Beauty in Brevity: Capturing the Narrative Structure of Flash Fiction by Filipino Writers
Exploring the Coalescence of Language and Literature through A Stylistic Analysis of Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo's “When It's A Grey November In Your Soul”
Developing ESL/ EFL Learners' Grammatical Competence through Communicative Activities
Oral Communication in Accounting Practice: Perspectives from the Philippines
Solidarity and Disagreements: Social Dimensions in Cooperative Writing Group
Move Sequences In Graduate Research Paper Introductions And Conclusions
Interactional Metadiscourse in Turkish Postgraduates’ Academic Texts: A Comparative Study of How They Introduce and Conclude
English Language Teaching at Secondary School Level in Bangladesh: An Overview of the Implementation of Communicative Language Teaching Method
The Relationship Between Iranian EFL Learners' BeliefsAbout Language Learning And Language Learning Strategy Use
Examining the Role of Reciprocal Teaching in Enhancing Reading Skill at First-Year Undergraduate Level in a Semi-Urban College, Bangladesh
Due to globalization, many universities around the world have started to strengthen academic and research practices with the view to meeting international standards. However, the higher education context of the study has faced the challenge to provide our students with successful language learning to prepare them for the job market. This challenge was the motivation for this research: to better understand the needs of our students' language achievement for their future jobs. Therefore, in order to examine how English teaching and learning can be improved in this context, we adopted a need analysis approach by conducting focus groups with university authorities (36 participants), English teachers (31 participants) and learners (54 participants) from different disciplines in a state university in central Mexico. Based on the participants' responses, the findings suggest that in the present context English teaching and learning should be redesigned to include practices which allow learners to develop language skills for their future career. To do this, we suggest a top-down strategic plan which promotes the inclusion of two major components (i.e. a general English coordination and content-based instruction) as a way to address the stakeholders' needs concerning linguistic limitations in this setting. This paper shows the importance of conducting needs analysis in higher education to determine how to enhance English teaching and learning from a context-sensitive perspective.
Research has gained a degree of recognition as a skill to develop at tertiary level, and a requirement to get a Bachelor's degree, for higher education is supposed to improve critical thinking, encourage innovation, thereby improving the quality of both teaching and research. Responding to the calls of earlier research to further explore students' attitudes towards various aspects of research, perceptions and experiences in other disciplines rather than solely arts, I captured my undergraduate English majoring students' personal research process with their attitudes, experiences and self-reported researcher identity to draw a holistic picture of the field both quantitatively and qualitatively with a case study. While the quantitative data came from a 33-item- scale to investigate attitudes towards research, the qualitative findings were reached by open-ended items. The findings show that they found research quite useful for their academic life, yet thought research could not be applied to daily life. Besides, most saw themselves as bad researchers due to lack of research experience and faced several research-related, affective, personality and health, technical, participant-related, timerelated and lecturer-related problems. Yet, they employed mostly indirect and also direct strategies in the process. The article ends with recommendations for satisfactory classroom implementations and informal classroom activities.
Many EFL teachers spend a lot of time marking students' written assignments and correcting their spelling, grammatical, punctuation, organization and idea generation errors in detail. The more mistakes students make the more meticulously they mark and correct mistakes. Despite meticulous error correction, students continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. Teachers' correction of written assignments does not seem to be effective in reducing students' errors and enhancing their ability to write correctly and effectively. The present study proposes a model for correcting students' errors effectively. In this model, students are encouraged to write for communication and not to worry about spelling, grammatical, punctuation or capitalization mistakes. Students do written assignments or part of them in the class. While doing the written exercises and writing their paragraphs, the teacher monitors students' work and provides individual help. She gives communicative feedback that focuses on meaning and highlights only errors related to rules or skills under study in a particular chapter. Feedback is provided on the occurrence and location of errors, but no correct forms are given. Self-editing and peer-editing are encouraged. Extra credit is given for good paragraphs every time the students write a paragraph in the class.
This study investigates cultural standards in the context of foreign language teaching from the perspective of two countries: Turkey and Russia. It compared both countries in terms of how they treat culture in foreign language education. The purpose was to identify commonalities and differences in cultural standards between the two countries. During the analysis of curricular documents, three domains of cultural standards were identified for each country: (1) Foreign culture domain, (2) Home culture domain, and (3) Intercultural relations domain. Document analysis was conducted based on online database materials from two primary sources: the Ministry of National Education of Turkey and the Ministry of National Education of Russia. As this study demonstrated the educational policies of the two countries whilst steered towards the attainment of culture-related competencies of foreign language learners, it revealed some important differences in how they define cultural standards according to the three categories of cultural standard domains. As a result, it appears Russia's foreign language curriculum outweighs that of Turkey in the domain of home culture and intercultural relations References.
The current paper is a mixed method study which aimed to find out teacher written feedback preferences of a group of prep-class students at a public university in Turkey. The written corrective feedback preferences of 37 students with high level of proficiency in English were examined via a questionnaire and an interview. The study lasted for two semesters. The findings of this long term study indicated that the students preferred the course teacher to provide feedback for each error in their assignments. Besides, the students believed that the feedback provided by their teacher enhanced their writing skill. However, most of the time, the students did not rewrite their texts in the light of the feedback provided to them when they were not instructed to do so. The generally preferred feedback type was form-focused direct feedback whereas the least preferred types were meaning-focused content related feedback and form-focused indirect feedback. Finally, the feedback preferences of the students did not change even if the practices of the course teacher changed over time. Instead, there was a decrease in the students' contentment of the teacher feedback as the practices of the course teacher changed from the first term to the second.