Teaching technical vocabulary in ESP context is a vital part of English language teaching at a university level. EFL teachers almost use traditional techniques for teaching new medical vocabulary. This study aimed at examining the impact of teaching medical vocabulary through collocations on vocabulary learning of medical students. This…

French has played a central role in Congolese education since its independence in 1960. Its dominant position at the postcolonial school is subject to controversy on the national and international level. However, the way that pupils themselves have experienced the role of French at school has not been researched so far. This paper investigates the…

This study investigates the relative impact of verbal expression and tone of voice when native speakers of English form an impression of non-native speech. Four expressions of inquiry uttered in two tones by non-native speakers were judged by native listeners and analyzed using an ordinal Probit model. Plain expressions received lower scores than…

The present study focuses on determining whether automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology is reliable for improving English pronunciation to Iraqi EFL students. Non-native learners of English are generally concerned about improving their pronunciation skills, and Iraqi students face difficulties in pronouncing English sounds that are not…

The easy accessibility, ubiquity, and plurilingualism of popular SNSs such as Facebook have inspired many scholars and practitioners of second language teaching and learning to integrate networked forms of communication into educational contexts such as language classrooms and study abroad programs (e.g., Blattner & Fiori, 2011; Lamy &…

This article explores, from within the social constructivist paradigm and drawing on data from twenty-one semi-structured interviews with international postgraduate university students approaching the end of a one-year full-time taught Masters degree in the UK, the range of language development brokers that have had an impact on these students'…

This paper reports on a study of the identity perceptions of undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mandarin at UK universities. Interviews with 26 students were conducted over a three-year period, most of whom were multilingual. Approximately half spoke English as an additional language. The remainder were native speakers of English. The…

Research has shown that tasks provide second language (L2) learners with many opportunities to learn the L2. Task repetition has been claimed to benefit L2 learning since familiarity with procedure and/or content gives learners the chance to focus on more specific aspects of language. Most research on task repetition has focused on adult…

This article reports on a case study of a language school in Greece, with a view to putting forward an understanding of the drivers that sustain or delay curricular innovation. Key to this understanding is the construct of intentionality, defined as "purposes" that drive teaching and learning activity. In the article, we describe three…

This longitudinal study examined the contribution of morphological awareness to English as a Second Language (ESL) reading comprehension. Young Chinese-speaking ESL learners completed twice with a one-year interval the same set of tasks that measured derivational awareness, vocabulary breadth, fluency of reading derived words, and passage…

In this article, we describe and evaluate an innovative pedagogical task designed to raise awareness of Global Englishes and to challenge standard language ideology in an English language classroom. The task encouraged the learning and debate of the controversial Speak Good English Movement, which campaigns for Singaporeans to use a…

We study the learnability problem concerning the dative alternations in English (Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989). We consider how first language learners productively apply the double-object and to-dative constructions ("give the book to library"/"give the library the book"), while excluding negative exceptions ("donate the…

English orthographic learning, among Chinese-L1 children who were beginning to learn English as a foreign language, was documented when: (1) "only" visual memory was at their disposal, (2) visual memory and either "some" letter-sound knowledge or "some" semantic information was available, and (3) visual memory,…

Mother tongue rhetoric transfer is unavoidable in ESL writings, especially for Iranian ESL learners, since Persian and English language is quite different. The paper discusses the negative transfer of mother tongue rhetoric in Iranian undergraduate ESL learners' writings from the perspectives of choosing rhetorical structure in English and Persian…

The use of Indonesian language by children who speak the Balinese language, especially for children who live in rural areas is quite difficult. This is because their Balinese language is much different from Indonesian language. If they speak Indonesian language, they have to fall back to the language first. That is, language transfer process will…