In this commentary, we describe the English language placement adaptations we were required to make due to the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic. It includes a brief description of our placement test battery which was adapted to address our institution's move to a remote teaching/learning mode. A discussion of the major challenges we experienced, their…

In her position article, Lee (2019) compellingly argues for focused written corrective feedback (FWCF) and offers clear guidelines for teachers to shift their feedback approach. As English language teaching practitioners in Chinese universities, we share Lee's view against any unthinking adherence to comprehensive written corrective feedback…

In this interview, I speak with Gail Shuck about her continued commitment to seize upon what she describes as "kairotic moments" to build a network of support for refugee students, an underserved language-minoritized student population, at Boise State University. Gail describes how she has inhabited her administrative position to work…

Lindseth (2016) reported that direct instruction and practice using the German verb-inversion rule resulted in higher accuracy in an oral test for college students, supporting the hypothesis that explicit linguistic knowledge can become implicit linguistic knowledge. It is quite likely, however, that the conditions for the use of conscious…

As the population of international--and particularly Chinese--students grows in US academic institutions, it is critical that writing center tutors be able to address these students' needs. However, whereas writing tutors at the author's institution are often taught to be indirect and focus on higher order concerns, such strategies are not always…

This paper is motivated by the premise that little is known about the use of requestive strategies in request emails in Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) context. Specifically, the paper examines and compares requestive strategies in request emails between two groups of university students, namely English majors (EM) and non-English…

The globalisation of education has meant that English medium universities are enrolling unprecedented numbers of students for whom English is not a first language. This, in turn, has put increased pressure on institutions to ensure they have in place suitable measures for screening applicants in respect of their English language proficiency and…

The notion that language is not simply a politically neutral medium of communication, but a social practice that determines power relations and shapes subjectivity has become widely accepted in critical language and literacy studies. Within any socio-linguistic community, certain ways of using language are considered "proper,"…

This article argues that improved interactions between home and international students are dependant on the way we use both the formal and the informal curricula to encourage and reward intercultural engagement. It draws on the results of several research studies to present some strategies for facilitating meaningful interaction between students…

As a sixth year student of Spanish looking back on her foreign language education, the author believes she has a greater understanding of what attracted her to and maintained her interest in the language. Yet she also recognizes areas in her education that could have benefited from change, including flexibility in creating her own program of study…

The move of the University of Southern California to eliminate its German department in order to shift resources to Asian languages has sparked a debate about the relative importance of learning European languages. College administrators seem to assume that global shifts in economic power call for changes in the distribution of their budget for…

In this article we examine how instructors make decisions about task design in telecollaboration and the factors that influence these decisions during the actual implementation of the tasks. We begin with a review of the recent literature of online intercultural exchanges to identify and describe a typology of 12 different types of tasks and task…

I define the "literacy autobiography" as a reflective, first-person account of one's development as a writing being. In this article I share a classroom practice that invited language learners to consider and compose their literacy autobiographies (LA). The context was a university credit English as a second language (ESL) classroom. The purposes…

It is argued in this article that user actions need to be monitored to understand what has happened during the learning process. Monitoring on its own is not enough; user actions also need to be controlled to some degree so that users can receive the guidance they need to help them to the successful completion of the learning tasks in CALL…

Discusses Japan's Ministry of Education's plan to raise the number of foreign students studying in the university system up to 100,000 by the year 2000. Barriers to the program include insufficient technical training and mastery of the Japanese language. (MDH)