The study of English language teachers’ cognitions and its relationship to teachers’ classroom practices have recently been the focus of language teaching and teacher education (Borg, 2006 & 2010). However, rarely have the studies delved into teachers’ knowledge about grammar (reviewed by Borg, 2001) or investigated the relationships between teachers’ knowledge about grammar and teachers’ actio...

According to research in mother tongue (L1) reading skills, successive processing the PASS Theory of Intelligence process affects reading skills through the sequential analysis and blending of phonemes and syllables. The present paper examines whether this cognitive process predicts also reading skills in English as a foreign language (EFL). A group of 81 pupils that had finished their first ye...

Vocabulary acquisition is of great importance in learning a foreign language. Since vocabulary knowledge reflects one’s language capability to a great extent, it has long been felt to be a crucial factor in language learning. However, vocabulary learning is also a major difficulty which impedes learners’ progress in language learning. This paper analyzes the impact of several factors on vocabul...

The paper evaluates Chinese EFL (English Foreign Language) learners’ attitudinal responses toward Chinese accent. Questionnaires administered among 81 intermediate proficiency EFL learners who were from China and UK (70 of whom were university students, 11 of whom were university English teachers). Results show clearly that the respondents do not have significant negative attitude towards their...

This study addresses the acquisition of the morphological markers in Persian learners of English as a foreign language. To this end, the accuracy order of nine morphemes including plural –s, progressive –ing, copula be, auxiliary be, irregular past tense, regular past tense –ed, third person –s, possessive -ʼs and indefinite articles was studied in 6...

This pilot empirical study examined the deficiency of textual cohesion and coherence reflected in genre-based English abstract production of the engineering discourse by most Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) advanced learners, using cohesive theory, text linguistics, and intercultural theory as the theoretical framework. The problems were addressed typically from the perspective of i...

Drawing on Norton Peirce's (1995) theory of investment and Darvin and Norton's (2015) expanded the model of investment, the present study aims to research investment in second language (L2) learning among Iranian English language learners. The participants included 852 male and female English language learners belonging to different age groups and English language proficiency levels. A ...

Although attribution theory has been applied in many fields of education as a way of understanding individual differences, it has somewhat been neglected by professionals in ELT to date. This study has thus sought to investigate the role of EFL learners’ attributions for success and failure in learning a foreign language and their performance on placement tests. Three instruments, namely, the I...