For immigrants and refugees, access to a national or majority language is an important issue. According to its immigrant language training policy, Canada offers its newcomers language instruction for the purposes of settlement and integration. One important aspect of settlement and integration involves literacy. Our study examined the concept of…

Research has found that text reading and Web reading, while sharing some similarities, require a different balance of strategies. Adult language learners, especially those with limited previous experience with the Web, may therefore need explicit, scaffolded instruction in order to read the Web. This article reports on teacher action research and…

If it is to be argued that self-access language learning centres (SACs) provide an efficient and effective alternative or complement to more traditionally accepted modes of language learning and teaching, it remains a serious concern that there is no research-based framework specifically developed for their evaluation. It is within the context of…

This case study aims to investigate the role of teachers' personal practical knowledge in interactive decision making for three pre-service non-native ESL teachers. The research question is: What role does pre-service ESL teachers' personal practical knowledge (operationalized as teaching maxims in this study) play in their interactive decisions…

The paper reports on parental involvement in Chinese students' language learning which has emerged as a major finding from an interpretative enquiry into their English-learning experiences. The data confirm that Chinese parents and other family members are closely involved in the study participants' language learning, in particular, their…

Whilst the communicative approach advocates the use of the target language and implicit/incidental learning in vocabulary teaching, recent literature suggests that there is a need for these methods to be reconsidered. This is motivated by studies which suggest that for effective vocabulary learning process to occur explicit learning should be…

Reading and understanding a text presents a variety of processing problems for L2 learners. The organizational pattern of a text has been considered by some researchers to have an important influence in this process. This article describes an experimental study of a group of Hong Kong schoolchildren and presents evidence that learners reading in…

School- and university-based writing tasks make demands on cognitive processing and socio-cultural knowledge that vary with the discipline in which the writing is situated. The variation in socio-cognitive demands makes the use of self-accessed, computer-mediated writing instruction more promising than conventional, teacher-fronted instruction. To…

As a steady stream of recent papers indicates, ELT curriculum reform projects are not always as successful as they might be. One overall reason for this situation appears to be a failure to adequately take into account concepts and practices from the world of innovation management. This paper describes an attempt to contribute towards ameliorating…

Our research focuses on bilingual adults enrolled in the Teachers for English Language Learners (TELL) program. TELL is a scholarship program whose goal is to increase the number of critically-minded bilingual educators in the state of Georgia in the United States. In this paper, we use critical discourse analysis to inform theoretical and…

The assumption that the "purpose" of school foreign language teaching is to serve "instrumental" ends may largely underlie the present adolescent dropout. In this article the author proposes a two-stage foreign language apprenticeship. A two-stage apprenticeship would include a carefully planned diagnostic element, preparing…

This article reports on a study which investigated the language lives of Afrikaans-speaking South African immigrants in New Zealand. Particularly, it focuses on their awareness of and attitudes to language policy in both South Africa and New Zealand, and how these influence their own and their family's language practices. Narrative interviews with…

Most practitioners teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) will agree that students come with some expectations about course content and teaching methodology and that these expectations play a vital role in student motivation and learning. However, the study of student expectations has been a surprising omission from Second…

This study examines the reliability of automatic speech recognition (ASR) software used to teach English pronunciation, focusing on one particular piece of software, "FluSpeak, as a typical example." Thirty-six Korean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college students participated in an experiment in which they listened to 15 sentences…

This paper describes a survey that assessed the attitudes toward English among university students in Macao five years after it reunited with the People's Republic of China and ceased to be a Portuguese colony. A group of 144 Macao-born and 197 Mainland-born Chinese students studying in a university in Macao were surveyed using a 22-item…