The potential of online language learning has received much attention recently. This paper reports the design of an online writing system featuring learning support for non-native students during their writing process. The central premise is that in the online writing situation, students are in great need of writing aids. The proposed system…

Communication breakdowns can occur during cross-cultural communication due to different perceptions and interpretations of appropriateness and politeness. This study investigates similarities and differences between refusals in American English and Thai and incidences of pragmatic transfer by Thai EFL learners when making refusals. The…

Educationists and writing practitioners consider reflection to be a defining feature of student portfolios (Fink 2003; Zubizarreta 2004; Jones and Shelton 2006). A writing portfolio without reflection is merely a collection of written work which does not contribute to "real" learning. Reflection in the portfolio approach happens when students…

The effectiveness of early English education was investigated in this study to determine if English should be taught formally in Japanese public elementary schools. We administered English tests and questionnaires to 1466 elementary school students in 2004 and 2005. The results showed significant differences between the…

This article surveys some of the conflicts endemic to foreigners teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in China. Though learning English is very popular in China now and China is one of the most popular destinations for Western EFL teachers, neither the teaching nor learning of English comes without certain clashes in the classroom. These…

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…

There has been a growing interest in and concern for the teaching of listening in the last 40 years. Looking back over the years, we can see how the emphases on teaching listening and the focus of listening instruction have changed. Although instructional practices were initially heavily influenced by models of the written language and a…

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…

Communication is one of the keywords of the global age. The ever-increasing use of English as a World language has clearly meant that British RP and American Standard English (GA) are no longer seen as the models that learners aspire to. With the global spread of English, three major related questions come to our mind: (a) diversity and…

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…

With the increasingly significant role that English language teaching (ELT) is playing in Asian contexts, it is important to gain a better understanding of the use of English as a medium of intercultural communication in Asia. In doing so, ELT practices may be better able to adapt themselves to the intercultural communicative needs of local…

Instructions are an under-researched aspect of classroom discourse. In this paper, we attempt to describe the functional structure of teacher instructions using the framework proposed by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975). We examine nine directing transactions or sets of instructions from four lessons taught on an English for Academic Purposes course…

Language teachers often encourage L2 readers to guess the meaning of unknown words in texts. This paper argues that before any statements about the value of guessing can be made, it is necessary to show how reliable learners' guesses are. To this end, the present study investigates how accurately EFL learners assess their understanding of unknown…