The article "Some Important Facts about Language Teaching/Learning: Basics and Assumptions" by Dr. Mahmoud M. S. Abdallah explores the foundational elements of language teaching and learning. It emphasizes the importance of language proficiency for personal, social, and professional success, highlighting the cognitive and societal…

From one of the leading figures in the field of second language acquisition and second language teaching, "While We're on the Topic..." offers an up-to-date overview of six principles underlying contemporary communicative language teaching. In a conversational style, Bill VanPatten addresses principles related to the nature of…

This article describes how a course based on the concept of English for specific academic purposes (ESAP) was transformed into content and language integrated learning (CLIL) at a trilingual university where English serves as a lingua franca and medium of instruction, due to the application of a task-based communicative approach. The article…

After presenting some of the main arguments against certain narrow concepts of second language practice, this article argues that a broader concept of practice, still focused on form or even forms, but with due attention to form-meaning links and with appropriate sequencing of activities to ensure declarative knowledge first, followed by its…

The point of departure for this article is the contrast between the theoretical landscape within view of language teaching professionals in 1991 and that of today. I argue that the pragmatic goal of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) developers and researchers to create and evaluate learning opportunities pushes them to consider a variety…

This article proposes a model for sensitizing students to the richness of literary texts based on Lee and VanPatten's (1995) structured input/output approach to teaching foreign languages (FL). It begins by discussing the difficulties and challenges of intermediate-level FL courses, noting that the concept of "bridge courses" may be faulty because…

Input must be both contextualized and natural if it is to be coterminous with actual communication, in which interlocutors participate in a cooperative and dialogic process. However, when input becomes decontextualized, discourse shifts to a superficial plane. As is commonly the case in theater, verbal act meaning in the classroom setting is…

Topics for conversation courses include conversational rules and structure, conversational strategies, functions and meaning in conversation, and social and cultural contexts. The direct teaching of conversational skills involves adding specific language input, increasing the role of consciousness raising, and sequencing communicative tasks…

After discussing the ties between language teaching and second language acquisition research, the present paper reviews the role that second language acquisition research has played on two recent pedagogical proposals. First, communicative language teaching, advocated in the early eighties, in which focus on the code was excluded, and then the…

This article outlines an approach to explicit grammar instruction that uses literary texts as comprehensible, meaning-bearing input. In this approach, which employs strategies from the teaching of grammar and the teaching of reading, literary texts serve as the basis of the inductive presentation of new grammatical forms and as a springboard for…