Unlike traditional methods, the communicative approaches draw on implicit and incidental ways of learning and contextualised exercises of grammar which improve language performance in terms of fluency and communicative competence. However, the discursive plan implies the use of high-level units of knowledge and the automatization of low-level…

Gestures are associated with powerful forms of understanding; however, their causative role in mathematics reasoning is less clear. We inhibit college students' gestures by restraining their hands, and examine the impact on language, recall, intuition, and mathematical justifications of geometric conjectures. We test four mutually exclusive…

Extensive reading (ER) has been implemented under a wide variety of names, such as "(uninterrupted) sustained silent reading," "free voluntary reading," "pleasure reading," "book flood," "independent reading," and "Drop Everything And Read (DEAR)"; its various names emphasize different…

This study aimed at exploring the impact of mentor text modelling on Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' accuracy and fluency in writing tasks with different cognitive complexity in comparison with two conventional approaches to teaching writing; namely, process-based and product-based approaches. To this end, 60 Iranian EFL…

Chinese EFL learners may have difficulty in speaking fluent and accurate English, for their speaking competence are likely to be influenced by cognitive, linguistic and affective factors. With the aim to enhance those learners' oral proficiency, this paper first discusses three effective models of teaching English speaking, and then proposes a…

In this essay, I argue for viewing mental representation and skill as distinct components of language acquisition. My claim is that language is not a monolithic entity--not a new concept, but one that is often overlooked by instructors and some scholars. I examine language as being (minimally) composed of mental representation and skill.…

From an information processing perspective, humans have a limited attentional capacity for processing information. Thus, second language (L2) researchers have investigated the role of pretask planning in task performance, finding that planning results in greater fluency and complexity but has mixed effects on accuracy. However, most planning…

One characteristic of the field of TESOL is that it appears to be in a constant state of change. For example, new curriculum frameworks currently being implemented in different parts of the world include competency-based, text-based, and task-based models. In many countries English is now being introduced at the primary rather than secondary…

Discusses issues related to psycholinguistics since second-language acquisition (SLA) research has emerged as a scientific discipline. These issues include the debate about the place of an innate universal grammar in language acquisition, basic cognitive mechanisms underlying SLA, and pedagogical implications of recent developments in the…

This review of the state of foreign language education in the United States notes that early grammar-translation methods gave way to the Army Method during World War II. Students learned both inductively and deductively and acquired primarily oral-aural competence, with reading and writing as secondary goals. Not until the late 1950s did the…

This collection of papers treats second language users in their own right rather than as failed native speakers, reflecting a new shift within the field of second language acquisition research. The 13 papers are: (1) "Background to the L2 User" (Vivian Cook); (2) "Lexical Representation and Lexical Processing in the L2 User"…

This article presents theoretical considerations behind the Jyvaskyla teacher in-service development program in teaching content through a foreign language and surveys some international experiences of bilingual education. The term "bilingual program" refers to all variations of bilingual education and teaching of non-language subjects…