Educators must reassess overall western teaching approaches in English teaching students in different language and cultural backgrounds. Although a westernized communicative teaching approach is ideal to implement language teaching, some Asian students are conservative to adopt or adapt it in their own English language learning. Accordingly, an adapted English teaching approach may be innovated...

This study explores 19 Taiwanese students’ writing in weekly online forum posts and traditional essays. Results drawn from discourse analysis of students’ writing in both types of writing tasks showed that the semesterlong online writing accompanied by explicit instruction on essays and basic academic writing conventions appeared to help raise EFL students’ consciousness of register in the two ...

in teaching a foreign language (fl), some cultural specificities (defined under the rubric of ‘little-c culture’) may totally conflict with the cultural norms of the learners’ first language (l1). to prevent such imminent problems, this paper recommended that the fl syllabus be designed in a way so as to equip learners with an intimate knowledge of the target language culture, and that language...

Foreign language (FL) knowledge has been shown to contribute significantly to FL reading performance. Studies have contrasted the contribution of FL vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, following a dichotomous view of these components, producing mixed results. Despite the increasingly recognized formulaic nature of language, the contribution made by phraseological knowledge to reading ability ha...

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...