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An Ideological Discussion of the Impact of the NNESTs’ English Language Knowledge on ESL Policy Implementation  ‘A Special Reference to the Omani Context’

An Ideological Discussion of the Impact of the NNESTs’ English Language Knowledge on ESL Policy Implementation ‘A Special Reference to the Omani Context’

| September 30, 2005

Knowledge of English to the non-native speaker English teachers (NNSET) is crucial and fundamental, and its importance has been highlighted by various writers over the past few decades. This research paper, therefore, examines from an ideological perspective the importance of English language knowledge to the NNEST and the implications it has for English as a second language…

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Does an Open Forum Promote Learning Among Students? A Collaborative-Learning Approach

Does an Open Forum Promote Learning Among Students? A Collaborative-Learning Approach

| September 30, 2005

This paper investigates how students responded to each other in an e-Community learning situation. Forty students, at two levels, were invited to respond to five questions regarding the Legislative Council election 2004 posted on the school forum. Questionnaires and interviews were conducted to see if students enjoyed the discussion with peers and casual browsers.

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The Kinds of Forms Learners Attend to During Focus on Form Instruction: A Description of an Advanced ESL Writing Class

The Kinds of Forms Learners Attend to During Focus on Form Instruction: A Description of an Advanced ESL Writing Class

| September 30, 2005

Participants were 19 international students studying in an advanced ESL writing class in a large United States university. The majority of forms they attended to were lexical in nature, of which most involved the meanings of words.

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Important Tasks of English Education:  Asia-wide and Beyond

Important Tasks of English Education: Asia-wide and Beyond

| September 30, 2005

We need to look deeply at times into the specific needs of learners in Asia and the Pacific region who we cannot forget are still very much living in local contexts -not only an evidently increasingly global one. That being said, there is much to learn from these studies that can be borrowed and lent across a number of frontiers.

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Extensive Reading Reports – Different Intelligences, Different Levels of Processing

Extensive Reading Reports – Different Intelligences, Different Levels of Processing

| September 30, 2005

Extensive Reading (ER) is an important aspect of any English as a Foreign/Second Language reading program. In this paper, I will consider a definition of ER and benefits of including it in a program. In the main part of the paper, I will explain four reporting forms that work with different intelligences and levels of processing.

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Toward a Critical Notion of Appropriation of English as an International Language

Toward a Critical Notion of Appropriation of English as an International Language

| September 30, 2005

Undoubtedly, English has gained itself the status of a world language, an international language, or a lingua franca in almost all settings (Crystal, 1997; Seidlhofer, 2001, 2003; Brutt-Griffler, 2002; McKay, 2003; Llurda, 2004). There are a number of ways to view EIL.

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Teaching Vocabulary

Teaching Vocabulary

| September 30, 2005

Deliberately teaching vocabulary is one of the least efficient ways of developing learners= vocabulary knowledge but nonetheless it is an important part of a well-balanced vocabulary programme.

The main problem with vocabulary teaching is that only a few words and a small part of what is required to know a word can be dealt with at any one time.

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The “Communicative Competence” Controversy

The “Communicative Competence” Controversy

| September 30, 2005

The main aim of this article is to question Hymes` theory of communicative competence as developed in his paper “On Communicative Competence” (1971) and to critically examine the implications it had for the field of foreign and second language teaching.

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Competence and Teaching English as an International Language

Competence and Teaching English as an International Language

| September 30, 2005

Roger Nunn considers different types of competence in relation to the teaching of English as an International Language, arguing that linguistic competence has yet to be adequately addressed in recent considerations of EIL. The paper first discusses the need to reconsider the scope of ‘communicative competence’ and then goes on to consider other kinds of competence relevant to EIL including linguistic competence.

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Comparison of Three Methods of Assessing Difficulty

Comparison of Three Methods of Assessing Difficulty

| August 5, 2005

Text difficulty has been a concern of educational researchers and practitioners for more than 70 years (Chall and Conrad, 1991) and many have used different methods to assess the difficulty of the text (Chall and Dale, 1995). In fact, one of the most important aspects of textbook development has been considered to be texts of appropriate difficulty by educational publishers.

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