Earticle

Through his work in corpus linguistics, Sinclair (1991) postulated two types of language production. In the first, the ‘open choice’ principle, each word produced carries independent meaning. The second principle, the ‘idiom principle’, is based on the notion that the choice of one particular word is responsible for the choice of other words in the immediate environment. This paper looks at the writing of a variety of text types of a wide range of pupils in the bilingual Bruneian secondary school system, and makes use of Sinclair’s principles to describe the transitional stages of their language development from learner English to their target, Standard British English. The results show that language produced by the idiom principle such as phrasal verbs, even common ones, is likely to be problematic for many pupils. Secondly, idioms and strong collocations may be problematic for all pupils including those with very advanced English. Based on these results, the paper offers recommendations for classroom methods and materials based on some of the principles of language awareness.

Attribution for success and failure can be conducive to academic motivation, learning achievement, and learning expectations. This study investigated students’ attributions for success and failure in learning English to find out whether or not their attributions differed according to the level of English proficiency. Two versions of questionnaires focusing on successful and unsuccessful learning experiences, including explanations for their success and failure, were distributed to 356 firstyear university students majoring in engineering- and science-related fields in Bangkok, Thailand. The results show that the students considered grades, teacher influence, classroom atmosphere, and effort as the factors that facilitated success, while they considered lack of ability, inappropriate learning strategy, lack of preparation, and lack of effort as failure attributions. The level of proficiency was found to be a factor influencing the formation of different views on attributions for success and failure. The results suggest that teachers and stakeholders in ELT should deal effectively with students’ attributions in order to enhance student motivation and to facilitate expectations for success.

To date, research into the role of affective variables in language learning has been conducted almost exclusively with learners in the classroom. However, the steady increase in the numbers of distance language learners worldwide calls for the research agenda to be extended to include this group of learners, given the specific characteristics and demands that learning at a distance places on its participants. This article reports on motivation and beliefs in the distance learning and teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) at Shantou Radio and TV University (SRTVU) in China, a strand of a wider study investigating affect which replicated Hurd’s (2006, 2007a, 2007b) study conducted with distance French learners at the Open University (OUUK). As indicated in the findings, interest in English was top of the list of motivating factors, while workload and assessment content/ difficulty were identified as the most demotivating factors. Of all the reported ways to stay motivated, positive self-talk was the most popular. The study also reveals that the beliefs held by Chinese students about their ‘ought self’ do not reflect perceptions of their ‘actual self’ as distance language learners. The article concludes that matters such as course workload, assessment content/difficulty, and course design need to be re-evaluated in the light of the study’s findings, and that it is crucial to provide learner support in order to help reduce the gap between the ‘ought self’ and the ‘actual self’.

Applying Discourse Analysis (DA) approach, the present research investigated the classroom discourse in EFL classrooms in Iran. The goals of the research were: (a) to identify the interaction patterns between teachers and students, (b) to investigate the effect of the gender of the teachers and the students on their interaction patterns, and (c) to find out whether the interaction was teacher-dominated or studentdominated. The results of the analysis indicated that the interaction patterns between the participants vary with the participants making use of a variety of discourse acts. Considering gender effect, it was shown that more similarities than differences existed between male and female teachers. Furthermore, boys were found to be more willing to interact with their teachers than girls. Finally, the findings showed that although the classroom discourse was following an IRF pattern in which the teachers dominated a high portion of classroom talk, the students did initiate exchanges with their teachers, and at times they even did followup their teachers’ responses to their questions, resulting in an IRF pattern even in Student-Teacher Talk.

This study investigated the effect of genre consciousness-raising activities on listening comprehension performance of Iranian EFL learners across language proficiency levels. To this end, some genre consciousness-raising tasks were adapted from Flowerdew (1993) and used as the treatment procedures. Two different listening comprehension tests of news broadcast genre, used as pre- and post-test, were administered to 120 senior university students majoring in English language translation. The results indicated that consciousness-raising tasks significantly affected EFL learners' listening comprehension performance. However, the effect of genre consciousness-raising tasks did not vary across different language proficiency levels. Overall, the findings provide empirical support for the facilitative effect of genre consciousness-raising tasks on listening comprehension performance of EFL learners. The findings may promise implications for EFL listening comprehension syllabuses and provide guidelines to designers to accommodate the insights derived from the genre-based instruction perspective.

This paper examines the use of family and given names in the Englishspeaking contexts among Japanese, Korean, Chinese high school students. An online questionnaire survey was administered and data was collected from 79 participants. It revealed that 1) more than half of the participants in three countries reverse the name order when speaking to an American student; 2) Korean and Chinese participants prefer their given name as the form of address by their Korean or Chinese teacher of English; 3) Chinese participants are inclined to retain the family name first order irrespective of the country of the interlocutors; and 4) Japanese participants tend to reverse name order regardless of the country of the interlocutors. The pedagogical implications are also discussed.

Inspired by Glasser’s (1998) choice theory, the author set out to explore the differences between Chinese students’ self-selected topics and largescale test prompts. She asked sixty-two English major sophomores to rate a corpus of seventy topics and prompts and to write reflective comments on them with regard to topic authenticity, difficulty, involvement and impact. The results show significant differences in topic orientation, accessibility and impact between students’ selfselected topics and test prompts. Factors causing such differences include students’ failure to adopt more effective strategies in the topic selection process, their lack of topic choice training in early writing instruction and their inability to learn topic generation from reading prompts. To narrow the above differences, we should give students learner strategy training, add a section of topic choice to course books on basic writing and engage students in reflective writing.