This study explores the impact of using TED Talks on improving oral presentation skills of Business English students and vocabulary uptake/retention. It also assesses the impact of improving such hard cognitive skills on increasing Business majors' speaking anxiety level. Sequential explanatory mixed method was used, which includes both…

Adolescents who are newcomers in a country and beginning to acquire English as an additional language are often in secondary classrooms with teachers who do not speak their languages. Due to these communication obstacles, there is a great need for teachers to build relationships with their students while setting optimal conditions for literacy…

Bilingual education programmes involving English are currently experiencing an unprecedented rise in popularity, both at school and at university levels. While one of the aims of such educational programmes lies in developing both academic knowledge and language proficiency, our understanding of the interface between these two elements -- language…

Articles in this issue examine (1) the primary sources of variability in reading and language achievement among Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States, (2) the extent to which poor performance at the end of grade 2 is identifiable in developmental trajectories beginning in kindergarten, (3) the relations among core reading…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

Narrative skills are fundamental and indispensable in business in the twenty-first century. The ability to devise, craft, and deliver a successful narrative is not only a pre-requisite for any Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or senior executive, but is also increasingly becoming necessary for employees in any organisation. This ground-breaking…

This research paper reports on the development of oral presentation skills in a 3D virtual world called "Moviestorm" machinima, in contrast with real-life videos. In this way, the implementation of both types of videos sought to promote the improvement of oral communication skills, specifically oral presentations in a foreign language,…

To address the problem of limited opportunities for practicing second language speaking in interaction, especially delicate interactions requiring pragmatic competence, we describe computer simulations designed for the oral practice of extended pragmatic routines and report on the affordances of such simulations for learning pragmatically…

This paper presents a case study that investigated and compared the stated beliefs and observed classroom practices relating to Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) of two ESL teachers. The findings of the study revealed that both the teachers hold similar complex beliefs that mostly contradict the philosophy of CLT. The practices were not in…

This article discusses principles involved in developing course materials for technology-mediated Chinese language learning, with examples from a new course designed to take into account the needs of distance and independent learners. Which learning environment is most efficient for a given learning activity needs to be carefully considered. It…

There are only a handful of studies focused on assessing online teaching. Yet, the uniqueness of online course environment provides instructors more opportunities to conduct self-assessment of their own teaching than the traditional face-to-face classroom. In this paper, we demonstrate two types of self-assessment through two cases that online…

This study investigated the effect of utilizing Facebook activities on enhancing oral communication skills for English as Foreign Language learners (EFL) in the English Department at Yarmouk University, Jordan. Participants of the study were first year English Language Bachelor degree students who speak English as a foreign language. The…

This article analyzes the effect of working with the abridged version of some novels in order to promote students' communication in English. Two fourth semester English courses, from a private university, were randomly chosen to develop the different activities during one semester. The data was collected through students' written papers, the…

This study examines the effect of prompts and recasts in providing CF for the article errors by Kurdish-Arabic bilinguals who learn English as a third language. 39 lower-intermediate Kurdish-Arabic bilingual learners of English were tested on three tests: pre-, post-, and delayed post-tests. The participants were randomly put into three groups:…

The predominant context for strategy research over the last three decades has focused on language learning situated in a conventional classroom environment. Computer technology has brought about many changes in language learning and has become ecological and normalized rather than a supporting tool in the language classroom. Consequently, the…