Arguing that the introduction of corpus linguistics in teaching materials and the language classroom should be informed by theories and principles of SLA, this paper presents a case study illustrating how corpus-based findings on reported speech can be integrated into a form-focused model of instruction. After overviewing previous work which…

This paper describes a research study completed in Singapore with students enrolled in an education degree program. The researchers were interested in the reading habits of Singaporean students who will become teachers of English in the Singapore government teaching service. Of interest is the data collection method which involved the development…

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)…

This study examined teachers' accuracy in decoding nonverbal behaviour indicative of foreign language anxiety. Teachers and teacher trainees twice observed a videotape without sound of seven beginning French foreign language students as they participated in an oral exam; four of these students were defined as anxious language learners by the…

This study examined the development of spoken discourse among L2 learners of Japanese who received extensive practice on grammatical chunks. Participants in this study were 22 college students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course. They received instruction on a set of grammatical chunks in class through communicative drills and the…

Insights from corpus linguistics have come to be seen as having a significant impact in second language pedagogy. Learner corpora, or collections of texts spoken or written by non-native speakers (NNS) of a language, are now being used for the purposes of enhancing language teaching. Specifically, by comparing the corpus of NNS with native…

Although the literature on language pedagogy encourages the use of pair work in the second language classroom, students sometimes seem reluctant to work in pairs, particularly on grammar-focused tasks. This study investigated the merits of pair work by comparing pair and individual work on an editing task and by analysing the nature of pair…

This study investigated the effects of second language (L2) proficiency differences in pairs and patterns of interaction on L2 learning, making use of both qualitative and quantitative data. We designed the study in such a way that four different "core" participants interacted with higher and lower proficiency "non-core" participants. These…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the durability of the effect of explicit and implicit instructions on beginning EFL learners' learning of the copula "be". The study intends to examine whether or not the effect remains after the auxiliary "be" of the progressive is introduced. Three groups of 89 Japanese junior high school students…

Students are rarely given the opportunity of being decisionmakers in class, and when they are, they may feel unsure of how to organize their own learning. However, over time they come to appreciate the benefits of a more active engagement in learning English. In this paper, I describe a procedure based on Exploratory Practice (EP) for guiding…

This study investigates the orientation of language-use practices during in-class peer work of second-year college learners of German in three different sections (classes) of a multi-section course, taught by three different teachers at a public American Midwestern research university. Qualitative analyses of recordings made over the course of an…

Previous research investigating the effects of contextualized and decontextualized tasks on vocabulary learning has focused on whether or not learners were able to gain knowledge of meaning and form. To date, research has generated little evidence indicating that context facilitates vocabulary learning. Decontextualized tasks tend to be equally or…

While the noticing function of output has been increasingly researched by a number of applied linguists, the nature of such noticing and its effect on subsequent learning in the context of EFL writing have not been fully investigated. In a four-stage writing task consisting of output, comparison, and two revisions, this study examined what…

This paper reports on the effects of classroom exercises that encourage noticing and conscious attention to form, which were part of a university EFL oral presentation course in Japan. The students on the course were given a set of exercises that encouraged them to notice and to reflect on L2 forms of their own choosing throughout one academic…

Instead of being completely arbitrary, the meaning of many idioms is "motivated" by their original, literal usage. In an FLT context, this offers the possibility of presenting idioms in ways that promote insightful learning rather than "blind" memorization. Associating an idiom with its etymology has been shown to enhance retention. This effect…