Many scholars and teachers in EFL education should agree that compared with reading and writing, listening has received much less attention. This brief article discusses important gaps existing in EFL listening and overall proficiency development. It presents the case for a greater focus on sounds and actual listening in the classroom and spoken…

This paper examines learners' fluency development in L2 silent reading rate and comprehension. In both L1 and L2 readings, a positive relationship between readers' silent reading rate and comprehension has not been as firmly established as theories might propose. Based on Wallot et al. (2014), the paper indicates the need to look at readers'…

Research has suggested that the type and frequency of learning strategies employed by successful listeners is greater than their less successful counterparts. Based on evidence that metacognitive strategies (e.g. listening-for-gist; inferring meaning) are more effective than cognitive ones (e.g. word-for-word translation), this study sought to…

An analysis of 44 commercially available English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks found that it is common for textbooks to present learners with exercises on phrasal verbs without first providing relevant input to help them. In these cases, learners are likely to resort to trial and error and are then expected to learn from feedback. The…

ELT materials tend to use prestige variety speakers as models, an underlying assumption being that this is needed in order to acquire the phonology necessary to parse English speech (Rose & Galloway, 2019). Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) (Galloway & Rose, 2018) provides the potential for movement away from such 'native speaker'…

Many language learners have difficulty practicing listening skills using authentic materials, and thus use captions to map text with speech, and they benefit from reading along while listening to comprehend content. However, many learners over-rely on reading the text and many have difficulty in dividing their attention to the multimodal input. We…

Aka (2019) conducted an year-long large-scale study demonstrating that Japanese high school students who undertook extensive reading performed better than a control group who undertook grammatical instruction. Those showing the greatest gains were those of lower and intermediate proficiency. The students' achievement was measured in terms of…

Usage-based approaches to second language acquisition put a premium on the linguistic input that learners receive and predict that any sequences of words that learners encounter frequently will experience a processing advantage. The current study explores the processing of high-frequency sequences of words known as 'lexical bundles' in beginner…

This longitudinal study examined whether and to what extent the production of voice onset time (VOT) for /p/, /t/, and /k/ in English was improved in second language (L2) learners by enrolment in a content-based instruction (CBI) program at a Japanese university. Measures of VOTs were elicited at the beginning, middle, and end of the academic year…

The present study investigated the interface between explicit instruction and computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in an effort to reduce plural marking errors among Japanese EFL learners. The instruction involved raising contrastive awareness of cross-linguistic and conceptual features, and was delivered via an online medium. A total of 180…

It is thought that in order to comprehend general conversation at the native-speaker level, it is necessary to know thousands of word families. Vocabulary learning is therefore a vital component to attaining proficiency in a language. Technological advances have greatly expanded the resources available to language students. In particular, learners…

In our globalised world, the desire for the acquisition of English has led to increased research into the appropriate pedagogical approaches for learning and teaching the language. This manuscript focuses on the use of learners' mother tongue in the learning and teaching of English in an effort to identify ways in which cross-linguistic…

Recently, second language (L2) instruction has benefitted from the development of instructional technology such as synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). The present study was conducted to investigate learner perception of the effectiveness of SCMC interactions for L2 learning and building intercultural competence. Students (n = 55)…

Teacher beliefs are an important area of inquiry because research has found that these beliefs are often diverse (Breen et al., 2001) and strongly impact classroom practices (Borg, 1998, 2003; Burns, 1992; Farrell & Bennis, 2013). Therefore, uninformed teacher beliefs could be to the detriment of the L2 learner. Despite the fact that knowledge…

The purpose of the present study is twofold. The first goal is to examine the effects of phonological input on students' vocabulary learning. The second is to discuss how different pre­-listening activities affect students' second language listening comprehension. The participants were first-­year students at a Japanese university. There were two…