This article reports a study that investigated how two Saudi Arabian men negotiated their positionality vis-à-vis a host community in the United States and how they engaged in different discursive practices in order to achieve fuller participation in the various worlds that became important to them. The study takes data from a larger research…

Autonomous learning and effective self-regulatory strategies are increasingly important in foreign language learning; without these, students might not be able to exploit learning opportunities outside language classrooms. This study investigated the influence of motivational factors and self-regulatory strategies on autonomous learning behavior.…

This article reports a study on a little-researched area: the linguistic repertoires of teachers of English as a second language (ESL) to adults. It proposes that, to heed recent calls to recognise learners' plurilingualism and to incorporate learners' languages in the ESL classroom, teachers' plurilingualism must be acknowledged…

This article reports on a study of Western male English language teachers and considers the ways in which their identities were shaped in relation to discourses of masculinity and heterosexuality. The article first argues that masculinity and heterosexuality have remained unmarked categories in research on TESOL teacher identities. It then draws…

The study reported in this article aimed to investigate the way working memory capacity (WMC) interacts with careful online planning--a task-based implementation variable--to affect second language (L2) speech production. This issue is important to teachers, because it delves into one of the possible task-based implementation variables and thus…

Whereas second language (L2) education research has extensively examined how different types of interactional feedback can be facilitative of L2 development in meaning-oriented classrooms, most of these primary studies have focused on recasts (i.e., teachers' reformulations of students' errors). Some researchers have claimed that recasts serve an…

This study examined the teacher education of novice teachers of English to speakers of other languages (ESOL). A survey and follow-up interviews were employed to investigate novice teachers' perceptions about four aspects of their teacher preparation: (a) degree of preparedness to teach after graduating from a teaching English to speakers of other…

Within the field of second language teacher education (SLTE), narrative has largely functioned as a vehicle for teacher inquiry, based on the assumption that such inquiry will ultimately bring about productive change in teachers and their teaching practices. Less attention has been paid to documenting what this change looks like or how engagement…

Narratives are often overlooked in workplace talk, but they contribute in crucial ways to relationship building and identity construction in workplace interaction. In this article we analyse narratives told by skilled migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds during a workplace internship conducted as part of a Workplace Communication course.…

In the 21st century, global flows politically, socially, economically, and environmentally are creating widespread movements of people around the world and giving rise to increased resettlements of immigrants and refugees internationally. The reality in most countries worldwide is that contemporary populations are multifaceted, multicultural,…

The extensive literature on classroom-based second language learning makes little attempt to situate the classroom itself in social and multilingual sociolinguistic space, in the complex and iterative networks of encounters and interactions that make up daily life. Daily life is routinely evoked and "brought into" the classroom as a pedagogic and…

Applicants for U.S. citizenship must pass the naturalization test on U.S. history, government structure, constitutional principles, and basic English skills. Although no formal preparation for the exam is required, many immigrants, especially those with limited English proficiency, avail themselves of citizenship classes offered by community adult…

The debate over authenticity is a longstanding one in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. This article revisits that debate in the context of linguistic-minority adults who, in the process of migration, experience a loss of independence and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986/2004). Adult migrants must develop authentic voices in…

What is the role of positive feedback in the adult English language classroom? This study applies ideas from complexity theory to explore the relation between frequency of oral feedback received and student language proficiency. The researcher collected data from digital recordings of adult students (N = 41) who attended classes for 30 weeks at…

There is considerable evidence from psycholinguistics that first language listeners handle function words differently from content words. This makes intuitive sense because content words require the listener to access a lexical meaning representation whereas function words do not. A separate channel of processing for functors would enable them to…