Purpose: Most EFL textbooks suggest the use of vivid pictures and verbal explanations in teaching English prepositions. However, this word class appears in collocations, and rote-learning does not really help learners retain and use this word class successfully. Cognitive linguistics (CL) has implications for English language teaching as it rests…

This article derives from a qualitative study that employed a sociocultural perspective to investigate the mediation of institutional policies on teachers' classroom practices of assessment for learning in one public and one private university in Vietnam. Data included observations of classrooms, interviews with teachers, executive officers and…

As an emergent theme in educational research, examination of the lives and careers of teachers reveals a wide range of educational factors occurring in many different contexts. Despite the relationship between teaching and life outside school, research studies have been inclined towards the working aspects of teachers' lives. Rather than following…

Pre-writing stage has been considered very significant as it enhances writing performance in that learners can have discussions with the teacher and/or their peers. They can also outline and organize their ideas individually to prepare themselves for writing. This study investigated the effects of using pictures and interactions in the pre-writing…

Mobile phone ownership among university students in Vietnam has reached almost 100%, exceeding that of Internet-capable desktop computers. This has made them increasingly popular to allow learners to carry out learning activities outside of the classroom, but some studies have suggested that learners are not always willing to engage in activities…

Few studies have been conducted to see how blog-based peer response helps students to improve their writing revisions. The present study investigates peer comments made through blogs, the nature of the comments and their areas of focus, and the ratios of students incorporating suggestions made through blog-based comments into revisions of their…

This dissertation investigates L2 student language production, task-based instruction, and teachers' scaffolding strategies in two special EFL classes in a Vietnamese university. Two English teachers and 73 students were studied as they participated in a nationwide educational project known as the Advanced Curriculum (AC), an initiative launched…

This study investigated EFL students' and teachers' perspectives and experiences of managing foreign language anxiety (FLA). Data were obtained from 49 student autobiographies, 18 student interviews, 8 teacher interviews and 351 student responses to an open-ended question. Content analysis was used to analyse the data with the use of NVivo. A…

Vietnam universities have experienced remarkable changes brought about by their internationalization policies. The switch to English as a medium of instruction (EMI) for some academic programs was one of these critical changes. Literature has reported numerous issues related to EMI, including inadequate language proficiency of teaching staff. This…

The significance of errors in explicating Second Language Acquisition (SLA) processes led to the growth of error analysis in the 1970s which has since maintained its prominence in English as a second/foreign language (L2) research. However, one problem with this research is errors are often taken for granted, without problematising them and their…

Motivated by the scarcity of research that examines the impact of teacher beliefs on their actual practices in Vietnam, this study investigated the relationship between teachers' beliefs about quality questions and their questioning behaviours in terms of questioning purposes, content focus, students' cognitive level, wording and syntax. Thirteen…

The central research question for this dissertation is: "How do overseas Christian ESOL teachers describe putting their religious beliefs into practice in their profession?" Specifically, the focus is on mostly evangelical Christian English language teachers who have earned a TESOL certificate and who at the time of this project were…

The "TOEFL Junior"® Standard Test is an assessment that measures the degree to which middle school-aged students learning English as a second language have attained proficiency in the academic and social English skills representative of English-medium instructional environments. The assessment measures skills in three areas: listening…

The effects of meta-cognitive strategy use on learning reading comprehension have gained much interest of researchers and educators (Chumpavan, 2000; Shmais, 2002; Phakiti, 2003; Aegpongpaow 2008; Subasi, 2009; Zhang and Wu, 2009). Available literature indicated a positive correlation between learners' meta-cognitive strategy use and their…

The field of English language education has seen developments in writing pedagogy, moving from product-based to process-based and then to genre-based approaches. In Vietnam, teaching secondary school students how to write in English is still lagging behind these growing developments. Product-based approach is commonly seen in English writing…