Effective teaching practice requires that teachers know their students not as 'faceless average learners', but as individuals. The most individual of learner characteristics is personality, and yet language education research has made little progress in understanding the role of personality. As the field of language learning motivation seeks to…

This questionnaire study examined the beliefs, practices and constraints related to learner autonomy reported by 359 teachers (mainly expatriate) working on an English Preparatory Year Programme (PYP) at a university in Saudi Arabia. The teachers associated learner autonomy primarily with notions of independence and control and saw it as the…

In this article I outline how and why I have established a self-assessment system for class participation scores in an English-speaking skills course at a Japanese university. I explain how my experience with one particular student, who personally admitted to having abused the system, led me to realize that elements from Yin and Yang have been…

While learners of a second language (L2) are increasingly interacting in small groups as part of a communicative methodological paradigm, very few studies have investigated the social dynamics that occur in such groups. The aim of this study is to introduce a group work dynamic measuring instrument and to investigate the relationship between group…

Presents results of an empirical survey aimed at obtaining classroom data on student motivational strategies. Hungarian teachers from various language teaching institutions were asked how important they considered a selection of 51 strategies, and how frequently they used them in their teaching practice. (Author/VWL)