Pragmatics in the field of English language teaching has recently received increasing research interests, but studies on teachers learning to teach pragmatics are limited. The present study extends this research agenda by investigating how well second/foreign language preservice teacher education (SLPTE) prepares teachers to teach pragmatics.…

International English Language Testing System (IELTS) scores have been widely used as the language entry requirements for international students in many English-medium universities. However, research on the predictive validity of IELTS on subsequent academic performance has been inconclusive. Additionally, despite the proliferation of IELTS…

If enhancing the connection between teaching and research has been highlighted in the general English language teaching profession, does English teaching at university -- the ivory tower characterized by research -- face the same issue? And how might this affect how the profession is perceived? This study provides an in-depth examination of how…

This study examined whether the reading passages in the new series of English-language textbooks for high-school students in Vietnam fostered reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading by looking at four factors: the number of unfamiliar words in the texts, the importance of these words for text comprehension, the…

The role of teacher professional learning (TPL) in assisting teachers to teach pronunciation in English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) contexts has received little attention. The study reported in extends this line of research by investigating how six EFL teachers at a Vietnamese university transform and integrate the pronunciation…

It is generally accepted that collocation is essential for establishing synonymy. They are related linguistic features which are important and useful for language learners. Given this importance, this present study considered the experience of 120 Thai English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. The study explored the students' knowledge of…

At the implementation level of the national project "Teaching and Learning Foreign Language in the Public-Sector Educational System for the 2008-2020 Period," the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) provided large-scale general English proficiency training for key English teachers and classroom English training for a…

In recent years, the use of English corpora to instruct grammar in writing classes has become increasingly popular. In English for Specific Purposes classes, such a novel approach is critically important since it not only allows teachers to achieve a profound understanding of which syntactic structures should be instructed, but it also increases…

This article reports on the views of selected Southeast Asian and Mexican second language teacher education students regarding the characteristics and pedagogical behaviours of good EFL instructors. A total of 116 participants from Mexico, Brunei, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam took part in the…

How does teachers' target language proficiency correlate with their ability to use the target language effectively in order to provide optimal learning opportunities in the language classroom? Adopting a conversation analysis approach, this study examines the extent to which teachers' use of the target language in the classroom creates learning…

With the globalization and internationalization of education, many teachers from Asian countries pursue their professional development in English-speaking settings. However, there seems to be scarce research on these teachers' expectations, lived experiences and identities in these contexts, and how their personal experiences influence their views…

This article describes the development and validation of a Vietnamese bilingual version of the Vocabulary Size Test--a test which measures written receptive vocabulary size. The test can be used to measure the English vocabulary size of Vietnamese learners of English. A learner's total vocabulary size is calculated by multiplying their test result…

Portfolios have gained great popularity as a method of process-oriented writing assessment in the last 20 years. Despite the apparent advantages, as with other new methods of assessment, they still raise many controversies, particularly those regarding the validity of their contents and assessment. This article describes the first stages in the…

Although a key component in English language teaching programs, English textbooks have been criticized for not offering classroom learners adequate opportunity for learning authentic language (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Grant and Starks, 2001; Wong, 2002; Vellenga, 2004). This is because instead of making use of language samples that native speakers…

Reading fluency plays an important part in academic achievement at colleges and universities. Speed reading courses, along with repeated reading and extensive reading, are popularly used methods to help students increase their reading speed. Several studies have shown the positive influence of a speed reading course in L2/FL on students' reading…