Preservice teachers come to any teacher education course with prior experiences, knowledge and beliefs about learning and teaching. Additionally, the belief systems of preservice teachers often serve as a lens through which they view the content of the teacher education program. Consequently, it is essential that teacher educators take these prior…

Learners' consciousness of mismatch of the phonemic inventory of their mother tongue with the language being learned may prompt them to activate their conscious grammar knowledge to monitor their oral production. This happens only when they become conscious of the nature of the task in advance. Otherwise the mismatch is believed to challenge their…

The study discusses the dynamics English language instruction in the Philippine basic education curriculum. Although English enjoyed immense popularity as early as 1900s during the American entry to the country, its role in Philippine education has transformed gradually as the country undergoes political, social and economic reconstruction in the…

Entering an "English Impromptu Speech Contest" intimidates many students who do not have a good command of the English language. Some choose to give up before the contest date while others stand speechless on the stage. This paper identifies a range of problems confronted by contestants from my college, the Yuanpei Institute of Science and…

While ELT has long recognized the need to address student anxiety in language learning situations, it has all too often assumed that such anxiety is primarily competence-based. Consequently, there has been insufficient recognition of the fact that identity-based anxiety, too, can have significant effects on language learning in the classroom. In…

It is often the case that undergraduates writing essays to fulfil course requirements have an academic audience (i.e. lecturer/s marking the essay) as their target readers. These texts may represent a form of academic writing by novice writers in the process of learning academic discourse and conventions. Though these texts may not be comparable…

The paper reports on parental involvement in Chinese students' language learning which has emerged as a major finding from an interpretative enquiry into their English-learning experiences. The data confirm that Chinese parents and other family members are closely involved in the study participants' language learning, in particular, their…

This article offers an overview of learning styles theories, selects seven to consider in more detail on the basis of recent research into validity and reliability, and synthesises these theories into a framework to aid task design in Teacher Education.

Second language anxiety has a debilitating effect on the oral performance of speakers of English as a second language. This article describes a research project concerning the conceptualization of second language speaking anxiety, the relationship between anxiety and second language performance, and the major reported causes of second language…

The present study reports preliminary findings on the elicitation strategies used by Thai and English caretakers when eliciting past event narratives from pre-schoolers. Ten Thai and ten English-speaking caretaker-child dyads were recruited from Bangkok, Thailand and from Sydney, Australia. Caretakers were asked to elicit past event narratives…

This paper aims to reconsider the status of "English as an international language" from the language user's perspective. Accepting a shift in focus from "English" to "Englishes", we argue that the concept of "Englishes", which assumes the pluralization of linguistic and cultural norms, still remains a collective concept, and to discuss English…

Two views of listening are examined. The first, listening as comprehension, emphasizes accessing meaning through listening, and focusses on the message rather than on form. The second, listening as acquisition, emphasizes the role of listening in promoting language acquisition, and emphasizes the role of noticing in facilitating language…

School- and university-based writing tasks make demands on cognitive processing and socio-cultural knowledge that vary with the discipline in which the writing is situated. The variation in socio-cognitive demands makes the use of self-accessed, computer-mediated writing instruction more promising than conventional, teacher-fronted instruction. To…

Hoey (1991) claims that lexical patterns, which are a network of repetitious and synonymous words of a text, can be identified even by elementary foreign language readers. The present study investigates whether intermediate Japanese EFL readers can actually find elements of lexical patterns of a text Hoey uses in his book to demonstrate the…

This paper analyses the use of the word "where" in texts written by Malay-speaking learners of English. Data from a learner corpus is compared with data from two corpora of academic writing by native English-speaker writers. Considerable over-use of "where" is found: this is explained as a consequence of various patterns of misuse of "where" and…