An indispensable part of any curriculum design in an educational setting is the analysis of the needs of the learners involved in the context. The needs can be addressed from different perspectives. Among them, the learners' needs in terms of their perceptions toward what constitute learning/teaching and testing processes are of prominent values.…

The present study revisited the issue of simultaneous attention to form and meaning from a methodological perspective that addressed several potential methodological issues of previous research in this strand of inquiry. Seventy-two second-semester-level participants were randomly assigned to one of five experimental groups, including a control,…

English learners of French whose first language (L1) does not mark the perfective/imperfective distinction have shown verb semantic influence and an overall preference for perfective over imperfective in their use of second language (L2) tense-aspect markers. This study investigated whether learners whose L1 marks the perfective/imperfective…

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the variable use of the subjunctive which constitutes a notable "fragile zone" in the spoken French of advanced L2 learners. A comparative approach is adopted to consider the relative impact of naturalistic and instructed L2 exposure in the case of our learner-participants who were Irish university…

Practitioners working closely with second language (L2) writers in the US recognize at least two types of L2 students: international (IL2) and Generation 1.5 (G1.5) students. Some argue that specific differences in each group's writing performance are evident (cf. Harklau, 2003; Reid, 2006); however, investigations into observable and measurable…

Alderson (2005) suggests that diagnostic tests should identify strengths and weaknesses in learners' use of language and focus on specific elements rather than global abilities. However, rating scales used in performance assessment have been repeatedly criticized for being imprecise and therefore often resulting in holistic marking by raters…

This paper examines the transmission patterns of Eastern Brittany's Romance language variety, Gallo, based on quantitative data showing learning patterns of school pupils of the language and their parents in 2003 and 2004. Results confirm the sharp decline in Gallo transmission between generations. Nevertheless, Gallo transmission has not…

This paper analyzes pedagogic practice in primary and secondary Singaporean English classrooms in terms of dialogicity. The dominant interactional patterns in Singaporean English classrooms are initiation-response-evaluation (IRE), whole class lecture and individual seatwork in which the students give either one word answers or remain silent.…

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of advanced second language (L2) students from Hong Kong who took part in a short-term sojourn in England after 14 weeks of preparation. While abroad, they lived with a host family, took literary/cultural studies courses, visited cultural sites, participated in debriefing sessions, and conducted…

Vocabulary notebooks are frequently advocated as a way for students to take control of their vocabulary learning (Fowle, 2002), with the added benefit of improvements in vocabulary learning (Schmitt and Schmitt, 1995; Laufer and Nation, 1999). The study described in this article attempts to lend empirical support to these claims, by investigating…

This study explored whether the learner ethnicity has any influence on the frequency and the choice of language learning strategy use by investigating learners of Japanese through the use of the SILL. The participants were 151 students of Japanese at an American University. The results of the mean SILL scores of each ethnicity revealed that the…

Visioning a world class university is certainly an appropriate target for a university. Realizing this vision would need an expansion of knowledge and greater English proficiency as in this period of history, English is the language of IT which is an important key to acquiring knowledge. Using a sample of 40 level one students from UiTM Dungun…

This dissertation presents a research study of the perceived level of parent involvement in primarily Hispanic secondary schools within Chicago Public Schools (CPS) with relationship to the type of leadership practices self-identified by that school's principal. Data was collected via a questionnaire which was administered to parents of secondary…

A renewed focus on foreign language (FL) learning and speech for communication has resulted in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) software developed with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). ASR features for FL pronunciation (Lafford, 2004) are functional components of CALL designs used for FL teaching and learning. The ASR features…

In this paper the academic English reading proficiency of 578 Norwegian university students was quantitatively examined. Self-assessment items were used to measure reading proficiency in Norwegian and English and validated using an International English Language Testing System Academic Reading Module. The study found that about 30% of the…