This study investigated French and Spanish EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' preferred use of three-word lexical bundles with discourse or stance-oriented function with a view to exploring the role of first language (L1) frequency effects in foreign language acquisition. Word combinations were extracted from learner performance data…

Informed by Vygotsky's conceptualization of the Zone of Proximal Development, this case study investigated the benefits of peer feedback on second language (L2) writing for students with high L2 proficiency and the factors that may influence their learning in peer feedback in the Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language context. Specifically, the…

Teaching basic reading, writing, and critical thinking skills is immensely gratifying and vitally important work, requiring intelligence, optimism, and humanity. To be able to gain some sliver of understanding with regard to students' attitudes, behaviors, skills, and abilities; to recognize that there exists a multiplicity of possible…

This study aims at investigating compliment responses of Turkish and Chinese EFL learners by collecting data via a Discourse Completion Test. The participants of the study are Lower-Intermediate and Intermediate Level Chinese and Turkish EFL learners and native English speakers. The first purpose of the study is to compare Turkish and Chinese EFL…

Anaphoric expressions are among the most frequent language forms which depend on context for their resolution. Among efforts made in theorizing referential choice, distance approaches take into account how accessibility/continuity is reflected by choice of referring expressions. The thing is that individual's choices are made under major and minor…

In this paper, we investigate university lecturers' experiences of and reflections on the development of their pedagogical competency during a 9-month university pedagogical course. The effects of long-term university pedagogical training are considered through experienced pedagogical competency by analysing university lecturers' evaluations of…

Over the past 45 years, the construct of syntactic sophistication has been assessed in L2 writing using what Bulté and Housen (2012) refer to as absolute complexity (Lu, 2011; Ortega, 2003; Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998). However, it has been argued that making inferences about learners based on absolute complexity indices (e.g., mean…

This study compared 70 English learners (ELs) and English-only (EO) second-grade students' writing samples before and after a yearlong writing program. The school utilized Write From the Beginning (J. Buckner, 2006) and focused on personal narratives. A subgroup of students also participated in an intervention supporting expository writing on…

In this paper, we explore the results of a short-term concept-based pedagogical intervention on the learning of declension as a meaning-making resource among US university learners of German. The pedagogical approached derived its principles from Vygotskian sociocultural psychology, namely the role of explicit, scientific (i.e., abstract and…

This article reports partial results of a qualitative study which explored the gains and challenges encountered by two groups of English as a foreign language pre-service teachers from a public university in Medellin, Colombia, in developing a situated view of academic writing through a systemic functional genre-based instructional unit. The unit…

Physical education teacher education is most successful when it includes several field experiences that are closely supervised and focus on reflective practice. Drawing upon attachment theory, the purpose of this study was to understand a mentoring program in which doctoral students served as mentors for preservice teachers during a methods course…

This qualitative interpretive study aimed to explore the use of content-based story writing as an educative curriculum to promote science teachers' professional learning. It also aimed to help teachers interact and reflect on their students' science stories to generate and explore content and pedagogical content knowledge. This study was carried…

In this multiple-case study, the author investigated fully online students' perceptions of and experiences with asynchronous and synchronous writing support options of an institutional writing center and a commercial tutoring service. This dissertation used a multiple-case study design (Merriam, 1998, 2009; Yin, 2009) to ascertain which features…

The importance of direct explicit instruction in secondary schools has been shown to improve student learning outcomes across the curriculum. The question then becomes one of whether adapting direct explicit instruction in post-secondary institutions would have the same impact on student grades. Graham and Perin (2007) identified eleven elements…

This piece describes an extended workshop in which reading, writing, listening, and speaking were used to build and sustain a feminist ecology intended to open up access to future lives in science for ethnically and linguistically diverse girls in an urban secondary school. The girls in the description above participated in a project called Girls…