The Problem: The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the information structure of native-English speaking (NES) ESOL teachers in giving explanations in a grammar class at an Intensive English Program (IEP) at a university in southern California Method: This mixed-method study employed a sequential-exploratory design. Six grammar…

The problem: Many previous studies have pointed out that EFL learners tend to face communication breakdowns with native speakers because their traditional classroom and textbooks are not able to provide learners with sufficient pragmatically appropriate input (Bardovi-Harlig, 1996; Rose, 1994, 1997). On the contrary, they are exposed to rich input…

This paper reports on a qualitative study that investigated the changes in students' writing process associated with corpus use over an extended period of time. The primary purpose of this study was to examine how corpus technology affects students' development of competence as second language (L2) writers. The research was mainly based on case…

English language teachers' opinions on the pedagogic relevance of spoken grammar are beginning to be reported, yet the voices of teachers in East Asia are rarely heard. In this article, the views of teachers from China and Singapore expressed in an online discussion are compared. The discussion, which was part of a taught postgraduate course,…

This paper reports on a study that investigated the impact of two types of computer-mediated corrective feedback on the development of adult learners' L2 knowledge: (1) corrective feedback that reformulates the error in the form of recasts, and (2) corrective feedback that supplies the learner with metalinguistic information about the nature of…

This study investigates English as a second language (ESL) teachers' beliefs in grammar teaching. A 32-item questionnaire was administered to 11 ESL teachers in a language school in California. The results show that the participants generally believe that the formal study of grammar is essential to the eventual mastery of a foreign or second…

Two hundred and ninety-six English majors at universities in Poland, Austria and Hong Kong were given a 50-item questionnaire designed to evaluate their knowledge of grammatical terminology. The main aim was to identify whether the three populations were subject to differing "terminological cultures". This was found to be substantially…

This classroom-based study investigated the metatalk of learners working in pairs on a text reconstruction task. Specifically, the study investigated the learners' level of engagement with linguistic choices, and whether the level of engagement affected subsequent language development. Data were collected over a 2-week period. In the first week,…

This paper reports on a study that examined a group of advanced German L2 learners' awareness and use of English focusing devices. Recent studies suggest that learners are aware of lexical resources, but lack awareness of grammatical structures. Focus constructions, i.e. pragmatically motivated word order variations, are pivotal to any text where…

Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension. The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in 8- and 10-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed.…

Seventy-seven 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children were presented with well-formed and ill-formed versions of 10 different sentence types. They were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences and correct the ill-formed ones. The sentences were presented in an interview format, developed by McDaniel and Cairns (1990, 1996). Both grammaticality…

This quasi-experimental study was conducted to assess and address the instructional needs of students who use a nonstandard English dialect for subject-verb agreement in their writing. Fifty-four students of diverse ethnicities in remedial English courses were divided into control and experimental groups. The researchers used four different…

It is now generally agreed that "output" functions to promote language learning through focus on form. Empirical studies reveal that oral communicative tasks can arouse learners' negotiation of meaning, but they are not so effective in bringing about focus on form. Hence, researchers have suggested using collaborative writing tasks to…

This article is concerned with knowledge about language in the English classroom in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on national educational policy. The article provides a discussion of the main national guidelines on English Language teaching in the primary and early secondary years, as well as some observations on the place of knowledge…

This study examined the relationship between the metalinguistic reflections produced by French-speaking elementary school students and their actual learning of ESL. Using a before-after design, data was collected at the beginning (Time 1) and at the end (Time 2) of a 3-month period during which the participants kept a metalinguistic journal.…