Written feedback on drafts of a thesis or dissertation is arguably the most important source of input on what is required or expected of thesis-writing students by the academic community. Despite its importance, relatively little is known about what type of information supervisors focus on when giving feedback. This article presents the findings…

When literacy instruction is integrated and contextualized in a child's background knowledge and daily experiences, learning is increased. This mixed-methods study describes effective bilingual instruction in second-grade classrooms in the United States where teachers utilize students' linguistic capital and foster home-school connections, two…

The relationship between linguistic experience and phonemic representations in spelling was investigated in two groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (aged 5-6 years) who spoke mostly Mandarin-L1 (n = 23) or mostly English-L1 (n = 27) at home. A 60-item cloze task including high- and low-frequency words with word-initial and word-final…

While research on portfolio assessment (PA) has focused largely on the summative aspects of writing assessment, not much has been done to find out its formative potential. Drawing upon student questionnaires and student and teacher interview data, this paper aims to explore the formative functions of PA and, specifically, how the formative…

Background/Context: How do we account for the persistence of below-average math test score performance among California Hispanics who are fluent in English, as well as Spanish-dominant English learners? Recent studies have attributed the problem to an overly rigid focus on "what works" in curriculum and fluency in English to the…

The field of English language education has seen developments in writing pedagogy, moving from product-based to process-based and then to genre-based approaches. In Vietnam, teaching secondary school students how to write in English is still lagging behind these growing developments. Product-based approach is commonly seen in English writing…

Few challenges facing America today are as vital as improving the educational attainment of low social economic and English Language Learners (language minority children). The United States' educational reform has brought forth numerous initiatives throughout the past decades to address the "Achievement Gap" between Latino students and their Anglo…

Employing a mixed-method explorative approach, this study examined the in situ use of and opinions about an educational computer game for learning English introduced in three schools offering different levels of freedom to choose school activities. The results indicated that the general behaviour of the children with the game was very different…

This article reports on an empirical study that examines general academic difficulties, and academic reading and writing difficulties among Asian ESL (English as a Second Language) international postgraduate students who are completing a Master's Degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at an Australian university. The…

The current study aimed to diagnose the probable significant differences in the use of language learning strategies among medical-text readers of opposite sex from different levels of proficiency. 120 (N = 120) participants were randomly selected from Azad Medical University of Mashhad: 60 medical students (age range 23-25; 30 = male and 30 =…

The problem. This research study explores an important issue in the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and second language acquisition (SLA). Its purpose is to examine the relationship between Vietnamese students' L1 grammar knowledge and their English grammar proficiency. Furthermore, it investigates the extent to…

This paper describes the outcomes and key elements of collaborative professional development on K-12 educators working to improve education of Latino and English learning students in a state with rapidly changing demographics. Across four years (2003-04 through 2006-07), 37 teams from 16 urban, suburban, and rural school districts in the state of…

A growing body of research has examined the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) for L2 writing. An area that has attracted considerable attention recently is how students and teachers perceive the usefulness of WCF. Most research in this area, however, has focused on students' perspectives, while many fewer studies comparing…

This study explores task-based, synchronous oral computer-mediated communication (CMC) among intermediate-level learners of Spanish. In particular, this paper examines (a) how learners in video and audio CMC groups negotiate for meaning during task-based interaction, (b) possible differences between both oral CMC modes and traditional face-to-face…

This study examined the effect of a self-monitoring strategy on EFL online learners' academic performance and motivational beliefs. A total of 90 college freshmen participated in the study, and instruments used in the study included two general English proficiency tests, a course-based reading comprehension test, and a modified version of the…