The Journal of Language Teaching and Learning

1-14

Authors: Xinxiao Yang, Dianbing Chen

The Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (1996; 2006) listed culture as one of five goals of learning a foreign language. However, the perceptions of foreign language instructors towards the teaching of culture and their effects on students’ foreign language learning remain unclear. This study involved six instructors from five different foreign language programs and four undergraduate students who are enrolled in the current language programs. Documents, classroom observations, and interviews were collected and analyzed to report the findings. The results indicated that instructors’ perceptions on teaching culture in foreign language classroom did make a difference in students’ learning and teaching a foreign language. Keywords: The teaching of culture, perceptions, instructors, culture teaching and learning, qualitative study

29-47

Authors: Dick Smakman, Agnieska Duda-Osiewacz

This study compares native English publications with non-native English publications. Specifically, publications have been compared of Anglophone and Polish scholars in the past two decades. Various stylistic and linguistic characteristics and several textual levels are assessed by applying Kaplan's (1966) Contrastive Rhetoric Analysis. Results show that differences exist at the paragraph level and not at the sentence or textual level. Native texts have a higher degree of reciprocity (reader-friendliness) and are more linear. Results reveal that Polish authors write academic English with traces of a Teutonic style but as far as reciprocity is concerned they are moving towards the stylistic features of native English; newer publications by the Polish authors are more reader-friendly than the older ones. Native speakers are not able to reliably recognise native and non-native sentences and often mistake non-native writings for native writing, and in many cases they even label native sentences as non-native. These findings put into perspective the aims applied in teaching academic language.contrastive rhetoric, academic English, Poland Keywords contrastive rhetoric, academic English, Poland

63-75

Authors: Rebecca Galeano, Kelly M. Torres

The National Standards for Foreign Language Learning seek to prepare U.S. students to be “culturally equipped to communicate successfully in a pluralistic American society and abroad” (NSFLL, 1996). Each of the five areas, Communication, Culture, Connections, Communities, and Comparisons, articulates a goal related to the culture and there is at least one cultural sub-standard under each of the other goal areas (Galeano, 2013). Even with such a stated focus on preparing students to function in a multicultural, multilingual world, language teaching, or focusing on the grammatical elements of the target language, continues to be prioritized in U.S. foreign language classrooms. This study analyzes whetherU.S. teachers continue to present information about target cultures at the surface level or whether they lead students to a deeper understanding of how cultural products, practices, and perspectives are related. It also examines whether or not teachers who have spent time living or studying abroad approach the teaching of culture differently from those who have not. Keywords: Culture, classroom, K-12 learners, National Standards for Foreign Language Learning, perspectives

84-91

Authors: Hayo Reinders

Backchanneling is a technique for monitoring student engagement and performance in the language classroom. In this article I give the pedagogical rationale for this activity and describe some examples of best practice. The article concludes with a number of practical recommendations on how to get started with the various tools that are available and how to best make use of their affordances with your students. Keywords: Motivation, assessment, monitoring, CALL

1-14

Authors: Christian Jones, Tania Horak

This study analyses spoken language from a small corpus of the popular UK soap opera EastEnders in order to understand the extent to which the language used may be a useful model of conversational English at intermediate levels and above. Results suggest that the spoken language used in EastEnders has a number of similarities to unscripted conversational language in general spoken corpora. It involves extensive use of the two thousand most frequent words in the British National Corpus (BNC) spoken lists and the most frequent words and two-word chunks are comparable to general spoken corpora and a larger soap opera corpus. The findings suggest that soap operas of this type may be a useful model of spoken language as they have more similarities to unscripted, naturally occurring conversations than dialogues often found in ELT textbooks. Keywords: Spoken language; authentic materials; soap operas; corpora

37-54

Authors: Ko-Yin Sung, Hsiao-Mei Tsai

This study explored college student errors, teachers' oral corrective feedback, learner uptake and repair, and learners' corrective feedback preferences in a Chinese language classroom setting. Data collection included the oral interactions in the classrooms, a preference of feedback survey, and focus-group interviews. The present study adopted the coding schemes used in Yoshida (2008) and in Lyster and Ranta (1997) to categorize data. Chi Square tests were run to examine whether there were significant differences in the frequency of students' error types and teachers' feedback types, and whether teachers' feedback types and learners' subsequent responses were related. The results showed that the most frequently made errors were phonological and lexical and that recasts were the most frequently used feedback type. Also, this study found a statistical significance between feedback type and learner repair in the beginner class. In addition, the survey results showed that the majority of the beginners preferred recasts while the advanced participants had preferences more scattered among different feedback types. The interview results showed that the participants' preferences were influenced by their learning styles and beliefs, their proficiency levels, the nature of the Chinese language, and the differences between Chinese and their native language, English. Keywords: Corrective feedback, learner uptake and repair, learners' preferences of corrective feedback, Chinese language teaching and learning.

69-83

Authors: Vahid Panahzade

Second language acquisition (SLA) researchers contend that focus on form (FonF) instruction plays a pivotal role in the course of language acquisition. Focus on form (FonF) instruction is learner-centered and is consistent with the learner’s internal syllabus. There has been an ongoing query in the literature as to whether focus on form should occur prior to error commitment or be reactive to the actual errors of the learners during the task. In this regard, this study tried to explore the effectiveness as well as the relative impacts of planned preemptive vs. delayed reactive focus on form on lexical resource of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ oral production in meaningoriented interviews. The study adopted a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design including two experimental groups, each receiving a distinct treatment during the whole semester. The participants of the study were a total of 19 upper-intermediate adult all-female students. Paired-samples t-test and independent-samples t-test were utilized to evaluate and compare the differing effects of the two treatments respectively. The findings of the study demonstrated that both types of form-focused instructions are conducive to learners’ oral production lexical resource. One of the interesting findings of the present study was that preemptive focus on form can be planned in advance on the basis of teachers’ experience, which can lead to a blurred dichotomy between planned and incidental focus on form. Keywords: Focus on form; meaning-oriented lessons; planned preemptive FonF; delayed reactive FonF; lexical resource