This essay offers a critical review of some key theoretical issues relevant to second language acquisition and considers the practical implications of these issues on language teaching. The discussion advocates a renewed communicative approach to language pedagogy, which entails the educators’ readiness to act as teacher-researchers, their cautious considerations of individual learner differenc...

Learning Objects (LOs) have increasingly become of interest to users and researchers of Information and Communication Technologies (Wiley, 2002; Gibson, 2002; Leffa, 2006). There are several definitions, an ample discussion and criticism in relation to what can be considered a LO. Leffa (2006) indicates the state of the art of LOs and points to the lack of theoretical support in the production ...

Communicative competence is one of the most highly sought after skills of prospective graduates among employers. In spite of its importance, the notion of communicative competence has been deemed fuzzy in Communication and Engineering studies. This fuzziness has undoubtedly led to tensions among stakeholders like educators and professional engineers across disciplinary tenures in interpreting t...

Recent work suggests that language production exhibits a bias towards efficient information transmission. Speakers tend to provide more linguistic signal for meaning elements that are difficult to recover while reducing contextually inferrable (more frequent, probable, or expected) elements. This tradeoff has been hypothesized to shape grammatical systems over generations, contributing to cross...

By most accounts, language is uniquely human. No other species has a communicative system with such expressive power, one that allows us to transmit a seemingly endless set of meanings to our conspecifics. Every sentence we produce is composed of smaller linguistic units put together in a rule-governed manner. The standard view is that sentences are put together using syntactic rules that defin...

Since the introduction of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), many textbooks have been written to incorporate communicative activities, authentic materials and personalized contexts. However, where the teaching and learning of grammar is concerned, most textbooks do not reflect CLT principles. As demonstrated in this paper, grammar activities in some Malaysian and Taiwanese textbooks retain ...