A main objective in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) is to enable students to communicate effectively in many situations and contexts. This involves being able to control a wide range of language functions, which are how speakers use language for requesting, congratulating, apologizing, complaining, consoling, and promising, among many…

In much of the literature on the exploitation of corpora for language learning, the learners are viewed as researchers, who formulate and test their own hypotheses about language use. Having identified difficulties encountered in corpus investigations by our intermediate-level students of Italian in a previous study, we have designed a…

Discusses the theoretical premises of two experiments in early second language teaching undertaken in Sweden, the first labelled "English without a book", the second, "English in the preparatory school". Analyzes results from the first experiment which led to the decision to begin English instruction as early as grade three.…

Task-based instruction (TBI) is frequently promoted as an effective teaching approach, superior to "traditional" methods, and soundly based in theory and research. The approach is often justified by the claim that linguistic regularities are acquired through "noticing" during communicative activity, and should therefore be addressed primarily by…

Examines four factors in the operation of formal schemata in the recall of written narrative texts in English by students in Hong Kong: quantity of recall; temporal sequence of recall from story-schematic and input versions of stories; the effects of second language proficiency level on quantity of recall; and the quality of recall. (31…

Explores whether pragmatic fluency is best acquired by provision of input and opportunity for communicative practice alone, or whether learners profit more with additional explicit instruction in the use of conversational routines. The article hypothesized that such instruction raises learners' awareness of the functions and contextual…

This journal highlights five papers by international authors on various topics in education. In the first article, it was hypothesized deductively that extroverts will show more fluctuations in attending than introverts and that individuals with high neuroticism show more fluctuations in attention span than less neurotic persons. The second…