This study, conducted in a Korean university setting, examines student beliefs about the attributes of effective lecturers of English as a foreign language. Student opinions about rapport and delivery type attributes are particularly informative. Rapport attributes were the major focus of discussion and viewed as particularly important in Korean…

In Australia, information and communication technologies (ICT) are a significant element of a multicultural and multilingual society. However, some people (in particular, international students, immigrants, refugees) may experience many challenges because they use technology in English as their second language (ESL) and in a new sociocultural…

This paper presents an overview of action research conducted in an EFL university context, in which data was collected about students' past English learning experiences and hopes for college speaking classes. This data was then used to guide the lesson style for the semester. The study used three cycles of action research over one 15-week…

In many societies the prevalence of behavioural problems in school-aged children varies by national origin. We examined the association between national origin and behavioural problems in 1 1/2-year-old children. Data on maternal national origin and the Child Behavior Checklist for toddlers (n = 4943) from a population-based cohort in the…

ESL students struggle to represent accurately on tests what they know. Understanding what constitutes equitable testing practices in university settings for ESL students poses a significant challenge to educators. This study reports on the content analysis of semi-structured interview data obtained from 13 university-level ESL students on their…

Professional development is an ongoing process, one that evolves as teachers assess and reexamine their teaching beliefs and practices. This article highlights some reasons for teachers to pursue professional development. It also suggests techniques that help teachers feel empowered and motivated in their English language classrooms. She includes…

Critical thinking skills remain at the forefront of educational discussions. These higher order thinking processes, including but not limited to reflection, inference, and synthesizing information, enable individuals to make reasoned judgments not only in the classroom but in everyday life. School systems demand that critical thinking be…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the effects of rater training in an L2 performance assessment and to examine the eligibility of L2 users of English as raters in L2 performance assessment. Rater training was conducted in order for raters to clearly understand the criteria, the evaluation items, and the evaluation procedure. In this…

This article introduces an instrument that has been developed to explore motivation and attitudes of students towards reading in a foreign language (FL). To develop the instrument, initially 123 students were asked a set of qualitative questions to determine their affective reactions to reading in a FL. A content analysis of emergent data yielded…

Recent studies of emerging technologies have shown that mobile phone production now exceeds one billion devices globally per year (Johnson, Levine & Smith, 2008). With a level of production that signifies a shift in the ownership of "networked machines" from institutions to individuals, the broad appeal of portable technologies now…

The role of conversational interaction in second language research has increasingly been seen as playing a facilitative role in second language learning. As such there have been a number of studies focussing on different types of interaction, including feedback such as recasts, and their potential role in second language learning. In this study,…

This study reports on findings of an investigation into Chinese students' attitudes towards varieties of English before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. One hundred and eight college students in mainland China evaluated six English speeches by two American English speakers, two British English speakers, and two Chinese English speakers for social…

Grounded in sociocultural theory, this article outlines a small-scale study exploring metacognitive awareness of second language (L2) listening. In each of five lessons, six pairs of advanced-level, adult, Japanese, EFL learners participated in a sequence of tasks involving the explicit verbalisation of strategies as part of a pedagogical cycle…

With the spread of English as the global language, many people from English-speaking countries go to foreign land to work as English teachers. A review of the literature reveals that there is little research on these teachers' teaching-abroad experiences. The current study is an attempt to address this gap in the literature. Situated in an…

In much of the literature on the exploitation of corpora for language learning, the learners are viewed as researchers, who formulate and test their own hypotheses about language use. Having identified difficulties encountered in corpus investigations by our intermediate-level students of Italian in a previous study, we have designed a…