With the United States' adoption of a standards-based approach to education, most attention has focused on the large-scale, high-stakes assessments intended to measure students' mastery of standards for accountability purposes. Less attention has been paid to the role of standards-based assessments in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to…

The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of explicit interventional treatment on developing pragmatic awareness and production of spoken requests in an EAP context (taken here to mean those studying/using English for academic purposes in the UK) with Chinese learners of English at a British higher education institution. The study employed…

In language teaching, emphasis is usually placed on grammatical competence rather than metaphorical competence to improve a learner's proficiency in the target language. Research has shown that figurative language poses a problem for second language learners whether it is in their ability to interpret, process, or produce metaphors. This affects…

This study examined the role of domain-general and domain-specific linguistic knowledge in the assessment of academic English language proficiency using a latent variable modeling approach. The goal of the study was to examine if modeling of domain-specific variance results in improved model fit and well-defined latent factors. Analyses were…

The MLA Report on "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" has been criticized for focusing its proposals on large German programs. This article attempts to show how some of its recommendations can also be implemented in smaller language programs. These programs exist within a network of relations to other…

This research describes a method applied at a U.S. university in a third-year Russian language course designed to facilitate Advanced and Superior second language writing proficiency through the forum of argumentation and debate. Participants had extensive informal language experience living in a Russian-speaking country but comparatively little…

Purpose: The demand for Accounting Information Systems (AIS) knowledge has increased exponentially over the past two decades, but studying AIS has not proved easy for many accounting students. The aim of the study is to understand the challenges accounting students face in studying AIS through investigation of the factors which may be contributing…

One of the central challenges globalization and immigration present to education is how to construct school language policies, procedures, and curricula to support academic success of immigrant youth. This case-study compares and contrasts language experience narratives along Elena's developmental trajectory of becoming an urban science teacher.…

During 2012/13, academics from the Department of Education, University of Oxford were commissioned by CfBT to conduct an independent evaluation of the CfBT Brunei English teaching programme. This report describes the main findings from a research project that studied the role of CfBT Education Trust in supporting improved English language teaching…

This article discusses the impact of changing student demographics on financing education and on our national wellbeing. We begin by examining the research of current student demographics and their relationship to learning and education costs. We then calculate a 1% cost factor from the average per-pupil expenditure based on the 2011 "Digest…

This study aimed at describing how the implementation of Task-Based Learning (TBL) would shape or change students' use of oral communication strategies. Students' problems and strategies to solve the problems during the implementation of TBL were also explored. The study was a mixed method, employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis…

The current government in Korea, in order to encourage more fluent use of English, has shifted the focus of the English curriculum from language accuracy to language fluency by encouraging English teachers to use English as a classroom language. However, many English teachers in Korea feel burdened by this policy, mainly because they themselves…

A challenge for todays instructional leaders is identifying the most effective method of educating English Language Learners (ELLs) who participate in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program. The primary purpose of the study was to compare the effectiveness of three programs used for ESL students in twelve elementary schools in a Urban…

Learning a second or foreign language is a long and time-consuming process, and not all language learners may be able to achieve a very high level of proficiency in the target language. It is even rarer to find second or foreign language learners who can use the target language as well as native speakers of the language. Researchers in the field…

There has been a plurilingual tradition of communication in South Asia since precolonial times. Local scholars consider pluringualism as "natural" to the ecology of this region. In plurilingualism, proficiency in languages is not conceptualized individually, with separate competencies developed for each language. The different languages…