The purpose of this study is to reveal the perceptions of teachers, learners, teacher trainers and administrators on teachers

This study has the main objective of evaluating the effectiveness of the writing component of the program applied at the Department of Basic English (DBE) and the Department of Modern Languages (DML) at Middle East Technical University (METU) in the 2010-2011 academic year in terms of program objectives, materials and content, teaching-learning process and the assessment of the writing skills. The opinions of the DBE and DML instructors, program coordinators and students as well as the content course instructors at different departments at METU were mainly obtained via questionnaires and interviews. The data collected via the questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS 15 while the analysis of all the qualitative data was done though content analysis. The results of the questionnaires indicated that the writing components of the program at the DBE and the DML were generally effective as for the dimensions of the programs as specified in the research questions from the perspective of instructors and students. However, the qualitative data revealed participants&rsquo / suggestions for the improvement of the existing writing programs at both departments. Some of the major conclusions that can be drawn from DBE students&rsquo / and instructors&rsquo / suggestions are as follows: There is a need to switch the focus from discourse-level writing to more freewriting practices through more student-centered activities / the materials should be more visually attractive / the assessment procedure applied to test students&rsquo / writing ability in the mid-terms should be standardized and the writing tasks as tested in the English Proficiency Exam (EPE) should be focused on in writing classes. On the other hand, as for the writing program at the DML, the need for the diversification of the writing genres, topics and the citation rules covered in the ENG 101 and ENG 102 courses depending on students&rsquo / departments was emphasized by the DML participants. Similarly, DBE participants underlined the need for departmentrelated content in writing materials. Also, the content course instructors agreed that the writing program applied at the DBE and the DML should be department-specific. In other words, this study displayed the necessity to conduct a needs analysis aiming to reveal DBE and DML students&rsquo / writing needs for their departments.

This study investigates the types, frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters employed in L1 and L2 argumentative paragraphs written by Turkish learners of English with pre-intermediate level of proficiency. It aims to uncover whether or not Turkish learners of English writing in L1 and L2 display any transfer in their employment of hedges and boosters. The extent to which the academic writing teaching materials result in any measurable change in the employment of hedges and boosters is also pursued. To this end, the data that is comprised of 104 (52 Turkish and 52 English) argumentative paragraphs written as a response to a TOEFL essay prompt are collected. The analysis of the data is done manually and each paragraph is coded and formatted in CLAN CHILDES. Later, PASW is used to run the descriptive statistics and calculate the frequency and percentages of hedges and boosters. The results show that the types, frequencies, and meanings of hedges and boosters are culture and language-specific and they are topic and genre dependent. Research v findings also reveal that the participants in this study often express appropriate degree of certainty and pragmatic vagueness while writing in L1 and L2. However, there are some cases in which the evidence of rhetorical transfer are observed with respect to functions of certain hedges. The findings further indicate that there is a parallelism between the teaching materials used in academic writing classes and the types, frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters produced in L2 paragraphs.

<p>The purpose of this essay is to find out how upper secondary English teachers should work in order to reach the weaker students. I am interested in what has been written about mixed-ability classes, the challenges they present and most of all how teachers of English need to work in such classes to reach all students, especially the weaker ones.</p><p>I have also interviewed three upper secondary teachers about how they work to reach the weaker students in their classes.</p><p>My findings are that, according to the teachers interviewed, the best way to deal with the problem is to bring back ability grouping. The literature I read mostly had negative views on this method and stressed the importance of differentiation and motivation instead. Both the literature and the teachers claimed that a good atmosphere, clear instructions, structure and setting routines were the most important factors when working with mixed ability classes.</p>

