Students were trained to perceive filled pauses (FP) as a bad speech habit. In a series of classroom sensitivity training activities, followed by students being rewarded to observe twenty minutes of live television from the public media, no differences between male and female Business Communication students was revealed. The practice of teaching…

The purposes of the current study were to (1) determine the relationship between the number of practice strategies students could articulate and their performance improvement scores, (2) identify trends in students' 5-minute practice behaviors, and (3) compare students' achievement based on their practice procedures. Participants were 65 eighth…

This study examines the effectiveness of written error corrections versus reformulations of second language learners' writing as two means of improving learners' grammatical accuracy on a three-stage composition-comparison-revision task. Concurrent verbal protocols were employed during the comparison stage in order to study the learners' reported…

This study examines the differential effect of two types of written corrective feedback (CF) and the extent to which language analytic ability mediates the effects of CF on the acquisition of articles by adult intermediate ESL learners of various L1 backgrounds (N = 91). Three groups were formed: a "direct-only correction" group, a "direct…

This study examines the feedback practices of 110 EFL teachers from five different countries (Cyprus, France, Korea, Spain, and Thailand), working in secondary school contexts. All provided feedback on the same student essay. The coding scheme developed to analyse the feedback operates on two axes: the stance the teachers assumed when providing…

This paper analyses the effects of manipulating the cognitive complexity of L2 oral tasks on language production. It specifically focuses on self-repairs, which are taken as a measure of accuracy since they denote both attention to form and an attempt at being accurate. By means of a repeated measures design, 42 lower-intermediate students were…

The interest in the application of large-scale computerized adaptive testing has served to focus attention on issues that arise when theoretical advances are made operational. Some of these issues stem less from changes in testing conditions and more from changes in testing paradigms. One such issue is that of the order in which questions are…

Drawing data from audiotaped lessons with 10 native-speaker English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) teachers and 12 EFL learners of varied linguistic backgrounds, a study explored some of the ways in which classroom talk by learners is collaboratively built to repair errors, misunderstandings, and non-communication. Focus is on both explicit and…

The relationship between the notion of "error" in linguistics and language teaching theory and its potential application to error correction in the second language classroom is examined. Definitions of "error" in psycholinguistics, native speech, and English second language instruction are discussed, and the relationship of interlanguage…

This study examined the relationship between discrimination error (determined by content analysis and tryout data) and confidence of response (determined by self report). Subjects were 63 undergraduate students enrolled in a biology class for nonmajors who received classroom expository information and read a text on the topic before they completed…

A review of the literature and teacher observations are used to examine the processes and strategies by which second language learners attain and organize verbal knowledge. Classroom data are derived from experience in teaching German to Dutch-speaking university students. The analysis looks at the relationship of morphology and word recognition…

This paper contends that classrooms should be safe places for students and their teachers to be wrong, suggesting that this concept should provide the mainspring for educational reform in Hong Kong and in other places in the world. It notes that education in Hong Kong is harsh and has a tendency to label students; for the majority of students,…

A study investigated the use of teasing as a teaching technique in a first-year college-level Russian class at a major university in California. The instructor is a native Russian speaker, and the class consisted of nine undergraduate students. A review of literature on teasing reveals its dual nature for conveying both a literal message of insult…

Describes a parser-driven Japanese tutor, "BANZAI," designed for second-language instruction and presents an empirical study of the program. Results indicate that ongoing rule-driven deductive feedback is more effective than example-driven inductive feedback for learning relatively complex structures whose grammatical rules are not…

Discusses a study of concord phenomena in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Findings indicate the presence of disfluencies, including apparent corrections, in about 15% of the relevant tokens in the corpus of recorded speech data. It is concluded that speech is not overly laden with errors, and there is nothing in the data to mislead the language…