The current study investigated the effects of different computer-supported cooperative prewriting strategies (text-based brainstorming, drawing, and mind mapping) on the writing performance of elementary-school EFL (English as a foreign language) learners in Taiwan. Three intact classes of fifth graders (N = 81 students; 27 per prewriting strategy…

English as a second language (ESL) teaching is partly a thinking process in which teacher knowledge plays a pivotal role in making instructional choices (Breen, Hird, Milton, Oliver, & Thwaite, 2001). The present study contributes to understandings of teacher knowledge by exploring the types of knowledge, which practicing teachers value in…

As email requests from students to professors have become increasingly common in academic settings, research has also shown second-language (L2) students' unfamiliarity with email etiquette in L2 has adversely affected their communication with their professors. The present study examines whether giving corrective feedback on students' performance…

Young monolingual children typically demonstrate frequent tense shifting during narrative development, whereas older children maintain a consistent narration tense. Therefore, inconsistent tense usage in older children could be an indication of overall limited language skills. However, information regarding tense use in bilinguals has been…

Based on the schema theory, it has been found that the background knowledge of males and females differs. This difference in background knowledge can affect the students' reading comprehension. In Iran, although boys and girls study in different schools, they follow the same curricula and syllabuses in all the schools. The present article reports…

The study examines the effect of explicit form focus instruction and specifically metalinguistic information feedback on the development of both implicit and explicit knowledge of adult English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. Ninety-one subjects at the lower intermediate level were carefully selected through placement test at one of the…

Teachers employ various strategies aimed at enhancing student motivation, yet there is scant empirical evidence to support their effectiveness. Based on an investigation of 30 EFL classroom observations involving 10 teachers and more than 900 learners (including 90 learners at different levels of English proficiency who completed questionnaires),…

This paper aims to explore the Iranian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' ability to gain grammatical accuracy in their writing by noticing and correcting their own grammatical errors. Recent literature in language acquisition has emphasized the role of implicit tasks in encouraging learners to develop autonomous language learning…

Recently, the use of children's picture books to teach English has been increasing in Japan. An advantage of these books is the high proportion of basic vocabulary they include. Can picture books also be useful for teaching Japanese students Italian and increasing their motivation? The present study analyses the effectiveness of employing a…

This study reports the dominant linguistic errors that occur in the written productions of Arba Minch University (hereafter AMU) students. A sample of paragraphs was collected for two years from students ranging from freshmen to graduating level. The sampled compositions were then coded, described, and explained using error analysis method. Both…

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects on motivation and success within the application of blended learning environments in the foreign language class. The research sample is formed by third grade students studying in the tourism and hotel management programs of the faculty for tourism and the faculty of economics and administrative…

This study concerns the effect of letter position on the retention of words by EFL learners. Given the fact that everyone has a mental lexicon, we would suggest that words are possibly organized in alphabetical order, then it would be likely for the learners to retain the words easily when exposed to the first letters of given words. The study…

Second language reading comprehension is the most important skill required by students, especially in a foreign language context. One way to help these students improve their reading comprehension is strategy instruction. In the present study, the effect of two strategies, namely, summarizing and students-generated questions have been…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the appropriateness of "English Textbook 2" for Iranian EFL second grade high school students from the teachers' perspectives. The participants of the study consisted of 25 English teachers (8 females and 17 males) randomly selected from different high schools in Boukan, Iran. The evaluation…

The criteria by which raters judge pragmatic appropriateness of language learners' speech acts are underexamined, especially when raters evaluate extended discourse. To shed more light on this process, the present study investigated what factors are salient to raters when scoring pragmatic appropriateness of extended request sequences, and which…