Monthly Editions
The Impact of Phonetic Instruction on Iranian Students’ Listening Ability Enhancement
The purpose of this study was to see if phonetic instruction followed by the learners’ checking of their pronunciation by the use of phonemic transcription would enhance Iranian students’ listening ability. Since random assignment was not possible, the nonequivalent group, pretest-posttest design was employed to study two classes of third grade high school students as control and experimental groups.
Online and Face-to-face Peer Review: Measures of Implementation ESL Writing Classes
This paper is an attempt based on the author’s experience and feedback as an ESL teacher teaching Writing for Academic Purposes at Universiti Putra Malaysia. This paper reviews the theoretical background behind peer review in both Face-to-Face and Online formats. With the advent of the cutting-edge Internet technology,practitioners have presented intriguing techniques to improve efficacy of ESL learning.
Creating and Sharing Writing iRubrics
Rubrics are scoring guides, consisting of specific pre-established performance criteria, used in evaluating student work. iRubric is a comprehensive rubric development, assessment, and sharing tool. It shows the major skills and subskills to be mastered, the different mastery levels, and marks allocated to each level. Rubrics can be collaboratively assessed with colleagues, classes and other individuals.
The Impact of “Imagination of Students” in the Development of the Professional Identity of Four Japanese Teachers of English in Japanese Higher Education
This study investigates how relatively new Japanese teachers of English in higher education in Japan develop their professional identity. Teachers’ professional identity has come to be seen as one of the most critical components in shaping classroom practices (Varghese, Morgan, Johnston & Johnson, 2005). Language teachers, who were previously viewed as technicians who applied appropriate pedagogical methodologies…
The Impact of EFL Students’ Vocabulary Breadth of Knowledge on Literal Reading Comprehension
Second language reading is a challenging task for foreign language learners. The amount of vocabulary students store in their brains will assist them in understanding reading, especially when students’ first language is a nonalphabetic language. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether EFL students’ vocabulary breadth knowledge influences their literal reading comprehension.
Examining the Vocabulary Levels of Indonesia’s English National Examination Texts
This study is designed to create a corpus of junior high school (JHS) and senior high school (SHS) English National Examination (NE) texts used in Indonesia throughout four years of administration to form the basis of analysis. By means of corpus analysis, it sought to find out the vocabulary levels of junior and senior high school English NE texts (distribution among the K1 – K20 vocabulary levels…
Understanding Your Students: An Investigation on Topics of Interest to Chinese EFL Graduate Student
This paper is an illustration of a tentative study conducted to investigate the areas and topics Chinese Non-English major graduate students are interested in speaking, writing and reading about. A total of 172 Chinese Non-English major graduate students participated in this study. Each of the participants was required to…
Article Errors in the English Writing of Advanced L1 Arabic Learners: The Role of Transfer
The problems encountered by English learners whose mother tongue does not have an article system have been researched extensively. The problems encountered by learners whose mother tongue does have an article system, such as Arabic, have been studied less. This article describes an enquiry into article system errors in a corpus of English writing by tertiary-level L1 Arabic speakers.
Error Correction of L2 Students’ Texts – Theory, Evidence and Pedagogy
In the last ten years there has been a revival of support for error correction of second language students’ written texts underpinned by disillusionment with the notion that comprehensible input alone is sufficient for acquisition of all aspects of a second language. Empirical studies in comprehensive and focused correction have aided this revival and demonstrated that error correction can produce significant benefits.
Creating a Corpus-Based Daily Life Vocabulary for TEYL
The purpose of this study has been to create a list of children’s everyday vocabulary in English which will provide a foundation for daily life vocabulary for Japanese elementary school students and which will complement and augment existing English vocabulary currently taught in Japanese junior and senior high schools.
