Earticle

Pre-organised and pre-packaged materials are omnipresent in second or foreign language classrooms worldwide. An element central to those materials are the rubrics, or written instructions given for tasks. This paper is based on the premise that rubrics are not always essential to the successful completion of certain tasks and raises the issue of the necessity of certain elements of the rubric from the point of view of learners. The overall study is broken into three related studies: the ability of learners to understand rubric lexicon, their ability to successfully predict and complete rubric-less tasks, and their ability to predict and form the likely rubric.

This paper details the use of portfolio assessment as an alternative to summative and formative testing in two English language courses at Khon Kaen University in Thailand as a part of a TESOL double degree program with Northern Arizona University. Portfolios for participant students were created over the course of one semester and used as a component in the students’ final grades for two courses. After the final portfolios were submitted, but before final grades were made public, data was collected regarding student and instructor attitudes toward the use of portfolios as a component in the students’ final grades. The data show that a majority of both students and teachers preferred portfolio assessment to traditional testing.

This study examines the practice of collaborative teaching by three native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) and three Taiwanese teachers of English (TTEs) in elementary schools in Taiwan. Through interviews and classroom observations, the nature of the collaboration between the teachers as well as the teachers’ perceptions and experiences of collaborative teaching are explored. Research findings include (a) while NESTs take sole responsibility for lesson planning and lead teaching in the classroom, collaborative dynamics between the NESTs and TTEs are primarily present during the class time; (b) support between the teachers is rendered for the purposes of linguistic assistance, classroom discipline, and cultural understanding; and (c) the NESTs and TTEs have different perceptions of the format that collaborative teaching should take and the role that each of the team teachers performs. Finally, suggestions on improving the practice of collaborative teaching of this kind are discussed such as (1) the need for extensive in-service training focusing on collaborative English teaching, (2) a search for a viable model of collaborative teaching, and (3) the development of a collaborative inquiry community.

This paper presents a research project carried out by student teachers in the framework of the English Department of an Israeli teacher training college. Two Jewish student teachers volunteered to do their student teaching practicum in a southern Bedouin village. The student teachers developed and taught a unit in English as Second Language on the differences and similarities between Jewish and Arab cultures for the purpose of promoting intercultural awareness and acceptance. Pen pal letters were written in English and exchanged between children of the Bedouin school and children of a Jewish school. Questionnaires were administered to 58 Bedouin elementary school children before and after the teaching unit in order to investigate the Bedouin children’s attitudes towards multicultural communication between Jews and Arabs. The responses to the questionnaire were analyzed quantitatively and figure drawings of Jewish and Arab people made by the children were analyzed qualitatively as measures of attitudes and stereotypes. It was found that many negative stereotypes were changed as a result of the culture unit taught by the student teachers. As teacher trainers and researchers, we present this project as an example of a researched-based training method for student teachers that have implications for the design of practicum programs.

This research presents a non-structured, empowered, and activity-oriented English immersion program developed and implemented at a college in an EFL setting. Since its inception in 1995, this program has gone through several changes in its curriculum and format. The participants in this program acquire the target language through being involved in several activities led by native speaking group leaders whose age are about the same as that of the program participants. The pre- and post-program interviews and the program evaluation made by the students and group leaders show that the program has significantly contributed to an increase in the speaking skills of the program participants, irrespective of the short program period. The program deserves the attention of English teaching professionals and researchers working in an EFL environment.

Investigating ELF/ESL students’ experiences in constructing their academic written texts seems to be of great significance in EFL/ESL writing syllabus design and teaching. The case study reported in this paper explores the underlying factors which shape students’ ways of supporting ideas in academic essays in English. Drawing on Lillis’ (2001) framework for exploring student writing, the study examines the writing experiences of students from Vietnam and mainland China at an Australian university. Based on the students’ reflection on their different ways of meaning making, this paper argues for the need to challenge the tendency to essentialize cultural rhetoric patterns and their effects upon Chinese and Vietnamese students’ writing in English as a foreign or second language. Several implications for teaching EFL/ESL writing have also been drawn from the findings of this study.

Given the prominent status of grammar learning in a foreign language milieu, seeking an effective grammar instruction remains a prevailing challenge for most linguists and foreign language teachers. The common paradigm still heavily focuses on language input and meaning-oriented tasks. While these two aspects are of indispensable importance for learning, the development of L2 interlanguage grammar system requires another learning process. At this juncture, Swain (1994) sheds light on roles of output as a potential learning mechanism. This study is an attempt to probe the degree to which the underlying process of output in a collaborative interactional grammar task can lead to grammar learning. Involving ten advanced and ten intermediate level students working on a text reconstruction tasks, this study revealed that output can provide a rich forum for learning to take place through its mechanisms: gap- noticing, hypothesis testing, and metalinguistic function. Yet, it exerted a different impact upon different levels of students. Gap-noticing was likely to be perceivable in the case of intermediate group whereas the other two mechanisms, hypothesis testing and metalinguistic function, seemed to be more prevailing in the advanced group. This study also found that a grammar-sensitive task can pave the way to L2 grammar learning by pushing students to deeper syntactic processing, rather than solely relying on semantic processing. In so doing, output serves a complementary function to foster L2 grammar learning.