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In early written corrective feedback studies, there were a lot of attempts to test if the feedback types are effective. This study was based on the assumption prevailing in the new era of studies of written corrective feedback, that feedback is effective. Firstly, it aims to compare the think-aloud protocols of the preferred and unpreferred feedback types which were chosen by 20 English learners (10 in preferred, and 10 in unpreferred feedback). To this aim, learners were asked to write diaries for six weeks. In each session, concurrent think-aloud protocols were employed and learners' verbal reports were extracted, and their mental processes were coded through developing a table of mental operations. In the second part of the study, the relative effectiveness of the preferred and unpreferred feedback was measured. Using the Chi-square goodness-of-fit test, the findings of the first part showed a significant difference between the mental operations for each feedback type. The results for the second part suggested that there is a significant difference between the effectiveness of the preferred and unpreferred feedback types. This latter finding indicates that the preferred feedback can facilitate the development of the accuracy in L2 learners' writing more than the unpreferred feedback.

This paper attempts to broaden our understanding on how cognitive task complexity (TC) contributes to L2 learners’ and language professionals’ perceptions of task difficulty (TD). This study was conducted to allow a deeper investigation of the extent to which manipulating TC can influence perceptions of TD, what TC-factors contribute to perceptions of TD, and whether there is a perceptual match between L2 learners and language professionals. The study employed a mixed-method design in which 68 students and 26 language professionals evaluated the TD of two video-based narrative tasks. The students, who were L2 learners of English at a Jordanian secondary school, performed two tasks with increased TC manipulated by intentional reasoning (IR) demands. Data on learners’ perceptions of TD were collected qualitatively and quantitatively using a retrospective questionnaire. The language professionals, who were researchers with a TESOL background, read the tasks instructions and watched the two clips before deciding which task would be considered more difficult and why. Results showed a match between learners and language professionals on their perceptions of TD. Both groups rated the more complex task (+IR) as more difficult. Two categories of higher cognitive demands imposed by IR requirement, i.e. task-induced and task-inherent, were found to be the major contributors to the perceptions of TD. The findings have significant implications for the development of an index of TD, which is considered a priority for language teaching, testing and syllabus design.

The objective of the study is twofold: to investigate the effects of corrective feedback (CF) on the accuracy of past tense use, and to compare the relative effectiveness of recasts and prompts on the accuracy of past tense use. The participants of the study consisted of 105 secondary school ESL learners in Malaysia. The target structure of CF was the regular and irregular past forms. CF was provided contingent upon the occurrence of past tense errors according to the type of corrective feedback (i.e., recasts, prompts and no corrective feedback) assigned to participants. By employing a pre-post- and delayed- post-test design, learning outcomes were measured by means of an oral production test (OPT), a written production test (WPT) and an untimed grammaticality judgment test (GJT). The results revealed that participants, regardless of type of corrective feedback, showed both short-term and long-term gains in accuracy of past tense use. However, on the delayed effects of CF, the findings suggest that the effects of prompts may be more durable compared to recasts or control. It was found that the effectiveness of corrective feedback was also affected by other mediating factors, including learners’ proficiency level, prior knowledge and the morphological structure of the target linguistic feature.

This study investigated the differential effects of focus-on-form (FonF: explicit instruction followed by focused tasks) and focus-on-forms (FonFS: explicit instruction followed by controlled exercises) on learning English lax vowels (i.e., /
/, //, //) by Persian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. To this end, 48 learners took a voluntary 6-hour course: the experimental group (n = 17) received FonF, the comparison group (n = 16) received FonFS, and the control group (n = 15) engaged in theme-based discussions with no focus on the target vowels. Learners’ pronunciations were elicited in controlled read-aloud and spontaneous picture description tasks and acoustically measured for phonetic accuracy based on tongue positions (i.e., formant 1 [F1] for the height and formant 2 [F2] for the backness of the tongue). Results revealed that whereas both instructional types significantly improved learners’ phonetic accuracy (i.e., adjusting F1/F2 values) in the controlled task, only the FonF methodology proved effective in the spontaneous task with large effects in the delayed posttest. The control group revealed no improvement in any tasks. Overall, the results show that FonF instruction may offer substantial benefits to EFL learners to have more accurate pronunciations in EFL speech. The paper concludes with the pedagogical implications of the findings.

