This study sought to determine the effects of explicit phonics instruction and sight word instruction on the letter-sound identification and word reading of 13- to 15-year-old English language learners in the eighth grade who were identified as having intellectual disabilities (ID). Using a randomized single-subject design, four Hispanic students…

Using research data on teacher codeswitching in South Korea, this article investigates the attitudes and perceptions among Korean learners of English as a foreign language towards English-only instruction as opposed to instruction which contains some switching to the learners' first language. The study was in part operationalized by exploring…

The current study evaluates guessing behaviors in a vocabulary size test (VST) and examines whether including an "I don't know" in a VST may have an impact on the results of the test. One-hundred-fifty first-year students at a university in China took part in the study. They were randomly assigned to three groups. Each group took a…

This mixed methods study adds to a growing international literature on the nature of language teachers' engagement with and in research by examining such engagement in the context of college English teaching in China. Questionnaire responses from 725 college English teachers and interviews with 20 of these teachers indicate that, although they…

Integrated speaking test tasks (integrated tasks) offer textual and/or aural input for test takers on which to base their subsequent oral responses. This path-analytic study modeled the relationship between test anxiety and the performance of such tasks and explored whether test anxiety would differentially affect the performance of independent…

This article addresses the question of how far working memory may affect second language (L2) learners' improvement in spoken language during a period of immersion. Research is presented testing the hypothesis that individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity are associated with individual variation in improvements in oral production of…

Foreign language anxiety (FLA) has been found to exist in all of the cultures where it has been studied, yet the literature provides limited empirical evidence to indicate whether foreign language students and teachers, as the direct stakeholders in the phenomenon, are aware of it. This study investigated the extent to which foreign language…

Little is known about the effects of various planning and revising conditions on composition quality in experimental or TESOL education research. This study examined the effects of planning conditions (planning, prolonged planning, free writing, and control), subplanning conditions (task-given, task-content-given, and…

This nonexperimental study explored the relationships among individual differences, contextual variables, and reading achievement of English language learners (ELLs) in one large urban school district in the United States. The sample comprised 840 students in Grades 3-8 and 10 nested within 37 schools. Hierarchical linear modeling results indicate…

The researchers completed a corpus-driven analysis of 688 texts written for children, language learners, and older readers to determine the vocabulary size necessary for comprehension and the potential to incidentally learn vocabulary through reading each text type. The comparison between texts written for different audiences may indicate their…

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…

This study investigated the effect of targeted test preparation, or coaching, on oral English as a second language test scores. The tests in question were the Basic English Skills Test Plus (BEST Plus), a scripted oral interview published by the Center for Applied Linguistics, and the Versant English Test (VET), a computer-administered and…

This exploratory study presents results of an online survey on student teachers' technology proficiencies and uses of various tools in an adult Intensive English Program (IEP) in the United States. The ultimate goal was to identify areas of improvement for teacher education programs with regard to technology-enhanced language teaching and student…

The present study aims to answer the questions concerning whether composition tasks or blank-filling tasks better facilitate vocabulary learning, which aspect of vocabulary knowledge is enhanced, whether the benefits can be retained over two weeks, and which task is more suitable to foreign language classrooms facing the challenge of time…

Interaction between second language (L2) learners in which the primary goal is the communication of meaning rather than the manipulation of language forms is widely regarded as beneficial for L2 learning from a variety of theoretical and pedagogical perspectives. Besides learning opportunities created through interactional feedback, modified…