Explores primary school teachers' perspectives on assessment in English in Singapore and discusses the impact of assessment on the importance of research into teachers' views on curriculum and assessment issues. Participants completed questionnaires and participated in semi-structured interviews. Findings indicate teachers are strongly aware of…

Examines chemical engineering students' attitudes to text and other parts of English language textbooks. A questionnaire was administered to a group of undergraduates. Results reveal one way students get around the problem of textbook reading. (Author/VWL)

This study investigates whether proficient second language (L2) speakers of Spanish and English use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, such as "Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California."…

Although there is extensive research into what constitutes second language learning motivation and how it works, most of the existing work is carried out in ESL environments, and is mainly concerned with motivation to communicate using the target language. However, in EFL environments such as Japan, students have quite limited contact with target…

The current study aims at investigating the effect of a suggested CALL program on developing EFL learners' mechanics of writing in English. An unbiased simple random sample of eighty fourth-year students (2006/2007) of the English Department at the Faculty of Education in Kafr El-Sheikh has been chosen to carry out the experiment. Forty students…

The Linguistic European Policy stresses the importance of linguistic diversity and encourages students to learn several languages, believing that the more languages we know, the better we can understand each other and preserve our languages. To preserve diversity and to value all the languages (either included in the curriculum or not) is a first…

In spite of long-standing political tensions between Japan and the People's Republic of China, Japanese remains a highly popular language to learn in Hong Kong. This is evidenced by the growth in number of Japanese-related courses and programmes offered at schools and universities in the Special Administrative Region. Although Japan is a dominant…

The validity of TOEIC Bridge™ scores as a measure of English language skill was examined from the standpoint of a unified concept of test validity. In this study, more than 6,000 test takers in 3 Latin American countries (Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador) took 1 form of the TOEIC Bridge test, and their scores were compared to additional information…

This paper describes a survey that assessed the attitudes toward English among university students in Macao five years after it reunited with the People's Republic of China and ceased to be a Portuguese colony. A group of 144 Macao-born and 197 Mainland-born Chinese students studying in a university in Macao were surveyed using a 22-item…

In the verbal linguistic systems, the target for English learners in China is educated native speaker accuracy. The target for more socially embedded interchange is yet to be established. Its basis needs to be formed from "what members of the target culture consider appropriate for foreigners and attitudes of learners themselves"…

This article addresses the learning of second language (L2) writing skills to show how pictures can be used as an effective guided writing tool to facilitate students' writing process and to improve their writing proficiency. A study was conducted with 53 university students who had a prior knowledge of Spanish in secondary school. All students…

Based on personal experience, this paper examines the ambiguities of the Likert-type 5-point scale in learning strategy elicitation. Four parallel questionnaires consisting of the same batch of 20 items taken from the Oxford scale (1990) were administered among a group of 120 tertiary level, non-English majors in China. Questionnaire 1 used the…

This paper reports on university student self-assessment of foreign language program learning at the University of Southampton (England) in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms. A survey of foreign language students on progress in foreign language learning revealed that many students were not unduly influenced by their scores on…

Case studies of six foreign adolescents participating in a 3-week immersion English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) program at the American Village language camp in Big Sky, Montana, are examined, including the students' motivations in learning and using English. Research focused on exploring student motivations toward learning and using English at the…

A national survey by the Higher Education Panel of the American Council on Education was conducted to provide some insight into what is happening in undergraduate international studies. Important features of international studies as they appear at a large stratified national sample of institutions are enumerated. These features are foreign…