East (2014) presented a largely qualitative study that uncovered how beginning teachers of languages other than English developed their understandings about task-based language teaching (TBLT) as they took part in a year-long initial teacher education programme in New Zealand. This paper reports a comparative re-production. It complements a recent…

This study examined the validity of data collected from a novel online story retell task. The task was specifically designed for use by junior school teachers with the support of speech-language therapists or literacy specialists. The assessment task was developed to monitor children's oral language progress in their first year at school as part…

Ellis (2003) identifies four key criteria that distinguish a "task" from the types of situational grammar exercises that are typically found in the more traditional language classroom. This study investigates how well teachers were able to design tasks that fulfilled these four criteria (Ellis, 2003) at the end of a year-long…

Adult second language (L2) learners have often been found to produce discourse that manifests limited and non-native-like use of multiword expressions. One explanation for this is that adult L2 learners are relatively unsuccessful (in the absence of pedagogic intervention) at transferring multiword expressions from input texts to their own output…

The New Zealand Numeracy Development Project is an example of a professional learning and development initiative that has been progressively scaled up across a system to improve teacher knowledge and practice and student outcomes in mathematics. This paper examines two elements of the project's design that have been pivotal in enabling teachers to…

Using a hierarchical needs assessment model developed by Hunt we identified the essential competencies of communication management practitioners for the purpose of curriculum development and selection. We found that the underlying values of the profession were embodied in two superordinate goals. Six major competencies were identified, which were…

Over the past 20 years task-based language teaching (TBLT) has become a dominant approach to teaching in many contexts, including schools in New Zealand and the Flemish speaking region of Belgium (East, 2012; Van den Branden, 2006), but there are challenges for teachers in adapting their teaching to this approach. This paper reports on a study…

This study investigated the ways in which two groups of four adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) responded to unfamiliar words they encountered in four communication tasks and the effect that different levels of engagement with these words (including negotiation of form and meaning) had on subsequent recall of word meaning. Of the…

This study examined the impact of training mothers to talk elaboratively about the past on children's understanding of mind. The researchers randomly assigned 102 mothers of 19-month-old children to a training or no-training group. Mothers in the experimental group received training in an elaborative style of talking about the past when children…

This article focuses on vocabulary and writing at university level from the perspectives of 14 English as an additional language students studying at a New Zealand university. The students individually carried out an integrated reading and writing task and then participated in an interview which focused on their language learning background and…