In recent years increasing research attention has been devoted to the definition and development of presentation skills. As an interactive oral discourse type, the presentation is characterised by specific speech acts, of which cooperative acts have proved to be of a highly developmental nature (Sazdovska, 2009). The aim of the present paper is to…

This paper investigates how instances of language use can serve as analytic anchors for insight into interactional development over time. I present a usage-based, longitudinal study of multi-turn sequences underlying telephone openings in order to specify if and to whom "language learning" may be relevantly ascribed. Two successive…

The collegiate foreign language profession has become increasingly aware of the unnecessarily detrimental effects of bifurcated curricula on student learning and departmental governance, yet there have been few instances to date of departments that have been able to achieve unified, articulated programs of study. This article presents one foreign…

First-year composition in U.S. higher education has been a major site of L2 writing research. Despite the historical division between mainstream first-year composition and L2 writing, there has been an increasing interest in integrating insights from L2 writing research into the professional literature in rhetoric and composition and writing…

The study of factors influencing undergraduate learners' participation and/or reticence in second/foreign language classrooms, a relatively recent line of research, can contribute to the betterment of language teaching and learning practices. In this work, we attempt to investigate the causes of a population of undergraduate English as a foreign…

The combination of theater and community-based service-learning can be a powerful tool to allow university students to meet their educational goals while connecting them with the world. The performance of children's theater in elementary schools with English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) programs, for example, has important pedagogical…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss, evaluate, and illustrate the experiences of a City-as-Text[C] exploration in partial fulfillment of the requirements of an honors study abroad program in Spain. First, the nature and procedures of City as Text[C] as a learning tool are explained, followed by a list of necessary conditions for its…

MDRC launched Opening Doors in 2003 to study the effects of community college programs designed to help students persist in school and earn a credential. This report presents early results from the Opening Doors program at Owens Community College in Toledo, Ohio, which operated from 2004 through 2006. The two-semester program served students whose…

The present study provides an in-depth, longitudinal account of an undergraduate student's L2 discourse socialization in an academic exchange program in Canada. By invoking Rogoff's (1995) notion of participatory appropriation, this qualitative case study examined an L2 student's task-related strategies and performance as they evolved over time in…

In the assessment of aural skills of second language learners, the study of the inclusion of visual stimuli has almost exclusively been conducted in the context of listening assessment. While the inclusion of contextual information in test input has been advocated for by numerous researchers (Ockey, 2010), little has been said regarding the…

This one-year long ethnographic case study seeks to add to the body of literature on EFL teachers' identities in Colombia by drawing on ethnographic methods and sociocultural theories to examine the identity construction of four EFL teachers at the university level. Specifically, this study explores how EFL teachers' identities shaped and were…

In 2005, supported by a Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Research Initiative Grant and Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) volunteers, the TYCA Research Initiative Committee distributed the first national survey of two-year college writing programs. This online survey explored two-year college programs and…

This study details the procedure and results of developing a mission statement at a language institute for the purpose of obtaining a program accreditation from an international language commission. A serious self-study process results in the development of a solid, true and ambitious mission since the mission covers all areas related to achieving…

This study describes the presence of professional skills found in poster session proposals in order to consider the use of poster sessions for developing the skills required by the 2012 Ecuadorian Standards for English teachers, specifically related to the fifth domain professionalism. Thirteen poster session proposals for a national English…

This study reports on a mixed methods study which explored 32 Iranian pre-service teachers' perceptions of attending online asynchronous discussion forums during two seven-week online introductory courses in corpus linguistics. Data were collected through a questionnaire, discussion forum entries and online text-based semi-structured interviews.…