaches to second language teaching. Since the usefulness of explicit instruction is at least to some extent dependent on the difficulty of the rules that are taught, an important question for teachers is whether their judgements of rule difficulty are…

This article examines how majority-language teachers coping with additive education view their roles in a bilingual framework, how they perceive issues of culture and language in young bilingual children, and how they understand the term "bilingual education" in an L2 non-additive context. The study has been conducted in the context of pre-school…