As economies are inevitably becoming dominated by multinational and global companies, the need for Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) is growing accordingly. Language institutes in higher education are trying to tailor their curriculum to meet the expectations of such companies each with their specific technical vocabulary. While LSP courses are…

Engaging in research is acknowledged as having a potentially transformative impact on the professional development of language teachers (Borg, 2010). Yet a cursory examination of the literature suggests that teachers rarely engage in research. The aim of this chapter is threefold: to introduce Exploratory Practice (EP), a form of inclusive…

The importance of providing pre-service and in-service teachers with sufficient training and practice in integrating technology into their classrooms has led several studies to investigate the possible effects of pre-determined training and practice provided to teachers. However, most of these studies seem to have focussed on teachers' beliefs and…

This study explores the effectiveness of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) approach to second-language (L2) English vocabulary learning in on-demand online distance learning at a private university in Tokyo, Japan. The participants were 49 Japanese undergraduates, intermediate L2 English learners at the B1 level in the Common European Framework of…

This short paper presents the quantitative results of an online survey of Swiss university students and staff on their use of Machine Translation (MT). The analysis of the 3,713 responses throws light on the context, purposes, degree of successive revisions, and ethical considerations surrounding the use of MT. With regards to language teachers…

In this study, we held a 12-hour workshop focused on training the Data-Driven Learning (DDL) approach for in-service Chinese teachers aiming to implement this pedagogy in Mandarin Chinese classrooms in the future. We analyzed data from a postworkshop questionnaire to understand how the individual-level traits of Chinese teachers (such as their…

An action-oriented approach views "users and learners of a language primarily as 'social agents', i.e. members of society who have tasks (not exclusively language-related) to accomplish in a given set of circumstances, in a specific environment and within a particular field of action. While acts of speech occur within language activities,…

Despite the benefits of multimodal technology in the language classroom and common practice to introduce digital tools in language teaching, research has shown that many language teachers do not feel confident to engage with and create online multimodal learning resources and environments. This exploratory study examines data from five experienced…

In this paper results of the EU projects 'Designing and Evaluating Innovative Mobile Pedagogies' (DEIMP, http://www.deimpeu.com/) and 'Mobilising and Transforming Teacher Educators' Pedagogies' (MTTEP, http:// www.mttep.eu/) are presented. Two key outputs, the Mobile Learning Toolkit and its iPAC framework (MTTEP) and the principles for innovative…

In this case study, Angela Helsloot, Principal at Allambie Heights Public School, on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, uses data from standardised tests and benchmark reading assessments across the school to show the positive impact that Sounds-Write instruction has had in Kindergarten and Year 1. [For the complete volume, "Systematic Synthetic…

We propose to use reading time as a metric to report progress in language learning applications. As a case study we use a web-based application that enables learners of a foreign language to read texts from the web and practice vocabulary with interactive exercises generated based on their past readings. The application captures generic…

In Chapter 4, Tara Hashemi examines Graduate Student Teachers' (GSTs') perceptions of their professionalization in FL programs which have adopted a literacy-based approach to teaching French in the United States. Findings show that while some clear efforts are being made by language program directors to provide GSTs with a large panoply of tools,…

This study explores the effects of extensive exposure to L2 TV series, describing perceptions of learning from this type of input. A total of 136 university learners of English participated in a pre-/post-test design study which included extensive watching of ten full-length episodes of an English TV series. There were three groups: captions,…

The American Education Research Association (AERA) is one of the largest education conferences in the world. Using the AERA Open Access Repository, we created a 5,000,000 word corpus of over 18,000 abstracts. We explored the coverages of the New General Service List (NGSL), the New Academic Word List (NAWL), and the Social Science Word List…

This research study tends to evaluate the efficaciousness and usability of a Vocabulary Learning And Strategy Teaching Web-App (VLASTWA) -- a customised and targeted web-app for (1) teaching the KeyWord Method (KWM) which is a widely investigated vocabulary learning strategy, and (2) facilitating new vocabulary learning via KWM. In this…