Research engagement and exploratory dialogue are central to forms of practitioner inquiry such as action research, in particular with regard to developing conceptual knowledge before action. Recently, practitioners have started engaging with technology such as podcasts as a way to facilitate opportunities for these focused interactions to take…

Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, many children are not learning to read competently in the first 3 years of primary school; thus, both 'reading to learn' and 'reading for pleasure' in these early years, and in higher grades, are constrained. Two of the many reasons for reading failure are the absence of suitable materials in languages with which…

According to Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman (2011), we use a language with others as a form of shared cognition, and in the process we scaffold each other. This action research investigates how students' online written output affects each other's writing. One thousand twenty online entries written by 21 Japanese university sophomore English majors…

The purpose of this action research was to explore the types of interactions that foreign language learners experience while using a wiki as a supporting tool for a face-to-face research course. This design allowed me to play a dual role: first, I studied my own classroom setting and students. Second, I implemented a pedagogical intervention based…

This paper explores the effectiveness of theme-based instructional (TBI) method as a means of honing the writing skills and the motivation for writing of 36 pre-degree ESL learners in a Malaysian tertiary institution. The method which focused on development of language skills through discussion of themes provided the teacher a direct and effective…