This paper reports a pretest-posttest experimental study of the acquisition of English tones by Mandarin EFL learners in a Chinese university. The target tones are high fall, high rise, fall-rise and complex level tones embedded in non-English words, one/two-syllable English words and short English sentences. The subjects are 31 Mandarin EFL learners majoring in English, who have learnt English...

Although learner-centeredness has been widely applied in instruction in the world, this approach has only been cautiously adopted in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching at some institutions in Vietnam. Taking a social constructivist view, this case study explores how a learner-centred perspective is employed in EFL teaching at a teacher training college in Vietnam. The study is based o...

This paper took an experimental approach and investigated how Korean EFL learners process the English island constructions. Since there are some controversies on the existence of the island effects in Korean, the L1 transfer effect may make it difficult for the Korean EFL learners to learn island constructions in English. To examine if the difference between English and Korean affects the acqui...

Although is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners’ although output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners’ although employment in Chinese EFL learners’ writing. The study is a corpus-based analysis launched under the analytical framework of contrasti...

Since second or foreign language learning is a?.m long term endeavor and learners may lose their initial interest and enthusiasm, they need to be kept motivated. Student engagement has been recommended as one approach to sustaining such at risk learners at high levels of motivation. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the dimensions of student enga...

Researchers and scholars have been attracted by the idea of using integrated writing task along with independent writing task to best assess the EFL learners’ writing competence. This study was conducted to compare the writing performance of EFL students in integrated and independent writing tasks. It also aimed to find out if writing performance varies with task types. A number of thirty Irani...

critical pedagogy (cp), as a poststructuralist educational movement, challenges the asymmetrical, power-over nature of classroom discourse and seeks to accommodate multivocality in the classroom and in the society. this study probed the discourse architecture of efl classrooms in iran. specifically, it aimed to explore to what extent iranian efl classrooms have stepped away from the teacher-dom...

This paper reports the findings of a qualitative narrative-inquiry study aimed at exploring what English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) student-teachers’ life stories revealed about their identity construction as future teachers. The project was carried out among eighth-semester student-teachers from public university in Tunja, Boyaca (Colombia). Hence, data collection drew upon written and in-dep...