Paraphrasing is a key skill for EAP students, and there are numerous techniques and tools that they can use to help them paraphrase. Whether they use these tools effectively to produce good paraphrases, though, is another question. A question, in fact, that Carol Bailey and Judi Withers at the University of Wolverhampton (UK) investigated in detail. This article is the report on their study, with its interesting findings and some useful take-aways for EAP teachers.
Using both a corpus and dictionary can help in recalling definitions and collocations of new vocabulary.
In this article, Jiang, Kalyuga and Sweller (2018) present their study into the ‘expertise reversal effect’ regarding the training of listening skills. This effect means that “instruction that is effective for novice learners is ineffective or even counterproductive for more expert learners.”
English language classrooms, even outside of English-speaking countries, are becoming increasingly multilingual, and many language teachers may be unsure of how to best cater to these more mixed groups of learners. This article highlights students’ and teachers’ experiences of multilingualism in their ELT classrooms, and strategies for utilizing linguistic and cultural diversity to benefit language learning.
Listening is a major part of ELT, and in particular ELT materials, with a listening section consisting of comprehension questions…
Yeldham and Gruba (2013) argue that bottom-up strategy instruction is not enough; there is a need to develop an interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes in order to progress.
This article explores criticisms of CLT put forward by proponents of TBLT and evaluates ideas that aim to counteract these, though do not manage to do so without encountering their own problems.
Does this teacher’s description of how they felt when they first started teaching ring any bells for you? It sounds…
This bite summarizes Tour’s 2105 paper on language teachers’ mindsets on digital technology. This case study of three participants explored their use of digital technology for personal purposes as well as in the language classroom.
This study comes out of Trier University where translation is one means by which the students are taught English. The teachers there believe in the value of translation as a means of learning languages. In particular, the type of instruction is referred to as CAT – Contrastive Analysis and Translation. This paper investigates the effect of translation classes on students’ grammatical accuracy.