Language teachers spend much of their time providing corrective feedback on students' writing in hope of helping them improve grammatical accuracy. Turning to research for guidance, however, can leave practitioners with few concrete answers as to the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (CF). Debate in the literature continues, reflecting…

This article describes a study examining the effects of Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) model instruction on the academic language performance of middle and high school English language learners. The SIOP model is an approach for teaching content curriculum to students learning through a new language. Teachers employ techniques…

Response to student writing has been a research concern for composition specialists for the past several decades. However, most research to date has utilized student opinions or researcher judgments about teacher feedback, with researchers rarely consulting teachers themselves as informants. Also, first language (L1) and second language (L2)…

This study examines the effects of working memory capacity and content familiarity on literal and inferential comprehension in second language (L2) reading. Participants were 62 Turkish university students with an advanced English proficiency level. Working memory capacity was measured through a computerized version of a reading span test, whereas…

A number of studies claim that knowledge of 5,000-8,000 of the most frequent words should provide at least 95% coverage of most unsimplified texts in English, arguably enough to guess or ignore most unknown words while reading (Hirsh & Nation, 1992; Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer, 1991; Nation, 2006). However, perhaps hidden in that 95% figure are…

In this article I examine the collocational behaviour of groups of semantically related verbs (e.g., "head, run, manage") and nouns (e.g., "issue, factor, aspect") from the domain of business English. The results of this corpus-based study show that much of the collocational behaviour exhibited by these lexical items can be explained by examining…

Tertiary education in many countries is increasingly bilingual, with English used in parallel with the national language, particularly as a reading language. This article describes the results of a survey of student attitudes toward, and reading practices regarding, English language textbooks. Over 1,000 students at three Swedish universities…

During the past 20 years, English language teaching and learning has grown phenomenally in Cambodia as the country has opened up to the outside world following more than two decades of civil war. As a result, the standard of English spoken today in Cambodia has also risen dramatically. One feature of this context of dynamic change has been the…

This is a two-part discussion. Part 1 is entitled "English Language Learning in Subject Lessons", and Part 2 is titled "Video as a Research Tool/Counterpoint". Working with different research concerns, the authors attempt to draw attention to a set of methodological and theoretical issues that have emerged in the research process using video data.…

The Academic Word List (AWL) is now widely used in English for academic purposes (EAP) classrooms in many countries, in a wide range of materials, in vocabulary tests, and as a major resource for researchers. In this article the author reflects on the impact of the AWL by looking at commonly asked questions about the list: What is the AWL? Is the…

Multiple-choice tests such as the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) are often viewed as a preferable estimator of vocabulary knowledge when compared to yes/no checklists, because self-reporting tests introduce the possibility of students overreporting or underreporting scores. However, multiple-choice tests have their own unique disadvantages. It has…

Whereas there has been much research on language and identity with respect to learners, teachers, and teacher educators, there has been little focus on the identity of the researcher, an important stakeholder in language education. Our research therefore addresses the following question: To what extent can narrative inquiry illuminate the ways in…

It is widely recognised that teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) and teaching English as a second dialect (TESD) in remote Indigenous Australia have a history of repeated failure of both policy and practice. National language testing has been been forcefully attacked by TESOL specialists, producing strong debate amongst…

Narratives of classroom life--the type that blend analysis with artistry, in the form of plays, poems, stories, and the like--remain relatively uncommon within language education research. Yet such narratives have the potential to make a significant and timely contribution to the field, given the ways in which knowledge is being reconceptualised…

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…