This article reports on the results of teaching expressions for academic discourse by using materials developed from the free online Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English. Results show that after 4 hours of instruction, learners improved the quantity and quality of their agreements, disagreements, and clarifications in an oral production task. Read More

Identifying vocabulary for second language (L2) writing instruction can be challenging, because target vocabulary is often either prescribed by the course texts or based on the intuition of the teacher. This article presents lexical frequency information and lexical frequency profiles as principled methods for targeting vocabulary for L2 writing instruction. Read More

EFL teaching has focused on developing grammatical competence and ignored pragmatic competence. Can EFL teachers fairly evaluate pragmatic appropriateness of learners’ face-threatening acts? The results of this study suggest that EFL teachers’ scoring was influenced by the grammatical accuracy of the produced acts. Read More

Drawing on the notion that classrooms are complex adaptive systems, the authors discuss a study showing that a teacher’s pedagogical practices were relational; they developed through the interaction of the teacher, language learners, the physical setting, programmatic policies, supervisors’ expectations, and so on. Read More

English for academic purposes students require a large vocabulary to comprehend academic texts, so they need effective strategies for learning and reviewing words on their own. But which strategies do students use the most? This article reports the results of an action research project in which students identified their preferred vocabulary self-collection techniques. Read More