PROMOTING LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ CROSS-CULTURAL AWARENESS THROUGH COMPARATIVE ANALYSES OF ASIAN FOLKTALES

Developing Intercultural Awareness and Language Speaking Proficiency for Foreign Language Learners through Cross-Cultural Voicemail Exchange

To expand global and intercultural communication, the effectiveness of asynchronous online communication devices, especially email, have been discussed in the area of foreign language teaching. A lack of specific research exists that addresses the application of online voicemail. This paper reports on a five month period of voicemail exchanges between 53 EFL learners in Taiwan and 56 CFL learne...

Cross-Cultural Issues for Asian e-Learners: An Analysis Based on Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions

When instruction is to be delivered by any medium, whether in a traditional e-learning mode or through the use of a blended learning model, cross-cultural issues have a major impact. This paper focuses on the cultural characteristics of Asian e-learners and uses Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as the basis for the analysis. Asian learners face some clearly identified challenges. For example, in ...

Orality, Folktales and the Cross-Cultural Transmission of Narrative

The Attitudes of Iranian EFL Learners toward Cross-Cultural Factors in Language Learning

The cultural background in language teaching has, for a number of reasons, recently moved to the foreground. Broadly speaking, there has been a shift in emphasis in course design from a pre-occupation with form to an interest in content. This article describes the results of a survey designed to elicit the views of students on what language teaching should be about. 400 students learning Englis...

Phonemic awareness of English second language learners

BACKGROUND The PA skills of phonological blending and segmentation and auditory word discrimination relate directly to literacy and may be weak in English second language (EL2) learners. In South Africa, literacy skills have been found to be poor in especially EL2 learners. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this paper is to determine the effects of vowel perception and production intervention on phon...