The inclusion of students with disabilities in the education system results in content or assessment accommodations to suit the students' special needs and to ensure they have acquired the objectives listed in the curriculum. In this paper, we aim at proposing different ways to accommodate a university English language test to a partially blind…

This study attempts to reveal whether there is unintentional reverse transfer L2[right arrow]L1 (English-Spanish) in the oral L1 production of university learners in formal contexts. The languages used by learners influence each other, and this transfer may occur from the first to the second language ("direct transfer"), or from the…

The objectives of this study are to elicit perceptions that Chinese users of English have towards a selection of world English varieties; to determine the effects of speaker gender and visual primes (ethnic faces) on perceptions; and also to reveal how these two factors interact with each other. In the present experiment, 278 respondents were…

This classroom-based study examined the effect of collective peer scaffolding activity on self-revised as well as new narrative and descriptive paragraphs developed by 32 EFL university students in a paragraph writing course in Iran. Each genre was discussed and practiced every other week and was followed by a collective peer scaffolding session.…

Given the importance of the phonological and lexical components of the language in L2 learning, this article discusses an innovative, holistic approach to learning these two components of the language based on the existence of "sound symbolism"--the interrelation between sound and meaning--in English. In particular, it describes how and…

This article will discuss recent theories of Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and provide an overview of studies into this individual difference which have been conducted in both Iran and New Zealand (NZ). So far few qualitative studies have been carried out into WTC or have used permanent migrants as participants. The article reports on a…

This article reports on mixed methods classroom research carried out at a British university. The study investigates the effectiveness of two different explicit teaching frameworks, Illustration--Interaction--Induction (III) and Present--Practice--Produce (PPP) used to teach the same spoken discourse markers (DMs) to two different groups of…

The focus of the present study is on identifying categories of learning strategies that are mostly used by Russian university students in an English Linguistics Program with a TEFL concentration. The more specific goal of the study is to offer a model of evaluation of the effectiveness of TEFL-oriented programs in terms of the language learning…

This study investigates the acquisition of discourse markers by Chinese learners of English in terms of gender, style and individual identity. The subjects of the study are 15 female university students and 15 male university students. The data is collected by means of audio recording in the classroom discussion and in the interviews. The examined…

The new requirement placed on students in tertiary settings in Spain to demonstrate a B1 or a B2 proficiency level of English, in accordance with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL), has led most Spanish universities to develop a program of certification or accreditation of the required level. The first part of this…

In recent years increasing research attention has been devoted to the definition and development of presentation skills. As an interactive oral discourse type, the presentation is characterised by specific speech acts, of which cooperative acts have proved to be of a highly developmental nature (Sazdovska, 2009). The aim of the present paper is to…

The present study is a corpus-based analysis of a selection of polysemous lexical verbs used to express modality in student argumentative writing. Twenty-three lexical verbs were searched for in three 100,000-word corpora of argumentative essays written in English by American, Filipino and Spanish university students. Concordance lines were…

There is a significant world-wide apprehension concerning perceived deficiencies in university students' performance and a resulting decrease of knowledge level and competency development. This paper analyses the benefits of using a portfolio as a means of evaluating student progress and the beliefs from which students draw their learning and…

The aim of this work is to analyse how Spanish readers react to English discourse markers in a text. We carry out an empirical study in which we ask three research question: (a) if there is any relationship between presence of discourse markers or absence of discourse markers and reading comprehension in English as a foreign language, (b) if there…

This paper reports an assessment of the collocational competence of students of English Linguistics at the University of Granada. This was carried out to meet a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, we aimed to establish a solid corpus-driven approach based upon a systematic and reliable framework for the evaluation of collocational competence in…