Responding to a gap in postmethod pedagogy in English-language teaching, this study details the implementation of a pedagogy of plausibility (PofP), a place-based ecopedagogy that privileges local knowledge and language practices. A PofP is informed by four pedagogic pillars: (a) teaching with particularity, (b) teaching with practicality, (c)…

This paper identifies various challenges that a 1.5 generation immigrant faced in a mainstream college composition class and reports on how he constructed his social presence and became a successful multilingual writer. The findings of this study would help higher education institutions more effectively serve the growing population of ESL students…

During and after the Financial Crisis of 2008, many institutions of higher learning have had revenue and budgetary reductions, forcing them to make severe university budget cuts and university reductions in force. Often the university cuts are preceded by a process of evaluation of academic programs where institutions determine what they stand for…

Previous research on foreign language classroom participation has shown that oral production has a privileged status compared to less salient forms of participation, such as mental involvement and engagement in class activities. This mixed-methods study presents an alternative look at classroom participation by investigating the relationship…

Grounded on the notion of observational learning in social cognitive learning theory, this study evaluated the effectiveness of repeated self-assessment on English-as-a-foreign-language learners' oral performance and the perceptions of the students and the instructor of this practice. Ninety-seven students from three classes in a Taiwanese college…

This study presents the analysis of a translanguaging by design activity I conducted with students finishing an EFL program at a Costa Rican university, for which I showed them pictures of graffiti in Spanish and encouraged them to discuss these, using their entire linguistic repertoire. I recorded their discussions, selected instances of…

This article reports on a qualitative study that investigated English learners' attitudes toward English as an International Language (EIL). Four major findings were identified in the current study. First, majority of the participants thought that English belongs to all its users, regardless of being its native speakers or not. Second, lack of…

Although vocabulary acquisition research has shed much light on practical methods for increasing lexical knowledge (Nation, 1994), many foreign language teachers hesitate to implement focused vocabulary-training programs in their classrooms. The reasons most often cited for this hesitation are associated with the difficult tasks of creating,…

In the context of our work as literacy specialists, we taught teachers to use sentence frames to support ELL students' writing. We then studied the impact of their instruction on students. Our analysis of student writing samples revealed no group wide developmental trends so we posed deeper questions about their work using the data analysis…

Educational institutions in the Arab Gulf are requiring rapid changes to enhance English language learning to keep up with globalization and economic growth. This urges the need for investigating policy changes such as effectiveness in curriculum orientations and their impact on the actual process of teaching in order to gauge how educational…

The aim of this study is to investigate the reasons that English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students in the Open Access College at the University of Southern Queensland give to explain their success in a course of study. It will examine how students' internal and external attributions change while studying EAP. The data has been gathered through…

In a Colombian private English institution, a qualitative evaluation system has been incorporated. This type of evaluation poses challenges to students who have never been evaluated through a system that eliminates exams or quizzes and, as a consequence, these students have to start making sense of it. This study explores the way students face the…

Language programs need multiple test forms for secure administrations and effective placement decisions, but can they have confidence that scores on alternate test forms have the same meaning? In large-scale testing programs, various equating methods are available to ensure the comparability of forms. The choice of equating method is informed by…

In the English as a foreign language (EFL) writing context, most of the research studies on the feedback process are conducted in a face-to-face context and few research studies have been conducted to investigate what actually happens in online feedback conditions. Thus, this study aimed to compare 44 EFL university students' experience of…

This paper reviewed the literature of the previous research and questionnaire survey on reading strategy. Based on theories of psycholinguistics, a five-week experiment was carried out in order to probe into the effectiveness of strategy training. The experiment was designed to answer the following question: Can reading comprehension be improved…