Despite the substantial amount of work which has been conducted into teachers' research engagement in mainstream education, this topic has been awarded scant attention in the field of English language teaching. This paper presents the results of a survey representing the first stage of multi-method investigation of research engagement in ELT.…

The identity formation of Australian-trained Vietnamese teachers of English is explored by looking at their experiences as TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) students in Australia and as teachers of English in Vietnam. On the one hand, the paper consolidates the understanding of identity in relation to difference and…

This paper reports on establishing and running a Self-Access Centre (SAC) in a secondary school in Hong Kong. The impetus for establishing the SAC came from new government curriculum guidelines with a focus on promoting greater autonomy for school students in their English language education. The approach taken in establishing the SAC was to…

The purpose of this study was to explore teachers' growth in understanding of algebra using concept maps. The study was set in the context of a five-year National Science Foundation funded teacher retention and renewal professional development project. In this project both beginning and experienced teachers are supported as they increase their…

Using a discourse analytic approach from the work of Hoey (1991) and a dual processing model from Wray (2000), this paper compares the language produced by the same classes of children when they are engaged in role-play and when they are playing rule-based games. We find that role-play tends to be richer in "frozen" pair parts, where the responses…

This article discusses the effects of repetition (1, 3, 7, and 10 encounters) on word knowledge in a carefully controlled study of 121 Japanese students learning English. The study is innovative and original in several aspects. (1) The study uses 10 tests to measure knowledge of orthography, association, grammatical functions, syntax, and meaning…

This paper investigates the nature of the substitutions used for the dental fricatives (/theta/ and /eth/) by Dutch learners of English as a second language. By means of an OT analysis, the underlying reasons for the difficulties encountered with these sounds are brought to light. The present data reveal that phonetics (or acoustics) rather than…

This article makes the case for using activity theory to explore the learning and teaching of writing in a foreign language. I illustrate my argument by bringing this theory to bear on a re-examination of the different modes of engagement in writing by university-level students of Japanese as a foreign language that I identified in an earlier…

This quasi-experimental study explores the effects of three types of instruction (form-based, meaning-based, and form- plus meaning-based) on the learning of Japanese relative clauses (RCs) and postsecondary Japanese as a foreign language learners' ability to generalize different types of relativization, examined in comparison to the predictions…

This article adopts an input perspective in examining a poverty-of-the stimulus (POS) learning situation in second language acquisition (SLA). Analysis of grammaticality judgement data from 81 English-speaking and 85 Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese isolates triggering input that informed English learners of subtle semantic properties of the…

In this article, the authors report that almost one in three adults in the UK have experience of learning a language as an adult, but only four percent are currently doing so--one percent less that in 1999, equivalent to a drop of half a million adults learning languages. Figures of speech, NIACE's UK-wide survey of language learning, also found a…

This article takes the inquiry into "nativeness" and "non-nativeness" to the level of developing an ethical framework for professional practice in English language education. In so doing, our aim is firstly to use the "sociology of the stranger" as a framework to problematize discourses on the Other and Othering. We shall argue that these…

Drawing on two major developments in languages education, namely communicative language teaching and frameworks of outcomes and standards, this address presents a reflection on "words" as the most basic resource of language teachers, and the way in which they are always open to interpretation and reinterpretation over time. With both developments,…

We often speak about developing students' cultural and intercultural awareness as part of the language learning process. However, these elements are often dealt with superficially and the methods used are somewhat unclear to many practitioners and to learners themselves. As a result, we very often hear that learners do not learn a language at the…

This article outlines what it means to be a strategic language learner in the context of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL). It looks at the possible roles for language learner strategies at their crucial intersection with language learning technology. We will first consider what language learner strategies have been represented in…