Earticle

This paper reports on research into the Chinese teacher experience of online learning. The context is the pilot units of an in-service “English Methodology” course in the BA degree program in education for English teachers in Chinese secondary schools. This was developed as part of a Chinese and UK government funded collaborative project from 2003 to 2005 by the University of Nottingham, UK and Beijing Normal University, China to develop innovative eLearning. The longitudinal evaluation involved a wide range of data collection methods including pre and post questionnaires, focus group interviews, online activity logs and tutor and learner diaries. Teacher reaction to the eLearning approach was very positive and the paper explores the key implications for eLearning design and implementation that arose.

This paper studies a College English curriculum innovation in the College English program at a Northern Chinese institution, called the Rolling Project. The efforts of this curriculum change met with great difficulty and were terminated after two years of implementation. Through the interviews with the instructors and an administrator involved in the Rolling Project, the author reports the problems that set back this innovation. Drawing from those problems, the author highlights three factors that are important for the implementation of educational change: vision-building, collegiality, and implementation as a learning process.

Communicative language teaching with its stress on meaning rather than form, employment of task-based instruction and “real-life” situations in the language classroom is often viewed in sharp contrast to traditional approaches to language teaching that employ the “presentation – practice – production” format and stress formal accuracy. Despite criticisms, traditional pedagogical practices in teaching foreign languages exhibit remarkable tenacity which is partially due to the learners’ preferences for the traditional methods of language instruction. This paper suggests that socio-linguistic surroundings in which language learning takes place is an important factor to consider when determining the choice for the classroom procedure. An empirical analysis of learners’ preferences for classroom activities was carried out in this research in an attempt to find a way to reduce a gap between the two pedagogical paradigms. Though the present study was conducted among the learners of the Russian language there are no obstacles to viewing discussion and findings presented in this article in a wider context of language learning and teaching.

The field of Contrastive Rhetoric has existed as a discipline within ESL/EFL composition studies for the past forty years. Nevertheless, this article is one of the first to report the findings of a research study testing the effectiveness of specific pedagogical techniques (teacher conferencing and peer response) for delivering contrastive rhetoric-oriented instruction in an English composition classroom. The results of this study hold important implications for EFL university writing (especially in East- Asia), contrastive rhetoric-oriented instruction, and composition studies in terms of further delineating the effectiveness of teacher conferencing and peer response in English composition classrooms. This study was conducted at Handong Global University in Pohang, South Korea in Spring 2004. In this study, the teaching treatment of reinforcing contrastive rhetoric-oriented writing instruction conducted in classroom lecture with contrastive rhetoric-oriented writing instruction rendered in teacher conferences and peer response groups helped lowerlevel Korean university writers make significantly better improvement in their essay writing (as measured by pretest/posttest results) when compared to their control group peers, who only received contrastive rhetoric-oriented writing instruction through classroom lectures, discussions, and written feedback on essays. The current article expands on the original findings in an attempt to explain more precisely the effectiveness of teacher conferencing and peer response in this study.

TEFL in Korea has gone through many changes and challenges driven by the societal needs and expectations from within and beyond Korea. The emergence of English as a global language has also led to reshaping its goals and approaches to achieve them. This paper discusses what has been done and needs to be done for development of TEFL, focusing on the teacher education programs as they are the key to realization of the curriculum rhetoric and to professionalization of TEFL in Korea. The results of a questionnaire survey on Korean teachers' perception of ‘good English teachers’ and professional development are discussed along with the perception of TEFL as a profession. Major issues of teacher education programs including curriculum, trainers and trainees, and evaluation are examined in order to see how successfully they fulfill their educational goals and missions: professional development and teacher empowerment. The emerging issues in regard to recruiting the native English speakers as classroom instructors and teacher trainers based on the myths are also discussed. Suggestions are made on how to turn the myths and the curriculum rhetoric into a positive reality.

Prosody affects listener’s recognition memory of spoken words or sentences (Eckstein & Friederici, 2005; Robinson, 1977). This study investigates Korean L1 speakers’ recognition memory for English sentences with prosodic cues, including Korean L1 speakers with different English proficiency levels and English L1 speakers. In doing that, this study replicates Pennington and Ellis (2000). The implicit focus and the explicit focus of the recognition task were conducted to explore the role of prosody in recognition memory. In both experiments, the participants showed a high level of lexical memory regardless of their proficiency level of English even though the Korean L1 speakers with high English proficiency were able to use prosodic cues to interpret and to recognize spoken sentences better than those with low English proficiency. However, all participants became more sensitive to prosodic information and obtained better recognition memory when they were encouraged to focus on prosodic cues. This suggests that participants’ recognition memory could be improved by explicit focusing attention on prosodic cues. Furthermore, it may be an indication that adult learners could benefit from explicit instruction in prosody (Goh, 2001; Pennington, 1998; Pennington & Ellis, 2000).

This study described factors that influenced Chinese middle school English teachers’ decision to implement communicative activities in teaching. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was utilized as a theoretical framework to analyze the data. Chinese middle school English teachers’ attitude in using communicative activities, their social pressure, and their perceived behavioral control over using these activities were described along with their opinions of the 11 communicative activities that were demonstrated at a workshop. Quantitative data were collected with a survey for the 101 workshop participants. In addition, qualitative data were collected through interviews (n = 15), telephone conversations (n = 7), e-mail exchanges (n = 5) and follow-up surveys (n = 13). Data revealed teachers’ relatively positive attitude towards the using of the communicative activities and five barriers of implementation of these communicative activities. Two groups of people, parents of the students and schools, were identifies as major influencing force in influencing teachers’ decision to implement the activities. Three groups of activities were categorized according to their popularity with the teachers. Suggestions for teacher training programs were made based on these findings.

This study examined the effects of task complexity and language proficiency on L2 written narrative production based on the analyses of 52 written narratives produced by Japanese high school students under different task complexity conditions. Task complexity was manipulated along the proposed task complexity dimension of Here-and-Now vs. There-and-Then in Robinson (2001a, 2006). Language proficiency was defined as scores on the Michigan English Placement Test (MEPT). In order to investigate the effects of task complexity and proficiency, four modes of production metrics were employed as dependent variables: accuracy, structural complexity, lexical complexity and fluency. The results showed that the effects of task complexity and language proficiency were largely independent; however, there were signs of interactions particularly in the cases of accuracy and lexical complexity.