Reflective models of supervision have shifted the emphasis from teaching observations as primarily evaluative events to events intended to promote teachers' reflective practice. This paper presents a longitudinal action research study investigating post-observation interactions between language teachers and their supervisors in an American…

Self-repetition is commonly found in spoken discourse, and it could be argued that it is an interactional necessity. Self-repetition in spontaneous talk is pervasive and performs a variety of functions. Some regard it as signalling redundancy, disfluency, or both, in spoken language, whereas others consider it to be facilitating the production of…

This paper reports on two studies that investigated the effectiveness of a contrastive analysis type of pedagogical intervention, which aimed to promote interlanguage development in the use and understanding of English possessive determiners (PDs) among adolescent second language (L2) learners. The first research question asked whether explicit…

While interaction inside the classroom--frontstage discourse--has been a subject of study and has been considered the most significant type of discourse that teachers engage in, I propose that interaction outside the classroom--backstage discourse--is equally significant and has not thus far received as much attention as it merits. This paper is…

This paper reports on an ESRC-funded project that investigated the use of corpus-based activities in a primary-school context, with children aged 8-10 years. The study explored the contributions that could be made by a corpus--comprising language written for a child audience--and a modified version of the associated software, in helping these…

Two interactional strategies explicitly taught to learners of English in Hong Kong are how to check that the hearer understands what you are saying as you communicate and, conversely, how to check that you have understood another speaker's message. The forms of these strategies that are taught in Hong Kong schools are fairly limited. This study…

The research reported here investigated primary school pupils' use of reading strategies. The study differed from most of the previous studies on reading strategies in that (1) the participants were young bilinguals in multicultural Singapore; (2) the data were examined within the Student Approaches to Learning (SAL) framework developed by John…

A model of language and speciality-area content teaching and learning in Japan is built on a concern to develop dialogically engaged language communal communication (DELCC) in class to be extended outside in the wider society. This model is applicable to other university contexts insofar as the FAO language is conceptualised and practised for life…

Teaching pragmatic competence in Korean-as-a-foreign language (KFL) settings is still an underdeveloped area, when compared to teaching other language areas, such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The first step to enhance pragmatic language teaching in foreign language (FL) education is to raise the FL instructors' and students'…

This study examines interviews with 46 undergraduates to explore if participants with differing language and cultural backgrounds view plagiarism or textual appropriation primarily as a) a language problem because of a lack of words of one's own, or b) a cultural challenge as a result of either some first language (L1) cultural training to…

A number of studies have examined the process and product of writing instruction under different conditions. Fewer studies have investigated the development of knowledge and its relationship to writing performance. While some writers may be able to draw upon knowledge of text in their writing, others do not possess this knowledge and yet others…

Learning the intonation of a foreign language entails complex perceptive and productive processes mostly beyond the common awareness level. Its instruction demands a thorough understanding of its prosodic features and the appropriate pedagogical practices and resources. This paper reports the findings from a computer-assisted study of the learning…

The role of recasts has been the subject of an increasing number of second language acquisition (SLA) studies in recent years, as has been the role of tasks. Few studies, nevertheless, exist that investigate the interaction between the two. The present study makes a preliminary excursion into this unexplored domain by examining the impact of two…

This paper reports a study employing stimulated recall protocols to investigate how L1 English-speaking learners of L2 German use their metalinguistic knowledge during the resolution of selected form-focused tasks. Verbal report data from 10 university level learners were analysed to gain insight into explicit knowledge in action during controlled…

The past three decades have seen a growing body of research into language learner metacognitive knowledge, strategy use, and the relationship between them. However, the correlation between knowledge about strategies and strategy use in ESL listening and speaking has not been explored. This study investigates 278 Singaporean students' knowledge and…