The purpose of this article is to explore recent research into World Englishes (henceforth WEs) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF),1 focusing on its implications for TESOL, and the extent to which it is being taken into account by English language teachers, linguists, and second language acquisition researchers. After a brief introduction comparing the current situation with that of 15 years ...

This study investigates the factors influencing the oral communication strategies of technological university students in Taiwan. Ninety-eight sophomore students of Lunghwa University of Science and Technology participated in it. Nakatani’s Oral Communication Strategy Inventory (OCSI) (2006), along with the demographics and English learning backgrounds of students, was used to collect data. Des...

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...

This paper proposes the automatic generation of Fill-in-the-Blank Questions (FBQs) together with testing based on Item Response Theory (IRT) to measure English proficiency. First, the proposal generates an FBQ from a given sentence in English. The position of a blank in the sentence is determined, and the word at that position is considered as the correct choice. The candidates for incorrect ch...

In the United States, the immigrant population explosion has been calling for increasing attention to English instruction for immigrant learners. In comparison with prolific literature on immigrant English language learners (ELLs) in K–12 educational settings, literature on English instruction for adult immigrant learners at non-profit organizations, especially through microanalysis of classroo...

This paper reports on two phases of a study of a group of advanced TEFL (teachers-of-English-as-a-foreign-language) students. To raise their awareness of the importance of discourse intonation while they were receiving teacher training, this study focuses on examining their sociocultural and psychological inclinations in the choice of phonological models. The first phase is an exploration of th...

The present paper explores nonnative (L2) phonological encoding of lexical entries and dissociates the difficulties associated with L2 phonological and phonolexical encoding by focusing on similarly sounding L2 words that are not differentiated by difficult phonological contrasts. We test two main claims of the fuzzy lexicon hypothesis: (1) L2 fuzzy phonolexical representations are not fully sp...

The effects of invasive nonnative species on community composition are well documented. However, few studies have determined the mechanisms by which invaders drive these changes. The literature indicates that many nonnative plant species alter light availability differently than natives in a given community, suggesting that shading may be such a mechanism. We compared light quantity (photosynth...

Predators sometimes provide biotic resistance against invasions by nonnative prey. Understanding and predicting the strength of biotic resistance remains a key challenge in invasion biology. A predator's functional response to nonnative prey may predict whether a predator can provide biotic resistance against nonnative prey at different prey densities. Surprisingly, functional responses have no...