Nurmukhamedov (2017) looked at the lexical coverage of TED Talks in order to understand how much vocabulary a person needs to know to understand these presentations, and whether the disciplinary topic changes that number.
Marshall and Walsh Marr (2018) investigated faculty perceptions of teaching multilingual students in writing-intensive classrooms. They found that most instructors view students in binary terms, which may negatively influence the pedagogical methods they employ in classrooms where typical binary categorizations are often blurred.
This article looks at a content-linked ESL program and how its short- and long-term impacts on language and academic success.
Rod Ellis offers a modular curriculum that does not throw the structural (grammar) baby out of the semantic bathwater.
Teacher trainees implementing core practices.
Swan (2017) argues that ELF is nothing new, that ELF is not necessarily an expression of ownership or personal expression, and that targetlikeness may be a more appropriate focus when concerning pedagogy.
Language Learning Social Network Sites (LLSNS) combine tutorial software and opportunities to interact with others in order to improve one’s foreign language competence. However, details on how learners use these platforms and what they learn from them are rarely found in the research literature. This survey study by Chin-Hsi, Warschauer and Blake (2016) investigated learners’ attitudes towards, usage of, and progress made on Livemocha, a popular LLSNS. The results show the potential of these sites for language learning, but also some key questions that need to be answered before LLSNS-use can bring about real success.
A ‘Big-picture’ Snapshot of Teaching Grammar in TESL/TEFL
Grammar is tough, for most of us. It’s tough to teach. It’s tough to learn about for our professional development. So, some of us gravitate towards approaches that we think eschew the teaching of grammar. Celce-Murcia (2015), however, shows how grammar instruction has a noticeable presence even in communicative approaches to language teaching. She provides the reader with an accessible introduction to grammar instruction in ELT and to its roll in communicative language teaching.
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This post synthesizes two studies investigating student and pre-service teacher perceptions of native-speakerism and how they may impact teaching and learning.
In this article, Marsden and Kasprowicz report on two studies which they use to highlight how limited educators’ exposure to primary research is, why this might be, and how teacher trainers and other interfaces can help.