For academically bound international students, university-based intensive English programs (IEPs) frequently function as an avenue to American undergraduate or graduate degree programs. This qualitative study examined how one university-based IEP was preparing its academically bound international students and facilitating their transitions to…

With universities and other academic institutions now creating policies regarding the use of pronouns and the rights of individuals to use the pronouns they prefer, use of the singular they pronoun in academic discourse is a relatively new phenomenon and not one that is typically studied by English as a second language (ESL) students before their…

This qualitative phenomenological study examined how 11 international students experienced learning English within an intensive English immersion program, which used an integrated skills approach for language learning. Participants included seven males and four females from Africa, Asia, Central America, Middle East, and South America. Drawing on…

Although the effects of different types of written corrective feedback (WCF) have been examined in great detail, learners' revision behavior in response to WCF has not been systematically investigated. The current study compared students' classroom revision behaviors when they worked in pairs and when they worked individually. It further compared…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

Although research about the effectiveness of second or foreign language collaborative writing for jointly written products has proliferated in the last few decades, there has been less examination of whether and how pre-task preparation could maximize the language learning opportunities that collaborative writing can afford learners. Informed by…

This study investigates the potential of asynchronous video-mediated oral book report assignments to enhance learners' spoken performance and decrease their speaking anxiety. The participants were 42 B1 level preparatory students from the English Language Teaching department who were taking skills-based intensive English education in Turkey. The…

The focus in this article is on research in language centers. Four center directors provide examples of the place of research in language centers and focus on how teachers and researchers work together to facilitate large action research projects. The first section describes a survey of instructors in U.S.-based intensive English programs (IEPs).…

This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided…

This article considers the challenges heralded by digital technology in relation to the management of academic integrity on high-stakes Direct Entry English Programs in Australia. Firstly, a number of the ways in which students are using digital tools to complete assignment writing are examined. Secondly, findings from a review of academic…

The study investigates to what extent English as a second language (ESL) learners develop explicit and automatised explicit knowledge of two target-forms (third person singular 's' and future conditional if-clause) after input and output based instruction and whether learning effects differ depending on the target forms. The study follows a…

Prosody communicates pragmatic meaning far beyond that which is evident at the surface level of an utterance and can pose challenges to learners' pragmatic comprehension. The current study investigated how second language (L2) English learners made decisions about speaker intent when communicated through prosody. Seventeen English L2 learners took…

Studies have found that morphology awareness could assist writers to increase productive vocabulary (e.g. Green et al., 2003; McCutchen & Stull, 2015), reduce vocabulary errors (e.g. Karakas, 2012; Ririn, 2010), and produce complex sentence structures using various forms of words. Postgraduate students as second language users of English (L2)…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought life to an unexpected halt, and all levels of education including higher education had abrupt changes from face-to-face teaching to emergency remote teaching to sustain the continuity of education. English preparatory schools that provide newly-enrolled university students with one-year intensive English language…

Although there is consensus that collaboration refers to two or more learners working together to accomplish a task (Davin & Donato, [Davin, K., 2013]; Ohta, [Ohta, A., 2001]), debate remains about how to assess collaboration. Researchers have pursued two approaches to evaluate collaboration during peer interaction: rater judgments (e.g.,…