The objectives of this study are to describe 147 Thai elementary school teachers' English pronunciation competence and to identify a teacher variable that has an impact on their pronunciation. The instrument used to collect data consisted of two parts: a questionnaire to elicit Thai teachers' personal information (i.e., seven variables…

The present study investigated the effect of form-focused and non-form-focused tasks on EFL learners' vocabulary learning through written input. The form-focused task aimed to draw students' attention to the word itself through word recognition activities. Non-form-focused tasks were divided into (a) the comprehension question task, which required…

Japan's government has mandated a shift from traditional to communicative methodologies in secondary English classrooms (Tanabe, 2004), but it is unclear whether this has affected student beliefs about language learning. This study investigates the beliefs of 315 incoming university students at a large private university in Japan from 2006…

This study has been an attempt to investigate the impact of cooperative tasks on the lexical development of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Sixty male and female students, who had scored homogeneously in a teacher-made proficiency test, participated in this study. Both the control and the experimental groups participated in a multiple-choice…

Learner-generated content (LGC) has always been produced as part of the learning process; however, it often generally goes no further than the teacher. Research has shown that by exposing LGC to a wider audience, students are motivated to produce work of a higher quality. The process of publishing and sharing LGC also helps students develop key…

For various reasons, second language learners modify their speech by means of self-repair. This study, based on a small-scale corpus, shows the patterns and features of self-repairs by intermediate Chinese learners of English. The results suggest that intermediate Chinese learners of English more frequently make repairs than advanced Chinese…

This study examines 75 Chinese EFL learners' test-taking strategies and their relationship with listening performance. It further looks into how students adjust their strategies under four different task conditions. The participants completed a three-phase (before/during/after) test-taking questionnaire and were given a listening test comprising…

This empirical study investigates the effect of online textual, pictorial, and textual pictorial glosses on the incidental vocabulary learning of 90 adult elementary Iranian EFL learners. The participants were selected from a pool of 140 volunteers based on their performance on an English placement test as well as a knowledge test of the target…

Courses in Spoken English (SE) are yet to be acceptable in Indian universities because conducting session-end tests in SE is assumed to be logistically difficult and academically problematic. This article argues that it need not necessarily be so; session-end tests can be conducted just as in other courses. With voice recording, preferably a…

Details the advantages and process of creating an online English-as-a-Second-Language placement test. Outlines the steps for constructing a good test and describes the piloting of an online exam over a 2-year period. (Author/VWL)

Recounts the use of a computer-mediated proficiency test in an intensive international teaching assistant workshop. Both traditional raw score analyses and item response theory analyses done on the test data are described in detail. Indicated that the test was not suitable for making exemption and retention decisions with this particular group of…

To study the effect of direct test preparation on TOEIC gain scores, two samples of students (i.e., English majors and nonmajors) at a Japanese university were divided into three treatment groups: (1) TOEIC preparation, (2) business English, (3) general (four-skills) English. TOEIC preparatory materials were concluded to have little benefit to…