This paper examines two language practices of students in a predominantly African American bilingual second grade class: language play and identity formation. Prevalent notions about legitimate language knowledge are visible in the school's curriculum, language goals, and assessment requirements. Additionally, discussions about bilingual…

This article examines the role of self-efficacy beliefs in learning English as a foreign language in an Indonesian primary school setting. Self-efficacy is a significant motivational factor affecting the cognitive and behavioral engagement of learners (Linnenbrink & Pintrich, 2003). The study adopted a mixed-methods research design that…

The "Teacher Leader Guide for School-Wide English Learning" provides a roadmap for capitalizing on the often untapped language expertise of ESL teachers. By providing teacher leaders with the tools needed to develop customized professional development and engage in non-evaluative peer instructional coaching, the School-Wide English…

Many of the foreign language teachers and professors I have encountered throughout my EFL teaching career say that speaking is the most difficult skill to teach in a foreign language class. Classes usually focus on teaching points (e.g. grammar or listening related lessons) that can satisfy larger classroom situations. Speaking requires adequate…

This article investigated the development of morphological awareness (MA) across three groups of students of Spanish as a second language (SSL) with different levels of proficiency. Four morphological assessment tasks on relational knowledge were designed in a simultaneous cross-sectional study that differed in two dimensions: complexity level…

Roughly 30 years ago researchers in the second language acquisition (SLA) field started to take a focused interest in the study of inner speech (IS) and private speech (PS) processes in second language (L2) learning and use. The purpose of this review is to assess the status of current research and the progress made during the last ten years on…

This study employs conversation analysis to examine a facilitator's interactional practices in the post-expansion phase of students' presentations in the context of a book club for second language learning. The analysis shows how the facilitator establishes intersubjectivity with regard to the ongoing task and manages students' task performance.…

Nobody disagrees that reading is good for students' language development. The more they read texts that they can understand, the more confident and adept they become. However, it can be quite a struggle to get students started on their reading journey. We suggest that this is partly due to a lack of access to comprehensible and compelling reading…

Research methods offer authentic ways to elicit useful data based on which informed decisions can be made. With respect to their design and data collection or analysis, research methods are traditionally divided into qualitative and quantitative types, each with its strengths and weaknesses. In response to new theories and technological…

This paper presents one Colombian university English as a foreign language program's in-house teacher development program for curriculum renewal. This program is an innovative attempt to prepare teachers for implementing a new curriculum and, simultaneously, engages them in professional development activities. The program is a response to the lack…

The increasing popularity of Facebook has prompted scholars and educators to explore its potentials as a learning environment for various fields of education. Along this line, several reviews of literature have been written about the educational use of Facebook; however, none of them have focused on a specific field of interest such as language…

This article addresses a key pedagogical issue of our time: the widespread yet generally unwelcome presence of machine translation (MT) in the language classroom. Studies have repeatedly shown that L2 students consult the most widely used translation tool, Google Translate (GT), in spite of the fact that its use is frowned upon by second language…

This study is a literature review on the findings of different studies on the dimensionality of language proficiency. It aims to particularly analyze the assumptions and the statistical findings of relevant research since it has always been an endless debate among linguists and language teachers about whether language proficiency is organized as a…

This review of high variability phonetic training (HVPT) research begins by situating HVPT in its historical context and as a methodology for studying second language (L2) pronunciation. Next we identify and discuss issues in HVPT that are of particular relevance to real-world L2 learning and teaching settings, including the generalizability of…

There is a wide body of research that shows how vitally important teachers are to successful learning processes. What they do, think, feel and believe are central to what happens in their classrooms, and, essentially, what happens to their learners. It is perhaps, therefore, surprising that the field of language learning psychology has focused so…