While previous studies have documented the internal structures of English lexical bundles (LBs) in a range of academic genres, how such fragmentary phrases are used in context has been given little attention. The current study addresses this gap by investigating to what extent three different writer groups, i.e., L1-English freshman students, L1-Korean freshman students, and published research article authors, integrate LBs into their English academic writing. The study first categorizes the LBs by their three main structures: VP-, NP-, and PP-based. It then focuses on the syntactic roles of the bundles in context, and plots these roles onto the developmental stages of grammatical complexity proposed by Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011). The results show a progressive sequence of native and nonnative apprentice writers’ use of LBs toward being proficient academic writers, while also demonstrating that some features are unique to each group. The study extends the structural analysis of LBs in the literature by providing new information on the grammatical status of LBs in context and in relation to their uses by different groups of writers.

This paper focuses on the use of Wiki in enhancing learners’ skills in writing argumentative essays. This paper describes the implementation of the online collaborative writing technique (OCWT) through Wiki activities and aims at analyzing the effectiveness of the OCWT to enhance the learners’ argumentative essay writing. This study applied a descriptive method, involving a group of 29 students from the English Education Study Program at Universitas Terbuka (UT), Indonesia. In order to find out the effect of teaching material model on improving students' English writing skills, the researchers used two types of instruments, test, and non-test. The observation was also conducted to describe the process of implementing the OCWT. Based on the observation reports, the results of the statistical tests, and the analysis of the learners’ perceptions, the OCWT using Wiki integrated into Moodle has a significant influence in improving the learners’ argumentative essay writing skills, and as its implication, this approach is very appropriate to hone learners’ learning independence. Moreover, the results of the survey show that the learners were very enthusiastic in participating in OCWT.

This study examined the experiences of pre-service English-as-a-foreign language teachers in a reading-to-write class. In particular, the study focused on how the class based on the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) proposed by Wen (2018) affected their reading during the reading-to-write tasks and their writing process when using reading materials. In addition, the factors that played essential roles in affecting the participants’ writing process were identified and discussed. A total of 18 pre-service EFL English teachers in Korea participated in this study. The data were collected from class observations, group discussions, reflective journals, and interviews. The results of the study showed that the participants had no prior training in using reading materials to enhance their writing skills, thus, they perceived reading tasks and writing tasks as two separate activities. As the participants carried out activities that promoted writerly reading, they learned how to mine the text and use what they found when they wrote their summaries and essays. The factors that were identified as encouraging such an effect were found to be closely related to the principles and hypotheses of POA. The findings of this study provides data to support the applicability of POA in teaching writing in the Korean EFL context and suggests factors that need to be considered when adopting this approach for teaching writing.

Reflective practice has been proved to be a meaningful way of learning about teaching and various aspects of teachers’ work by several studies in different EFL teaching contexts. In Thailand, despite the commonly-reported problems about the English language education program for prospective English teachers, a few studies were conducted on how to improve the situation. By employing the reflective teaching approach, this study reports on how an educator assisted 48 Thai pre-service English teachers to learn how to teach English writing in the Writing Instruction course. The findings from the survey, the teacher-educator’s notes during the course and the focus-group interview showed the considerable success of this teaching approach. Furthermore, the information from the evaluations on micro-teaching performances by the teaching groups, their peers and teacher-educator, and the students’ reflections on their teaching strengths and weaknesses and their plans for reconstructing their teaching revealed some considerations for improvement. This study is thus expected to not only reflect on how teacher-educators are trying to improve the quality of English preservice-teachers in Thailand and to develop their experiences to be life-long learners, but also provide some insights to enhance reflective prospective teachers in other educational settings with similar teaching and learning cultures.

