Since Dornyei and Csizer's (1998) landmark study of the importance that Hungarian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers attached to a selection of motivational strategies and the frequency they reported using them in their classrooms, there have been few published attempts to examine the cross-cultural validity of their findings. The study…

This exploratory study focuses on four non-native English speaking secondary content teachers in a short-term immersion program aimed at introducing them to language teaching methods for secondary school content instruction through the medium of English. Such programs have been found to have largely mixed results for language performance. This may…

This article investigates the effect of explicit individual corrective feedback (ICF) on L2 pronunciation at the micro-level in order to determine whether ICF needs to complement listening only interventions. To this purpose, the authors carried out a study which investigated the immediate effect of feedback on comprehensibility of controlled…

The present study investigated the impact of critical discourse analysis (CDA) on TEFL students' critical thinking (CT) ability in "Reading Journalistic Texts" classes. In so doing, the study utilized an experimental design with 24 participants in the control group and 29 participants in the experimental group. The results of a pretest indicated…

Punctuation is a surprisingly underexplored area of second language writing and learning. The small body of published literature about punctuation tends to look at ways in which punctuation can be taught. Little is known, except anecdotally, about how English as a second language (ESL) students actually feel about using English punctuation,…

The paper reports on a longitudinal multiple-case study that probed into four advanced university-level Chinese EFL learners' situated vocabulary learning experiences and explored the role of L2 motivation in their productive vocabulary development. In the study, Lexical Frequency Profile analysis and semi-structured interviews were conducted with…

This study investigates the effects of instruction (input plus focused metapragmatic noticing) on the oral production of conventional expressions, particularly those conventional expressions which perform specific pragmatic functions in English. Using a pre-test-instruction-post-test design we tested 36 university-level students in six intact…

The present study examined the effectiveness of mechanical and meaningful production of output on the learning of English relative clauses by Iranian EFL learners. The study involved two groups of learners (N = 36) who completed a pre-test, three activities and a post-test over an 8-week period. The collaborative dialogue of the participants was…

This empirical study investigates the beliefs of teachers and students regarding strategies for learning and teaching Chinese tones, which constitute a crucial feature of the spoken language and often cause problems for learners. Two online questionnaires that listed 11 Chinese tone learning strategies and 7 tone teaching strategies were…

Reading and discussing literary texts in a second language (L2) is a significant component of intermediate and advanced level collegiate language education. However, in spite of more attention to the role of literary texts in L2 instruction, the function of reading strategy instruction to teaching literary reading in the L2 has remained…

The relationship between teachers' beliefs and practices is generally understood to be a complex one. In recent years the topic of language teachers' beliefs has attracted considerable research interest, mostly in the form of case studies of teachers in particular contexts. A number of such studies focus in part on the relationship between beliefs…

This study investigated the effects of using two types of written advance organizers, key sentences and key vocabulary, on the improvement of EFL learners' listening comprehension. 108 second year university students at the higher and lower listening proficiency levels were randomly assigned to one control group and two experimental groups. Prior…

One problem common to many Oral Communication (OC) classrooms in universities in Japan and other countries is that English major students often lack the impetus to proactively develop their oral language proficiency. In this paper, we present our investigation into whether regular self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment would promote the use of…

The present study investigates the interaction between two types of explicit instructional approaches, deduction and explicit-induction, and the level of foreign language aptitude in the learning of grammar rules. Results indicate that on the whole the two equally explicit instructional approaches did not differentially affect learning…

This study investigated the relationship between immediate learner repair in response to interactional feedback and learning targeted forms. In particular, the study examined and compared the relationship between two major types of repair: learner-generated self-repair following elicitations and teacher-generated repair following recasts. It also…