This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 2014 International Conference of Pragmatics and Language Learning at Indiana University. It includes fourteen papers on a variety of topics, with a diversity of first and second languages, and a wide range of methods used to collect pragmatic data in L2 and FL settings. This volume is…

Conceptual grammatical knowledge is an area which causes problems at different levels of education. This article examines the ideas of conceptual change theory as a basis for establishing a new grammar teaching method. The research strategy which I use is educational design research and the research data have been collected from teacher students…

This article reports on two studies using "Language Muse[superscript SM]" (LM), a web-based, teacher professional development (TPD) application designed to enhance teachers' linguistic awareness and to support teachers in the development of language-based instructional scaffolding for English language learners (ELL). In Study 1,…

The paper investigates how a student on a master's-level teacher education course for English language teachers goes about constructing her grammar knowledge. The learner is a novice teacher with English as a foreign language. Learner diary, interview, and group interaction data were analysed thematically, revealing that she made relatively few,…

This study examines the problems encountered by trainee language teachers who strive to maintain their language skills at their optimum level in the classroom. Many trainees will admit that their language skills need refreshing and a significant number of mentors agree with them. This article explores language attrition and strategies that can be…

As English becomes an international language in the world, there is a growing interest in developing English skills from early childhood. In Korea, the demand for English as a foreign language education for young children has increased considerably in the past decade. However, little is still known about the professional knowledge of an early…

The role of teacher-student interaction and collaboration in solving linguistic problems has recently been in the center of SLA research. Accordingly, this study investigated the effect of Oral Interactive Feedback (OIF) on the accuracy and complexity of Iranian intermediate EFL learners' writing. After ensuring the homogeneity using Preliminary…

It has been suggested recently that it may be useful for language teaching practitioners to have some knowledge of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics (CL) provides tools that may help the language-teaching practitioner to gain insight into the semantic potential of words and communicate the meaning of lexical chunks in greater detail…

Previous research has shown that learners of English might experience considerable difficulty when giving constructive criticism to peers in instructional settings. Unlike native speakers, they tend to soften their criticism far less frequently while aggravating it far more often, and thus require pedagogical help in this area. The present study…

English language learners (ELLs) are the fastest growing population in the US schools (National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 2011); these students are consistently outperformed by their White counterparts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress data (NCES, 2011). While traditional English as a second language (ESL) classes…

Previous research into student teachers' knowledge about language concluded that overall the picture was fairly bleak. Such research focused on the knowledge about language that the student teachers possessed when they moved from secondary school education into Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes. However, few studies have investigated the…

This article aims at absorbing the pronunciation teachers task and how much phonology should teachers know. Teachers and future teachers need a well-rounded concept of the phonology of the language they are going to teach and the native language of learners. Emphasis must be placed on the understanding of language as a system of rules and as a…

Previous research shows that American learners of Japanese (AJs) tend to differ from native Japanese speakers in their compliment responses (CRs). Yokota (1986) and Shimizu (2009) have reported that AJs tend to respond more negatively than native Japanese speakers. It has also been reported that AJs' CRs tend to lack the use of avoidance or…

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,…

The need for some form of explicit grammar instruction is recognised in most current approaches to second language teaching. Since the usefulness of explicit instruction is at least to some extent dependent on the difficulty of the rules that are taught, an important question for teachers is whether their judgements of rule difficulty are…