Since the University Grants Committee (UGC) selected the academic module of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) as the common English proficiency assessment for graduating undergraduate degree students in 2002, almost all the tertiary institutions in Hong Kong have offered IELTS preparation courses that aim at providing…

This article examines the applicability of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's (1871-1944) educational ideas in what Denzin and Lincoln (2005) call the "fractured future," a time marked by human, environmental, and climatic destabilization, and a time in which the social sciences "are normative disciplines always already embedded in issues of…

This study is concerned with the significance of the affordances of multimodality in contemporary conceptualizations of ESL/literacy pedagogies. Using a cellular phone advertisement, 18 students composed visual representations of their understandings of the text. Drawing on the social semiotic framework of Kress and van Leeuwen, the annotated…

The goal of the present work was to examine the effects of bilingualism on adults' ability to resolve cross-linguistic inconsistencies in orthography-to-phonology mappings during novel-word learning. English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals learned artificially constructed novel words that overlapped with English orthographically but…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of Korean case particles in a Korean-English bilingual child with specific language impairment (SLI). The child's production of four types of Korean case particles were compared to those of three typically developing children during probe and storytelling tasks. The Korean-English bilingual…

An engagement with difference has significant implications for the teaching and research of English for Academic Purposes where traditional focus has been on the preparation of students for university content courses, with an emphasis on skills development. What has largely been missing from this debate is a problematizing of the practices of a…

The authors present two experiences of assimilation, "melting-pot" and "salad-bowl" processes, their connections to the WASP framework of skin color, language, and religion, and their influences in the classroom. They focus on how fluency in the English language is the dominant assimilation factor for immigrant students and share their experiences…

This paper reports on a longitudinal case study of an adult EFL learner who perceived himself as having difficulty learning English. Both learning difficulty and learner identity are viewed as being constructed in discursive interactions throughout one's life and, hence, amenable to reconstruction. Data collected from classroom interactions,…

The main focus of research papers on listening teaching published in recent years is the theoretical meanings of decoding on the training of listening comprehension ability. Although in many research papers the bottom-up approach and top-down approach, information processing mode theory, are applied to illustrate decoding and to emphasize the…

In second language learning, to possess a perfect pronunciation, the importance of stress and rhythm should not be ignored. This articles explores the nature of sentence and word stress as well as rhythm, thus putting forward some feasible ways of training and acquiring a good English stress and rhythm in EFLT (English as Foreign Language…

As with language teaching and learning, many factors are at work disregarding of which makes teaching absolutely futile. This introspective paper shows that teaching is bound to many other factors not normally regarded within the framework many teachers apply. Practicality of teaching methods is highly dependent on the kind of learners; that is,…

The world of CALL is changing rapidly, but there are three major trends that can be perceived as significant to language teaching and learning and likely to remain so over the next several years. This paper will discuss these trends--convergence, searchability, and collaboration--and offer examples of interesting websites that illustrate them.…

The relation of morphological awareness to reading and spelling skills of dyslexic children and English language learners (ELL) is investigated. The lack of reading and spelling skills is found to be significantly correlated to insensitivity to derivational morphology.

The General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) was developed in 1999, commissioned by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. The purpose of the test is to provide individuals with a gauge of their English language proficiency and assist employers and educational institutions in selection and placement. Also, it aims to encourage the study of English…

This paper presents two experiments in the acquisition of the nominal domain in English by Japanese and Spanish second language (L2) learners. The first experiment tests the L2 learners' ability to distinguish between count and mass nouns using a grammaticality judgement task and the second experiment tests learners on different types of definite…