This article serves as the introduction to this special issue of "Language Teaching Research" on content-based language teaching (CBLT). The article first provides an illustrative overview of the myriad contexts in which CBLT has been implemented and then homes in on the five studies comprising the special issue, each conducted in a distinct…

This study investigated whether pre-task planning that embeds grammatical guidance to attend to a specific L2 form might be a suitable pedagogical choice in beginning-level foreign language classrooms. First-year high school students of English in Japan were asked to do an oral story-retelling task with a class partner under one of three…

This article examines the ideological import of (a) a selection of internationally distributed ELT textbooks to find out whether a recurrent ideological pattern could be observed and (b) the ELT books used in Iranian high schools to see if the ideological import of these books was different from that of the internationally distributed ELT…

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of two types of vocabulary instruction--image-schema-based instruction (ISBI) and translation-based instruction (TBI)--on the acquisition of second language (L2) polysemous words. Fifty-eight Japanese high school learners of English were divided into two treatment groups (ISBI and TBI)…

Whilst there are studies exploring students' perspectives of assessment, relatively little is known about how Chinese high school students' respond to assessment. Students' perspectives are particularly important because the power of assessment directly impacts on their motivation and attitudes towards schooling. This article…

The vocabulary knowledge of 166 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan was measured annually over a five year period using a bilingual version of the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) (Nation, 1983, 1990; Schmitt, Schmitt, and Clapham, 2001). The five years of data collection involved English language instruction in high school and…

This paper shares an initiative conducted in Malaysia in terms of knowledge to gauge students' Reading Age and to inform teachers of their students' reading progress and learning. Ensuring teachers understand the needs of students' reading ability and preparing students to read and comprehend texts are the two most fundamental parallel tasks in…

Despite the influence of changing demographics in Japan, the National Center Test for University Entrance Exams continues to assert an ever increasing role in the process of university admissions. In preparation for this examination, the majority of senior high school students learn from textbooks approved by the Japanese Ministry of Education,…

The need to broaden the notion of literacy has been continually emphasized within the field of New Literacy Studies in recent years. This is necessary because of the advent of information and communication technology (ICT) in our everyday, school and workplace literacy practices. A broader notion of literacy is needed to pay attention to the…

The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology issues a document known as the Course of Study Guidelines on average once every ten years. This document states the overall and specific goals for English education in Japanese junior and senior high schools including specifying the contents of ministry approved textbooks.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of two experimental methods of teaching the present progressive verb tense based on four instructional principles: teach form-function relations, compare similar grammatical forms, promote learner autonomy, and provide opportunities for generative use. Ninety-nine Japanese first-year…