This research examines the development of self-awareness in students as they strive to adapt themselves to their current environment. The significant social factors that immerge include; culture, religion, language; economic status, family integration and work experience. Also considered are the relationships of students with teachers and…

This study investigates how college students solve their cognitive conflicts when receiving peers' suggestions and corrections in online text revision. A sample of 45 undergraduate students were recruited to read their peer writers' texts, edit peer writers' errors, evaluate peer editors' corrections and suggestions, and finally rewrite their own…

This paper focuses on the construction of language expertise in international, university-level English-medium courses where English is used as a lingua franca. Even if the courses are not language courses, language sometimes becomes the topic of discussion in the form of language correcting and commentary. This paper looks into these instances,…

This linguistic and ethnographic project examines register formation among a community of Sri Lankan university youth. The Raggers group at the University of Peradeniya (Kandy, Sri Lanka) has strict rules forbidding the use of English and supporting a register of Sinhala made up of linguistic features from different Sinhala varieties. Detailing…

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) aims to encourage language learners to think about what they do when communicating, and to think about what they can do to help themselves and others to learn a language better. This paper considers to what extent the CEFR supports language learning by looking at how a group of learners, in the…

This paper explores the feasibility of an automated, online form of L2 strategy instruction (SI) as an alternative to conventional, classroom-based forms that rely primarily on teachers. Feasibility was evaluated by studying the effectiveness, both actual and perceived, of a five-week, online SI course designed to teach web-based dictionary skills…

Peer interaction may facilitate acquisition through fostering learner production, feedback, and noticing of form. This study examined learners' awareness of form during peer interaction in role-play and discussion tasks over a three-week period of a tertiary intermediate-level French class. The data for the study comprised transcribed recordings…

Reformulation is mostly considered as an important verbal mechanism for coping with non-native speakers' speech production problem in second language acquisition. Drawing on interlanguage pragmatics and conversation analysis, the present study examines the specific ways in which reformulation is used to achieve mutual understanding in the…

Despite a proliferation of research into academic writing and the availability of a number of guides to writing, little attention has been given to the means of supporting students striving to reach the level of proficiency in English expected from graduates in their respective fields. Our study aims to explore the prevalent problems in writing in…

This dissertation offers a Cognitive Grammar-based approach to teaching cases to L2 German and Russian students and examines the impacts of various methods of case instruction in beginning German and Russian language classes. A CG-based explanation of cases was already proposed by some CG theorists (i.e., Langacker 1987, 1991; Smith 1987, Janda…

Corrective feedback has been discussed mainly in second language acquisition contexts, but less has been done concerning corrective feedback in foreign language settings. In this descriptive study, conducted at a Mexican university, our aims were to identify the perceptions of instructors of English as a foreign language about corrective feedback…

Linguists have long accepted the inevitability of linguistic variation as scientific fact. However, the general public continues to associate regional variation with low intelligence and to promote a non-regional, "accentless" English as the ideal. The result of this ideology, which ignores the natural diversity of all languages, is that…

In this paper, both a cognitive and a sociocultural theoretical perspective are used to bring together findings from two studies that investigated the effects of instruction designed to enhance the potentially positive effect of peer interaction on L2 development. Despite differences between the studies' learning contexts, participants' age, and…

The present study investigates learning gains resulting from collaborative consciousness-raising (CR) tasks. For this purpose, text reconstruction and text repair tasks, two varieties of CR, were adapted from previous CR studies and administered to EAL (English as an Additional Language) learners in a women's university in South Korea. We…

In this study, framed within a sociocultural theory of mind, we explore the role of languaging in mediating between students' understanding of a grammatical concept and their written production of the forms related to that concept. The development of scientific concepts, in this case of the concept of voice in French, involves the use of language…