During the 2014-2015 academic year, the authors conducted roundtables related to queer identity in the English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classroom at Oregon Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (ORTESOL's) fall and spring conferences and at an in-service day at Portland State University's Intensive English Language…

Collaborative text reconstruction tasks such as dictogloss have been suggested as effective second language (L2) learning tasks that promote meaningful interaction between learners and their awareness of L2 target grammatical structures. However, it should be noted that the effect of pair interaction on the final product may differ depending on…

This dissertation explores science literacy for English learners (ELs) in secondary and university contexts. The two studies conducted for this dissertation demonstrate the reading comprehension abilities of secondary school ELs, and the writing of ELs for a university introductory biology course. The first study reveals some inequity in public…

Intensive English Program (IEP) Instructors and content faculty both listen to international students at the university. For these two groups of instructors, this study compared perceptions of international student speech by collecting comprehensibility ratings and transcription samples for intelligibility scores. No significant differences were…

Listening comprehension is an essential and challenging skill for language learners, and listening instruction can also be a challenge for language instructors, since they have little access to the listening process inside students' minds. Greater knowledge about what learners perceive when they listen could help language teachers better tailor…

Many studies have investigated vocabulary memorization strategies in the EFL context, but few researches have been conducted on the types of memorization strategies used by the Arab students in Malaysia. Thus, this study investigates the types of vocabulary memorization strategies employed by the Arab students in the Intensive English course at…

In an effort to better understand how participating in teacher research as a student teacher compares to conducting it as a practicing teacher, a teacher educator and her former teacher education student engaged in a collaborative dialogue. They focus their reflections in this article on the impact of external forces on the process of teacher…

This article reports the findings of ethnographic classroom research on the deployment of literature circles in English reading classes in the vocational secondary education sector in Indonesia. Grounded in micro-interactional, thematic, and discourse analyses, empirical findings showed that the students engaged actively in text selection, role…

In language programs, it is crucial to place incoming students into appropriate levels to ensure that course curriculum and materials are well targeted to their learning needs. Deciding how and where to set cutscores on placement tests is thus of central importance to programs, but previous studies in educational measurement disagree as to which…

Reflection is a crucial element in service-learning and having English as a second language (ESL) students create multimodal reflections on their service-learning experience helps them develop multiliteracies and results in learning that is authentic and meaningful as students engage in social discourse while they develop their academic language…

This study explored the development and maintenance of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) among 352 American learners of Arabic who completed summer intensive language programs in five Arab countries. Data were collected through a survey that was based on the 2007 draft of the Culture Proficiency Guidelines (Lampe, 2007; later adopted by…

In search of ways to better the foreign language proficiency levels of their citizens, governments frequently announce macro foreign language policies. In Turkey, the latest education reform in 2013 lowered the onset of foreign language learning to the second grade. The piloting of the latest foreign language policy is in progress to transform the…

Previous studies have shown that learner individual differences have important impacts on L2 accuracy development. The present study examines a learner variable (i.e. extraversion versus introversion) and its effects on incidental focus on form. Twenty-eight ESL students in two classes (an advanced and an upper-intermediate class) and their…

This study first briefly describes an instructional approach to teaching grammar known as X-Word Grammar and then compares its effectiveness in assisting students in achieving grammatical accuracy with traditionally taught grammar. Two groups of L2 pre-college students were taught using curricula and practice procedures in two different grammar…

Constructionist research on L2 learning has focused on the degrees to which skewed frequency (Goldberg, Casenhiser & White, 2007; Casenhiser & Goldberg, 2005; Goldberg, Casenhiser, & Sethuraman 2004) in a person's linguistic environment can facilitate "entrenchment," "schematization," and "contingency…