This study explores the culture of feedback, i.e. the beliefs, behaviours and other characteristics that are common to the members of a particular group or society, in a higher education institution in Oman. It examines how feedback on second-language writing is interpreted, enacted and developed by learners and teachers, and investigates the…

This study explores the role of an online pre-sessional program in preparing students to matriculate into an English-medium bachelor's program at a Japanese university. The study covers two program sessions, the first of which consisted primarily of international students, and the second comprised mainly of graduates of Japanese high schools. To…

This chapter is a reflective account of the author's experience as a teacher of English at the University of Pavia during the first wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. It considers the design and delivery of an English for architecture and construction engineering course as well as the assessment stage of a text analysis course. It proceeds by…

This project examines how writing teachers of multilingual students conceptualize their pedagogical practices. Specifically, it draws on work in teacher cognition research to examine the nature of teacher knowledge and the unique characteristics of this knowledge specific to the teaching of second language writing. Seeing teacher knowledge as…

It is now widely recognized that assessment and the feedback play key roles in the learning process. However, assessment-based learning approaches are not yet commonly practiced in Japan. This paper provides an example of an assessment-based approach to teaching and learning employed for a course entitled "English as an International…

Projects related to the European Language Portfolio (ELP) carried out at the Language Centre of the University of Trieste are concerned to examine whether and to what extent "can do" descriptors can be extended to courses in Languages for Specific Purposes. The project reported in this article had two aims. The first was to explore what…

Research into Singapore English (SgE) has undergone many paradigm shifts from the 1970s to the present. This paper first begins with a consideration of how variation in the English language used in Singapore has been studied. It then identifies the two main varieties of English commonly described in Singapore, namely, Standard SgE (SSE) and…