In this study we explored characteristics of Chinese, English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ beliefs about reading and teaching reading. Specifically, we investigated the relationship of beliefs between reading and teaching reading. Participants included 96 university EFL teachers who were faculty members from three different universities in a large city in Northeast China. We conducted data collection and analysis in an exploratory design through a survey of 10 open-ended questions modified from the Burke Reading Interview (BRI). We then used a quantitizing method to code all qualitative data and conducted statistical analysis to describe these data. Findings indicated that three theoretical orientations about reading (behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism) were matrixed with three different belief systems (dominant, dual, and multiple belief systems). The matrix indicated a complex belief system about reading and teaching reading among these EFL teachers. Within the matrix, relationships among different beliefs were non-linear and unpredictable. In terms of the constructivist theoretical orientation, findings indicated a statistically significant, but weak, association between teacher stated beliefs about reading and stated beliefs about teaching reading. We discussed the findings based on the research questions and provided implications for EFL teachers.

The study focuses on the implementation of communicative English language curriculum reform of four secondary school teachers in Bangladesh. The study is explorative, interpretive, and qualitative in nature. A phenomenology approach, under the qualitative method, was adopted to explore how teachers experience the phenomenon of communicative language teaching (CLT) based curriculum reform. The classroom practices of CLT curriculum were observed for one week for each teacher. Teachers’ beliefs regarding the curriculum reform were explored through a semi-structured interview. The finding of the study revealed the existing mismatch between curriculum intention and implementation. The study reflected on the teachers' views of their being teachers and how it enacts with the curriculum. Teachers’ prior beliefs regarding English teaching and learning and their practices are found to be barriers to implement the curriculum. Numerous factors such as assessment, lack of teacher training and lack of learners’ ability contributed to the phenomenon. Nevertheless, the study shed light on the limited implementation of the CLT reform in the context of Bangladesh, since the cognitive and contextual realities of teachers’ work were not taken into consideration while reforming the curriculum.

Multiword units receive attention as being an essential part of vocabulary knowledge that will expedite the learning of an L2. However, there is lack of a graded multiword units (MWU) list that can offer direct applications for pedagogy, syllabus design or materials development. The current article aims to report on the development and evaluation of COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) Multiword Unit 20 (COCA_MWU20) where the notion of MWU family is adopted. The compilation involved selecting and grading the MWU by grammatical well-formedness, range, and frequency. The 10,000 MWU families which made up the list were utilized in the development of ColloGram, a list-based MWU family analysis program. The COCA_MWU20 can be expected to help L2 learners increase their knowledge of lexical items beyond single words and ColloGram is the first of the kind that can analyze multiword items based on COCA. For researchers, the ColloGram can also be a tool for identifying MWU that may appear in a target text.

This study sought to examine the use of Poll Everywhere as an Audience Response System (ARS) within the English conversation classroom at a Korean university. The findings of this study addressed student engagement in English conversation courses and the relationship it has with Poll Everywhere. Over the course of two semesters, students were exposed to instruction laced with an ARS in the form of Poll Everywhere to stimulate English conversation. The students were then asked to respond to how it affected their motivation and desire to speak English in class. Students overwhelmingly noted that the use of Poll Everywhere in the classroom enhanced their learning experience, allowed them to be more enthusiastic, interested, and motivated to respond in English, and generally increased their engagement in English instruction. Furthermore, it was noted by the students that factors such as anonymousness, novelty of teaching style, and the ability to aid in the expression of English allowed for them to engage more in English lessons as they produced English language in a classroom setting. The results of the study hypothesized that Korean university students respond positively to Poll Everywhere integration that allowed for enhanced engagement in English conversation classes.