Developing effective oral business English (OBE) curricula requires clearly understanding student needs. This study evaluated the speaking needs of Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduates majoring in business English for specific purposes (ESP), aiming to inform the design of a teaching module that bridges the gap between…

Background/Context: Students designated as English Learners (ELs) account for 10.4 percent of all students nationwide but have historically been provided unequal access to educational resources (Gándara et al., 2003; National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). Further, education policies are often blind to ELs' strengths and challenges,…

Young Indigenous students with a language background of emergent, unrecognised, and/or non-prestigious contact languages are commonly by-passed as English language learners (ELLs). Consequently, they are taught and assessed via undifferentiated mainstream pedagogy and testing, generally characterised by reported underachievement. Long-term social…

Vocabulary is often neglected despite being one of the most crucial aspects of language acquisition. Due to the lack of emphasis on vocabulary learning, ESL students have issues in learning the English language effectively, which resulted in low-level language proficiency. Hence, this paper attempts to address this problem by introducing Visual…

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages Companion Volume (CEFR CV) emphasizes macro-functions of language (i.e., reception, production, interaction, and mediation). However, there seems to be little consensus on whether the macro-functions are commensurable with CEFR-based proficiency tests. This paper focuses on the Examination…

Teachers' English proficiency is a significant qualification for successful teaching of English. However, the issue of what level of proficiency teachers believe they need for different settings has not received much attention. This study investigates this issue by looking at novice Chinese pre-service teachers (N = 113) in an MA TESOL program in…

Recent second language acquisition research has demonstrated that language learning is in essence the learning of constructions, or form-meaning pairings. Compared to first language acquisition research, however, our understanding of how constructions in a second language (L2) emerge and develop with proficiency and/or experience is limited.…

There are two important dimensions to successful second language learning: what goes on inside the classroom and what goes on outside of the classroom (Richards, 2015). This paper investigates smartphone use for online learning of English among Japanese university students using online surveys and semi-structured interviews. The investigation…

Using Hofstede's classification of national culture, this article examines whether culture influences peer evaluation of performance on global virtual teams (GVTs). Two separate analyses were conducted based on the hypotheses developed. The first analysis included close to 8,000 students and the second included over 3,000 students, all who…

Global mobility and economic and political crises in some parts of the world have fuelled migration and brought new constellations of 'cultural diversity' to European classrooms (OECD 2019). This produces new challenges for teaching, but also for assessment in which cultural biases may have far-reaching consequences for the students' further…

The present study was executed with the purpose of validating ELT Certificate Lesson Observation and Report Task (ELTC-LORT), which was developed by China Language Assessment to certify China's EFL teachers by performance-based testing. The ELT Certificate has high-stakes considering its impacts on candidates' recruitment, ELT in China and quality…

Task-based approach is commonly used in second language teaching and it has been adopted in translation teaching too. However, driven by the lack of studies on task-based approach in translation especially in the very early stages of teaching translation, Saudi universities are no exception, this study focuses on the significance of implementing…

The following research investigates the effect that unprescribed conversation with native speakers of the target language had on learners' L2 listening comprehension skills at the beginning (n=21) and advanced intermediate levels of Spanish (n=27). Treatment groups completed two-thirty-minute conversations with native speakers via…

Purpose: This study aimed to explore whether a match between learning style and teaching style in English as a foreign language (EFL) class affects two student variables: proficiency and motivation to learn English. Design/methodology/approach: Participants consisted of nine EFL teachers and 331 Japanese undergraduate students who were required to…

This study qualitatively and quantitatively investigated synchronous (real-time) computer-mediated communication (SCMC), via Zoom (https://zoom.us) videoconferencing, to explore second language (L2) learning and learner autonomy. Twenty-five L2 Spanish participants (n = 25) from the same university utilized SCMC over a 6-week implementation…