Most collegiate departments where one can find Spanish, French, German, and other non-English disciplines are referred to as "language departments," either formally or informally. Such designations are interesting as they suggest to the outsider (i.e., non-language person) that these departments consist of experts in language. In this…

This study takes a new look at the topic of developmental stages in the second language (L2) acquisition of morphosyntax by analysing receptive learner data, a language mode that has hitherto received very little attention within this strand of research (for a recent and rare study, see Spinner, 2013). Looking at both the receptive and productive…

As theoretical developments in applied linguistics challenge the dominant mentalist framing of cognition as knowledge residing in the head, new ways of understanding and recording teachers' and students' engagement with languages are needed. Structural and competence-based formats for measuring proficiency posit an incremental model of learning as…

The absence of Chinese culture in foreign language teaching has a strong impact on the exchange between different cultures, and is also an obstacle to intercultural communication competence training. In general, English teaching level in China frontier minority areas is far behind that in developed areas, and shows its own teaching and cultural…

Pragmatic competence and its development has been a pivotal issue in ELT in the last two decades. This paper explored pragmatic knowledge incorporation into Iranian EFL textbooks. Three high school English books named "English Book 2," "English Book 3" and "Learning to Read English for Pre-University Students" were…

Pragmatic competence plays a very significant role in cross-cultural communication. In Chinese high school, many English teachers focus more on lexical and syntactic aspects of English. The aspect of pragmatics, however, is relatively neglected by high school English teachers. The aim of this research is to investigate pragmatic transfer in…

Writing status-congruent emails is a skill that requires high pragmatic competence and awareness of the politeness conventions and email etiquette that need to be followed. Planning and composing such emails pose a greater challenge for EFL learners who use English in "lingua franca" communication (ELF), as they not only often struggle…

This article analyses the teaching of Swedish language lecturers active in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. It shows the centrality of literature and literary constructions and analyses images of Swedishness and the Swedish nation present in the teaching material of that time in relation to the national image present in…

The ability to use language effectively in communication is regarded as important as knowledge of grammatical rules in the communicative competence models. Pragmatic competence, namely the ability to understand and use linguistic forms appropriately according to context, is thus accepted as a vital component of language ability. Recently,…

The goal of this study was to determine the overall effects of pronunciation instruction (PI) as well as the sources and extent of variance in observed effects. Toward this end, a comprehensive search for primary studies was conducted, yielding 86 unique reports testing the effects of PI. Each study was then coded on substantive and methodological…

Research on the efficacy of second language (L2) pronunciation instruction has produced mixed results, despite reports of significant improvement in many studies. Possible explanations for divergent outcomes include learner individual differences, goals and foci of instruction, type and duration of instructional input, and assessment procedures.…

This paper describes a task-based activity used at the United States Military Academy, in their first- through third-semester Portuguese language sequence "Proficiencies" (Proficiências). The stand-alone task-based activity can be an effective tool in gaining foreign-language proficiency at even the lowest levels of classroom instruction…

Angela Huanca Barrantes, a highly respected teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) in the city of Ilo, has a strong impact on the lives of students at the Admirante Miguel Grau secondary school and at Centro Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, which is one of four binational centers in southern Peru. Due to Ms. Huanca's lack of understanding…

The 2007 Modern Language Association report spurred research regarding the professional development of foreign language graduate students. This article first reviews existing proposals for the professional development of graduate students, then addresses the relevance of helping graduate students to develop the knowledge and skills that are needed…

This article documents the current research efforts of a research team at a Colombian university to explore the new forms of literacies in second languages in the city. The different research projects from this research team aim to break the social imaginaries, often perpetuated in policies, that people in cities are not using English as a…