Acquiring good listening and speaking skills in English are the main concern of many second and foreign language learners, and today's English teacher needs to be well versed in current approaches to the teaching of the aural/oral skills. In this paper, current trends in the teaching of listening and speaking will be examined and some of the most important terminology that is used in contempora...

English language teaching (ELT) in Iran has experienced a turbulent history reflecting an often dynamic context and changing attitudes toward English, yet framed within a discourse of tolerance rather than one of embrace, as this study is going to show. The discourse was much brighter before the Islamic Revolution and this study reveals that there were much fewer adverse policies toward the spr...

Discourse markers improve both the quality and comprehension of a written text. This study aimed at investigating the effect of explicit and implicit instruction of formal meta-discourse markers on writ- ing skills. The quantitative data were collected from 90 upper-intermediate students at Shiraz Univer- sity Language Center. Two experimental groups went through an instruction, while the contr...

In this work we focus on classroom discourse. Specifically, we describe an approach to modeling and tracking the classroom verbal interaction between teacher and students. We assume that the evolution of the classroom discourse takes place in a space whose dimensions correspond to specific discourse categories and thus the rate of occurrence of these events can be monitored, categorized and tra...

The literature of ELT is perhaps overwhelmed by attempts to enhance learners’ writing through the application of different methodologies. One such methodology is critical discourse analysis which is founded upon stressing not only the decoding of the propositional meaning of a text but also its ideological assumptions. Accordingly, this study was an attempt to investigate the impact of critical...

Research of discourse analysis and pragmatics suggests that English language assumes a three-part feature in communication: locution, illocution, and perlocution. Therefore, the teaching of communicative English language should follow the same pattern. But for years, the classroom teaching as well as the teaching materials in China focuses mainly on locution, but ignores the other two aspects, ...

We developed courseware for teaching reactive tokens. Reactive tokens are audio or visual signals that structure discourse, and are sent by discourse participants who do not have the floor to those who do. Cultures with much in common sometimes differ markedly in their reactive tokens. Nonnative language learners need to learn how to interpret and convey reactive tokens in order to be perceived...