The Journal of Language Teaching and Learning

22-36

Authors: Thomas Lehmann, Tanja Weber

The impact of teachers’ understanding of efficient teaching has become an important field of research in various countries and domains over the last decade. However, there have been few cross-cultural comparisons in the context of English language teaching. Additionally, the question how teachers may foster the development of communicative competence is also still in debate. In order to provide more insight in the characteristic teaching perspectives of teachers and to identify where they differ in their use of methods for ELT, this paper reports results of a cross-cultural questionnaire study with 68 EFL-teachers from Chile and Germany. The findings show interesting differences in the predominance of specific teaching perspectives. Furthermore, differences in the use of foreign language teaching methods such as interlingual communication tasks and text work were found between Chilean and German EFL-teachers. The results of the study are discussed and conclusions for teacher training and future research are drawn. Keywords: teaching perspectives; communicative competence; English language teaching (ELT); English as a foreign language (EFL)

54-73

Authors: Stephanie M. Knouse, Francisco Salgado-Robles

While the pedagogy of community service-learning (CSL) in Spanish has been successfully implemented in the United States for several decades, it is still common for instructors and students to encounter significant obstacles that decrease its effectiveness, such as insufficient opportunities to produce the second language (L2) and a lack of affective support. In the present study, a collaborative CSL course was designed to examine the degree to which a cross-institutional endeavor could offset these commonly observed challenges. Under this model, 28 students from two identical CSL in Spanish classes at two different institutions formed a community of practice (CoP) and interacted via Web 2.0 technologies. Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveal that students reacted favorably toward the inter-institutional endeavor and its accompanying online tasks. Specifically, students benefitted from the guaranteed outlets to practice the L2 with their peers (i.e., blogging and Skype videoconferencing) and by receiving constant encouragement from their classmates. Keywords: blogging; CALL; communities of practice; language use; service-learning; Skype; Spanish; social networking; Web 2.0 technologies

86-107

Authors: Carolina Girón-García, Claudia Llopis-Moreno

During several decades, considerable attention has been paid to speaking assessment procedures. Probably, the reason for this relevance lies in the difficulties in dealing with oral assessment and in determining the adequate type of assessment (Campbell et al., 2001; Stoynoff, 2013; Schwartz & Arena, 2013). The main aim of this article is to analyze to what extent students’ oral competences (such as their English competence and fluency) affect their peers’English oral production. More precisely, we intend to study effective procedures to assess oral production in ESP contexts. In order to assess our students, we have designed a speaking-based rubric as the main instrument (called ‘Speaking Diagnostic Test’), based on previous research (Wilson, 2006; Spandel, 2006). The results obtained from both questionnaires will help us identify to what extent students’ preferences in working with other classmates influence their English oral production and therefore to what extent these results could lead to the reformulation and modification of the assessment methods. Keywords: ESP contexts; rubric; ‘Speaking Diagnostic Test’; oral production.