Collocation is an aspect of language generally considered arbitrary by nature and problematic to L2 learners who need collocational competence for effective communication. This study attempts, from the perspective of L2 learners, to have a deeper understanding of collocational use and some of the problems involved, by adopting a task based…

The academic literature and educational principle suggest that native and non-native English speaking teachers should be treated equally, yet in many countries there is a broad social and commercial preference for native speaker teachers which may also involve racial issues. Attitudes towards native and non-native English speaking teachers have…

This study examines the influence of length of residence in the target language community and overall L2 proficiency on L2 pragmatic competence with a reference to L2 grammatical competence. Participants were 126 international students in the US with two academic levels of English proficiency from 17 countries, speaking 20 languages. A…

This study investigated a hidden curriculum in published language teaching materials by tabulating the number of instances that Canada was mentioned in 9 French textbooks and their accompanying workbooks and CD-ROMs. The materials were used at large public universities in the northern United States. For the present study, 2 raters, a Quebecois…

Lexical phrases are both numerous and functionally important in written texts. Despite this, L2 learners often find their use problematic, typically overusing a limited number of well-known phrases, while at the same time lacking a diverse enough phrasal repertoire to employ lexical phrases in a native-like manner. While a number of studies have…

When researchers from the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) met with Boston secondary school teachers three years ago, the teachers told them they had a problem. Students struggled to understand their textbook lessons because they continually tripped up on--or glossed over--the academic words they came across. The researchers'…

The major European testing agencies have calibrated their exams to the levels of language proficiency described in the Common European Framework (CEFR). In Italy, where the Framework has been enthusiastically embraced, external exams are now frequently used within the state education system as they are believed to provide reliable, widely…

Trinity College Dublin was proud to host, in April 2016, the Second International Conference on Telecollaboration in Higher Education, with the theme "New Directions in Telecollaborative Research and Practice." Over two and a half days, 150 participants offered 95 research presentations, posters, and "problem shared" sessions.…

Lardiere (2003), in her reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001), justifies the use of suppliance in obligatory contexts as a method of analysis in the investigation of the second language (L2) acquisition of past tense, and claims that such a method is characteristic of previous studies that have proposed the Aspect Hypothesis. It is argued here…

The soundscape of higher education is changing. The changes reflect an age of managerialism and an age of uncertainty. These changes call on us to give up on some of the ways we have understood knowledge in the past and prompt us to find news ways of recognizing and understanding the complexities facing higher education research. This paper…

This paper is a literature review report concerning educational uses of Wikipedia in the first 10 years of its existence. The aim of the work is the tracing and the presentation of published and validated educational applications of Wikipedia in a manner that could inform learning design by teachers or researchers. For the review, 24 scientific…

The paper composes a framework for learning design, using Web 2.0 technologies in teacher training, transferring the advancement in technology to become an affordance in the teaching/learning process, based on Bloom's Extended Digital Taxonomy in order to enhance the Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge of teachers. As a case study, it…

This collection offers a distinctly Asian voice for English language education and addresses some of the unique needs of Asian learners in EFL contexts. Teachers and researchers from nine Asian countries present some of the most current and innovative research in five distinct and fascinating areas of EFL teaching and learning. This book is…

A formative design experiment methodology was employed to investigate the acquisition of early reading skills for high school English language learners (ELLs) beginning to read English. A fundamental challenge facing high school ELLs entering schools in the United States for the first time is learning how to read. While there is considerable…

Many intensive English language programmes that English second language (ESL) students enrol in adopt a process approach to writing, interpreting writing as a cognitive process that is highly private or individualistic (Atkinson, 2003), where writers use specific cognitive phases, such as pre-writing, drafting, and revising, to generate their…