Language learners and educators have subscribed to the belief that those who go abroad will have many opportunities to use the target language and will naturally become proficient. They also assume that language learners will develop relationships with native speakers allowing them to use the language and become more fluent, an assumption…

Teachers of introductory technical courses such as statistics face numerous challenges in the classroom, including student motivation and mathematical background, and difficulties in interpreting numerical results in context. Cooperative learning through small groups addresses many such challenges, but students for whom spoken English is not their…

This study deals with the application of the pragmatics research to EFL teaching. The need for language learners to utilize a form of speech acts such as request which involves a series of strategies was significance of the study. Although defining different speech acts has been established since 1960s, recently there has been a shift towards…

This case study examines the implementation of "Foreign Language Activities" (English language education), which officially began in Japanese elementary schools in 2011. Subjects in this study included 37 Japanese classroom teachers (20 males and 17 females) in four elementary schools in Tokyo. The Teacher Foreign Language Anxiety Scale…

The purpose of this article is to explore Korean English learners' identity and pedagogical implications of the findings. After a brief explanation about why the manners of examining English learners' identity can be diverse according to their sociocultural context, as an agency of Korean English learners' identity representation, their…

Teachers' professional identity influences the way they think and teach. For pre-service non-native English speaking teachers (NNESTs), they are at the crucial stage of constructing self-image and self-perception as English language teaching (ELT) professionals, their beliefs about English teaching and learning and their attitudes towards changing…

Research on the effectiveness of short-term study-abroad (SA) programs for improving oral skills has shown mixed results. In this study, 24 L2 German learners (L1 English) provided pre- and post-SA speech samples addressing a hypothetical situation and completed surveys on cross-cultural interest and adaptability; L2 communication affect,…

This paper reports the results of a survey of California TESOL educators about issues related to nonnative English-speaking teachers (NNESTs). A good deal of research suggests that NNESTs are as effective, if not more so, than native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) and that their treatment in today's work world should be reconsidered; in…

This study proposes an approach to automatically score the "TOEIC"® Writing e-mail task. We focus on one component of the scoring rubric, which notes whether the test-takers have used particular speech acts such as requests, orders, or commitments. We developed a computational model for automated speech act identification and tested it…

The study examined heritage speaker grammars and to what extent they diverge with respect to grammatical gender from adult L2 learners. Results from a preference task involving code-mixed Determiner Phrases (DPs) and code-mixed copula constructions show a difference between these two types of operations. Heritage speakers patterned with the…

In today's world, the increase in the number of non-native English speakers in the world has led to the emergence of so many different varieties of English and has influenced some of the important issues related to English language teaching (ELT). The strict traditional adherence to native speaker pronunciation and culture in ELT are among the…

First-year university students (n = 185) completed an online questionnaire that allowed comparison of those who reported studying on-campus with those who reported studying fully-online. Independent sample t-tests compared the means of students in the two study modes on demographics, frequency of use of digital technology and metacognitive…

This paper reports the outcome of a study carried out in Qassim University with 169 Saudi male novice university students to obtain a deeper insight into their perceptions of their native English speaker teachers (NESTs) and non-native English speaker teachers (NNESTs) in the English language classroom. Quantitative and qualitative data were…

Studies in interlanguage pragmatics have shown that L2 learners' proficiency has an influence on the occurrences of L1 pragmatic transfer. However, questions remain whether the relationship between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency is positive or negative. This paper is designed to study L1 pragmatic transfer in requests made by Chinese…

This qualitative study employed informal conversational interviews and semi-structured individual interviews to capture the Saudi students' opinions about the feedback they receive, and about their perceptions on what constitutes helpful feedback. Sociocultural theory was used as the framework of this study. The findings suggest that the Saudi…