This article reports on data from interpretive case studies of seven well-qualified, experienced teachers of adult ESOL, collected through weekly interviews and analysis of documents and materials produced over the duration of a whole course for each teacher. Teachers' knowledge and experience was apparent in their ability to conceptualize and…

This article uses activity theory to consider how teacher learning and development occurs. It aims to show that imitation and orienting activity, both of which make use of the analysis of actions into means and goals, can help explain how a group of Malaysian mathematics and science teachers learned to use the language-teaching practice of tasks…

Grammar can be viewed both as knowledge and as ability. When viewed as knowledge, the focus is on rules for sentence formation. When viewed as ability, the focus is on how grammar is used as a resource in the creation of spoken and written texts. Twelve principles are proposed as the basis for a pedagogy that focusses on acquiring learning to use…

Several factors have been shown to influence inclusion of children with special educational needs. This paper reports on findings from a questionnaire investigating training, specialist knowledge, confidence, attitudes and beliefs of the Reception class, Year 1, and Year 2 teachers of a cohort of children with a preschool diagnosis of moderate or…

Second Language Teacher Education (SLTE) is affected by two factors; a rethinking of its knowledge base and instructional practices as a response to changes in our understanding of the nature of SLTE, as well as external pressures resulting from the expanded need for competent language teachers worldwide. The impact of these two factors is seen in…

The recent past in language teaching has been dominated by the Skill-Building Hypothesis, the view that we learn language by first learning about it, and then practicing the rules we learned in output. The present is marked by the emergence of the Comprehension Hypothesis, the view that we acquire language when we understand messages, and is also…

Teachers' informal discussions of learner motivation often emphasize the need to find ways to motivate learners, most usually through "fun" or "dynamic" activities. This paper starts from the assumption, however, that part of the work of the teacher is to avoid the "demotivation" of learners, and that there is a need to consider the overall…

The English language teaching (ELT) practicum has come to be recognized as one of the most important aspects of a learner teacher's education during their language teacher training program. During the practicum, learner English language teachers need lots of support and cooperating teachers are seen as the main source of this support because they…

Judicious training in the use of learning strategies can be very valuable for language students. However, the notion of "strategy" is not always well defined in the literature. For pedagogic purposes strategies need to meet certain criteria: they should be problem-oriented, subject to choice among alternatives, under conscious control, clearly…

The Postgraduate Diploma in English Language Teaching (PGDELT) programme at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore provides an interesting case study of how economic and entrepreneurial concerns and aspirations in modern university settings have played a role alongside pedagogical motivations in shaping the development of the…

Previous research has found that native English speakers can judge, with a relatively high degree of accuracy, the frequency of words in the English language. However, there has been little investigation of the ability to judge the frequency of high and middle frequency words. Similarly, the accuracy of EFL teachers' frequency judgements remains…

This paper reports the findings of a study examining classroom questioning behavior and its impacts on students' development. A triangulation was conducted to collect data: observations of nine university English lessons, semi-structured interviews with six teachers and focus group discussions with three groups of students. The data showed that…

This study aims to explore students' attitudes toward teacher feedback. The study used a triangulation of participants and methods in which the practice of feedback was seen from the perspectives of students and teachers collected from the quantitative data (questionnaires) and qualitative data (open-ended items in questionnaires and interviews).…

My goal in this article is to discuss the empirical support for extensive reading and explore its pedagogical applications in L2/FL learning. I argue that the benefits derived from diverse studies on extensive reading in many different contexts are so compelling that it will be inconceivable for teachers not to make it an important feature of…

This study explores teachers' beliefs in the use of English textbooks for teaching English in the upper secondary Normal Technical (NT) stream in Singapore. The NT stream in Singapore is a form of "vocational" pathway; pupils streamed into the NT classes are considered to be academically "weakest" amongst all three streams in the secondary level.…