This study employs a method in experimental phonetics to investigate the use of tones in 45 Chinese EFL learners’ read speech. The study is based on O’Connor & Arnold’s (1973) descriptions of tones of English, and takes the recorded spoken data of 8 English-speaking British university students as the norm for comparison. Findings of the study indicate that, so far as primary tones are concerned...

The advent and application of computer and information technology has increased the overall success of EFL teaching; however, such success is hard to assess, and teachers prone to computer avoidance face negative consequences. Two major obstacles are high computer phobia and low computer self-efficacy. However, little research has been carried out in this area, especially from instructors’ pers...

As reflective practice has become an influential factor in teacher professional development, teachers need some techniques to enhance their reflective teaching. In this light, this study was intended to examine: (a) whether self-evaluation techniques could promote English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ reflective teaching, (b) whether EFL teachers who used self-evaluation techniques would ...

This study used a novel method to explore different schedules of spacing in young EFL learners. In doing so, we taught young EFL learners English–Farsi word pairs using different spacing schedules (massed vs. spaced). In the massed condition, learners studied five-word pairs in session one and five-other word pairs one week later. In the spaced condition, the learners studied 10-word pairs in s...

This study seeks to explore five 6 th grade EFL learners' major writing problems by analyzing the nature and distribution of their writing errors and it also investigates factors that cause errors in their writing in English through email communication. This study examined EFL learners’ writing samples and followed taxonomy: grammatical, lexical, semantic, mechanics, and word order types of err...

There still exist lacunae in our understanding of howness and the effectiveness of metacognitive strategy training for various language skills in most EFL contexts; most notably in input-poor environments. The present study sought to investigate the possible effects of metacognitive strategy training on vocabulary strategies awareness and vocabulary knowledge among Iranian EFL learners. The exp...

Over the past few years, the prevalence of web-based applications in school and at home makes learning and teaching through the Internet become an inevitable way in education. With great potentials for enriching all kinds of educational applications, web-based instruction is becoming an impressive apparatus for learning resource delivering. In this study, an asynchronous web-based language lear...

As far as the communicative nature of writing is concerned, cohesion is regarded as an essential textual component both in creating organized texts and rendering the content comprehensible to the reader. Many researchers have explored the connection between the use of cohesive devices (CDs) and the quality of the writing. To gain more insight into this area, this study reviewed some studies foc...

At Kyoto Junior College of Foreign Languages on the premises of Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, Hospitality English, a new first-year English as a Foreign Language course was introduced in April 2008. Hospitality English, a one semester, one-and-half-hour per week course was designed to develop specific English spoken language skills to help students gain employment in the hotel industry i...