This article traces the intellectual roots and developments of the notion of competence in second language (L2) teaching and research. Since L2 teaching and research invariably concern competence of some sort (linguistic, communicative, interactional, or otherwise), there have been countless attempts to define competence from diverse theoretical…

This teaching activity builds students' interpersonal competencies in identifying Mark Knapp's Stages of Relationships (Adler, Rosenfeld, Towne, & Scott, 2012, Interplay: The process of interpersonal communication, p. 504, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). The activity establishes a theoretical understanding of each stage and asks students to use…

The importance and benefits of teamwork in the university context have been widely recognized in recent decades. However, there is little evidence that analyzes the effects of the combination of collaborative learning strategies and gamification methodologies for the improvement of transversal skills and academic performance. In this sense, in…

The present study explored strategies teachers use to help people with ASD develop sociosexual skills for empathy expression. Previous research found the curriculum for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) does not always include strategies to teach the socio-sexual skills required for empathy expression. This qualitative descriptive study…

This study investigates the factors influencing Chinese students' willingness to communicate (WTC) with their Chinese lecturers in English Medium Instruction (EMI) classrooms at a Sino-foreign cooperative university. Drawing on MacIntyre et al.'s (JAMA 82:245-556, 1998) heuristic model and Wen and Clement's (JAMA 16:18-38, 2003) culturally adapted…

Active learning methods increase student learning, despite potential ressentiment of students towards these methods, based on the lack of knowledge, experience, exposure, or cultural ressentiments regarding social interactions with people perceived as strangers, which hamper the success of these methods. We investigated the student appreciation of…

This contribution outlines the problems and possibilities of three issues with regard to the teaching of L2 interactional competence (IC): (1) specifying IC, (2) standardising IC, and (3) translating conversation analytic (CA) insights into classroom practices. In particular, I argue for a shift of discussion from the conceptually treacherous…

While serious role-play games have been developed for individuals with autism spectrum disorders to learn social interactions and emotions, there is a lack of role-playing games that teach people without autism the necessary communication skills to engage and interact effectively with autistic people. In this research, we present a mobile serious…

This action research described how a middle school teacher integrated five discussion protocols including structured controversy, pair communication, triad protocol, personal experience panel, and Socratic seminar into her sixth-grade Language Arts classes. Collected data from three different sources indicated an overall improvement of both…

Academics at Griffith university envisioned a complementary learning and supportive relationship could be developed between Bachelor of Information Technology (BAIT) students and Master of Social Work (MSW) students. Discussions between discipline specific staff highlighted that each discipline had strengths and expertise that could assist…

Individual differences in children's social communication have been shown to mediate the relationship between poor vocabulary or grammar and behavioural difficulties. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that social communication skills predict difficulties with peers over and above vocabulary and grammar scores. The essential social…

This article presents findings from a study in which nine classroom teachers interacted with campus literacy coaches. Teachers were interviewed about qualities that they believe constituted an effective literacy coach. The themes that emerged were that literacy coaches have strong interpersonal skills, are knowledgeable, provide specific feedback,…

Although cooperative learning is a well-researched framework with many reports on its effective implementation in education, successful cooperative learning practice remains elusive in the classroom. The literature suggests certain elements of cooperative learning are key, but few studies have addressed their importance with respect to the…

The last half-century has seen a slow, tentative change in adult attitudes about young children's capacity to think abstractly. Parents and teachers know the young child as a dramatic mixture of the concrete, sense-bound, and the transcendent, and it is just that mixture, cultivated and pursued, which makes for philosophy. Young children's…

This investigation uses conversation analysis (CA) to document, in very close detail, how participants-in-interaction manage and organize repair practices in moments when linguistic repair becomes conditionally relevant in conversational or 'chatting' phases of online dyadic L2-learning interactions between a tutor and tutee. Specifically, this…