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The following paper offers a Canadian educator’s reflections on teaching a content-based culture course in Commonwealth Studies to university-level Korean EFL learners. Describing the course’s rationale, teaching methods, materials, and student assessment methods, along with student reactions to the course, the paper suggests Commonwealth Studies can serve as a useful framework by which to educate Korean students–and possibly other English learners in Asia–on the international and cultural dimensions of the English language, improve their English skills, and make them more effective cross-cultural communicators.

This paper deals with the phenomenon of the global spread of the English language and the moral and ethical concerns associated with it. The paper shows that as English has become a language widely used in international contexts, it can be a potential cause to inequality among people and among nations, and a threat to any other language and culture. However, like globalization, English cannot be avoided or ignored, which places ESL/EFL teachers in a dilemma, as they need to resolve conflicts between internationalism and national cultural identity − that is, working to help students to communicate effectively with the world while maintaining their national and cultural values. Implications are given to classroom teachers in the process of managing this dilemma.

The Chain Interaction (CI) analysis of texts produces an index which is a formal (in contrast to functional) measure of cohesion as well as coherence of texts (cf. Halliday & Hasan, 1989). This study is an attempt to (1) explore the local and/or micro-linguistic texture of English newspaper editorials and catalog what Halliday and Hasan (1989, p. 94) refer to as the “Cohesive Harmony Index” (CHI) of texts, and (2) examine whether there is significant micro-textual variation from one culture to another within the same text type. To this end, a total of 90 editorials electronically culled from three English newspapers (30 editorials each) published in three different socio-cultural environments by native speakers of English (The Washington Times), and non-native speakers (The Iran News, and The Pakistan Today) were text-analyzed. The results of a CI analysis of texts demonstrated that, in terms of the cohesive harmony in texts, there was statistically no significant difference (α = .05) between editorials written by (non)native editorial writers, in whatever socio-cultural and socio-political context they were produced and disseminated. In other words, the CHIs of editorial texts turned out to be analogous suggesting that the editorial texts produced by non-native speakers of English enjoy almost the same degree of linguistic cohesiveness as native texts.

With the rapid development of modern information technology, distance learning has become a very popular education mode. Special features of distance education lead to the new roles of the teacher in this new environment and request a brand new teacher-student relationship. Based on her experience, the author uses the “instructor” in SUNY Learning Network of the US and the “tutor” in Bewai Online College in China as cases to analyze how a teacher should function in the distance-learning environment. Hopefully through the comparison and contrast of these two cases more pedagogical principles in distance education will be revealed for the benefit of distance educators.

Inter-cultural communication became especially important in Taiwan after the government decided to develop Taiwan into an Asian-Pacific economic center. This economic decree resulted in communication abilities becoming a primary expectation for all Taiwanese citizens. Knowing that, an appropriate place to begin to assess or improve the ability to communicate is to examine the educational system, and that review is the subject of this study. The researcher conducted a telephone survey that collected data from a random sample of 150 elementary English teachers throughout Taiwan to investigate teacher’s practices and beliefs toward Elementary English Education in Taiwan. A five-point Likert-type scale was used to measure respondents’ practices and beliefs. Data was analyzed using SPSS according to the seven pre-selected variables: teachers’ qualifications and training, materials, teaching methods, assessment polices and practices, content/curriculum of English enclosures, environment, and culture. The open-ended questions revealed the survey participants found teachers hope to implement in the programs for increasing the number of qualified teachers, adding teacher qualification policies, and dividing students according to their English abilities. In addition, the teachers reflected that MOE made a smart move by implementing the program immediately upon realizing the importance of the English learning needs among elementary students.

Several past studies have pointed out that Japanese EFL students are not skilled in producing argumentative essays in English, a mode of discourse most often required in academic contexts. The present paper reports on a study conducted to explore the effects of a-year-long writing instruction method that was designed to facilitate Japanese college EFL students in making a successful transition from the “knowledge-telling” model to the “knowledge-transforming” model of writing (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987). It was found that the instruction method led the students to produce essays with both macro- and micro-level rhetorical and linguistic features that are considered to be characteristic of formal academic discourse. Specifically, after given the instruction, the students produced essays of better quality with clearer organization, logical consistency, and objective support. They also used more enumerators and logical connectors, and employed, as grammatical subjects, more third-person pronouns and inanimate nouns. It was also found that at least a year is required to ensure such improvements in the students’ academic writing. The paper exhibits a sample analysis of students’ actual essays and also provides examples of teaching materials used.

Contradictory findings of SLA researchers have motivated a variety of opposite viewpoints concerning the availability of UG in L2 acquisition. Moreover, there is a recent, renewed interest in the claims made by the proponents of the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) according to which UG’s active role in L2 acquisition is likely to decline after puberty. The present study sought to scrutinize the role of UG and age of onset in L2 acquisition. In fact, the study was specifically aimed at determining whether there was any significant difference between native speakers of English and Iranian near-native speakers of the language in terms of their access to Binding Conditions A and B. It was also an attempt to probe into the pervasive ‘the younger, the better’ myth concerning the relevance of UG to L2 acquisition. The participants in the study were mainly 30 male and female native speakers of English and 60 male and female Iranian near-native speakers of the language among whom 30 had first been exposed to English before puberty and 30 after puberty. The required data were basically obtained through the administration of two tests, one on general English syntax and the other on Binding Principles A and B. The data were analysed through analyses of covariance (ANCOVA) and two-way analyses of variance (Two-Way ANOVA). In short, the findings of the study provided empirical evidence in favor of UG’s mediation in L2 acquisition and against the position held by the proponents of the CPH according to which UG is likely to lose its active role in L2 acquisition after puberty. Moreover, the flexibilities inherent in the Persian language concerning the Binding Conditions as proposed in the GB framework tend to minimize, if not totally rule out, the possibility that the subjects’ access to Binding Theory as a subsystem of UG might have been affected by their underlying knowledge of Persian.

The TOEFL is an increasingly important test in the Asian EFL context. Learners who wish to study abroad realize the importance of the test and garnering a high score on it. This paper will outline the specific learning strategies employed in a recent TOEFL preparation program in Japan. It will delineate the specific strategies that can be used to improve learner abilities on the test and how scores can be dramatically improved through the use of language learning strategies. Further, through the use of these strategies, learner satisfaction with TOEFL preparation courses can also be greatly increased. This paper will then outline the results of a recent TOEFL preparation program–in which there were 116 participants–that used such strategies with great success. Finally, the results have pedagogical implications for teachers and learners alike: a well-constructed TOEFL preparation program can successfully prepare learners for the test, thus increasing their satisfaction with the methods employed in such a course.