This article presents an interview with Professor Alan Davies who was born in Wales, studied at Oxford University and Birmingham University, and taught in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh, completing 40 years this year. Professor Davies has travelled widely to give invited talks and seminars, participate in applied linguistics conferences,…

The primary goal of this research was to identify those factors that may contribute to anxiety, and those factors that may reduce anxiety in an attempt to understand more fully the role that anxiety may play in learning a foreign or second language. This study utilized the qualitative research tradition, the phenomenological interview, with the…

It has been hypothesized that some aspects of a second language (L2) might be learned easier than others if a language is learned late. On the other hand, non-use might result in a loss of language skills in one's native, i.e. one's first language (L1) (language attrition). To study which, if any, aspects of language are affected by either late…

This article presents case studies of three tutor/tutee dyads, focusing on the negotiation of tutor roles over a semester as part of a course requirement for MATESOL candidates. Tutors were enrolled in the course "Issues in Second Language Writing," and tutees were ESL student volunteers. Data came from on-line discussions from the course,…

Teachers and students agree that despite the time-consuming nature of providing written commentary and revising using this commentary, teacher feedback is both desirable and helpful. Nonetheless, teachers express concerns about how to provide commentary in ways that their students can effectively use to revise their texts and to learn for future…

The development of pragmatic and sociolinguistic rules of language use is important for language learners. It is necessary to understand and create language that is appropriate to the situations in which one is functioning, because failure to do so may cause users to miss key points that are being communicated or to have their messages…

This article discusses issues in measuring lexical diversity, before outlining an approach based on mathematical modelling that produces a measure, D, designed to address these problems. The procedure for obtaining values for D directly from transcripts using software (vocd) is introduced, and then applied to thirty-two children from the Bristol…

Two notions from cognitive psychology were examined in relation to the transfer of reading comprehension skills from L1 to L2: (1) the notion that reading comprehension proceeds by the comprehender's building of a mental structure representing the text and (2) the notion of working memory. Two groups of French learners of English (at…

Within '"communicative language teaching," "natural" language has had a privileged position, and a focus on form has been seen as something inauthentic or as something that is inconsequential for learning (for a critique, see Kramsch and Sullivan 1996; Cook 1997). Yet in the present study of an immersion classroom, it was found that children with…

Since the cessation of Soviet hegemony the Baltic Republics have endured drastic changes in their political, economic, social and linguistic situation. The official reinstatement of the respective state languages has been a key feature in the establishment of their newly regained national independence. Consequently, large sections of the…

This paper reports on research in progress in Melbourne secondary schools in which a community language is taught to students from a range of backgrounds. The programmes are described and contextualised. The project is developing models and strategies to enable schools to cater for the needs of secondary schools of students with and without home…

The multifaceted ways in which English Language Learners (ELLs) engage in "acts of identity" (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985) through their language use have created new challenges for ESL pedagogy. Heterogeneous identities have called into question the native speaker construct and the assumed links between ethnicity and language expertise.…

This paper gives a contrastive analysis of noun phrases in English and Chinese. The syntactic features of the structures, the devices used to mark distinctions in number, case and gender, as well as the similarities and differences between English and Chinese relative clauses are discussed. Partly due to the documented differences between these…

Jamaica is a Creole-speaking environment, where children enter school with a range of varieties, some of which are closely related to English. The expectation is that they will learn English in school. The appropriate language teaching approach, it is argued, is not English as a mother tongue, English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign…

The relationship between second language learning and meaningful interactions is now well recognised in second language acquisition research. While English is a widely taught foreign language around the world, much of the interaction research comes from core-English countries, which are also the major producers of English language teaching (ELT)…