<p>Viele Schüler haben Schwierigkeiten, eine korrekte Wortfolge zu produzieren. Die Wortfolge in deklarativen V2-Sätzen sollte eigentlich kein Problem für schwedische Deutschlerner ausmachen, weil die syntaktischen Strukturen des Deutschen und des Schwedischen in diesen Sätzen gleich sind. In Hauptsätzen haben beide Sprachen SVO-Wortfolge und wenn Sätze mit einer anderen Konstituente anfangen, verlangen beide Sprachen invertierte Wortfolge, das heißt AdvVSO.</p><p>Es hat sich jedoch herausgestellt, dass L2-Lerner Probleme bekommen, wenn sie eine andere Konstituente als ein Subjekt am Satzanfang platzieren. Die Schüler schreiben manchmal keine invertierte Wortfolge und die Wortfolge wird damit inkorrekt. Das Ziel dieses Aufsatzes war es, die Wortfolge in Textproduktionen schwedischer Deutschanfänger zu analysieren und mit der Analyse Bestätigung für Pienmanns Prozessabilitätstheorie oder für die Transferhypothese zu suchen.</p><p>Laut Pienemanns Prozessabilitätstheorie beruhe die inkorrekte Wortfolge darauf, dass die XSVO-Wortfolge einfacher als invertierte XVSO zu produzieren sei. Pienemann meint, dass alle L2-Erwerber von dieser kanonischen Wortfolge (SVO) ausgehen. Meine Untersuchung ergab jedoch, dass schon die Anfänger nicht subjektinitiale Sätze produzieren, was gegen Pienemanns Theorie spricht. Überdies produzieren auch die L2-Lerner in meiner Studie in großem Ausmaß eine korrekte XVS-Wortfolge und das deutet auf Transfer aus der Muttersprache hin. Im Vergleich zu Pienemanns Studie, in der nur etwa 20% der nicht subjektinitialen Sätze korrekt waren, produzieren die L2-Lerner in meiner Studie in 80% der Sätze eine korrekte Wortfolge, was ein erheblicher Unterschied aufweist. In Bezug auf die inkorrekte Wortfolge bin ich der Meinung, dass diese auf Transfer aus dem Englischen ins Deutsche beruhen könnte. Die Schüler lernen zuerst die englische Wortfolge und somit könnten diese Strukturen ins Deutsche transferiert werden.</p>

<p>This paper is a study within the general area of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), focusing on second language learning in formal (class room) settings. The main questions discussed in this essay are firstly, whether social factors matter while learning a second language, secondly, to what extent attitudes towards the second language matter and thirdly, what attitudes students actually have towards studying a second language.</p><p>The paper compares both students and teachers in the UK and Sweden. To be able to make this comparison I travelled to the UK and followed a class at the University of Wolverhampton that study Swedish.</p><p>This paper has benefited from both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative part consists of a questionnaire that was handed out to the students in both England and Sweden. For the qualitative part of my research I made use of the structured interview form, which is a method that has a compact nest of questions and where the sequence of questions is decided before the interview. I interviewed two students and one teacher in each of the countries that this paper covers.</p><p>The social factors that this paper recognises are age, gender, social class and ethnic identity. Furthermore, the essay examines the impact of students’ motivation and attitudes while studying and learning a new language. It has been demonstrated that motivation has a major role to play while learning a second language. It can be argued that the more motivated students are the more and better they will learn. According the students in question their opinions are that you have to have a good teacher while learning languages, i.e. a teacher that can encourage you and make you develop. On the other hand the teachers in question said that the students must be interested in learning second languages otherwise it is pointless since they will not develop.</p><p>The findings of the present paper are analysed in the light of previous research published in this field.</p>

This Report answers three questions: (a) Why is teaching pragmatic competence important? (b) What are the approaches to teaching pragmatic awareness? Specifically how do instructors teach Spanish requests?, and (c) What role does technology play in pragmatic awareness instruction? The first chapter explains why I chose to write my Report on developing pragmatic awareness through speech act instruction. Chapter two discusses development of pragmatic awareness. Chapter three and four address approaches to teaching pragmatic knowledge and technology’s role in pragmatic instruction. Chapter five proposes a lesson for an intermediate university Spanish class grounded on speech act theory. Materials and a rubric for classroom use accompany the lesson (Appendices A-C). The chapter concludes with a discussion of pedagogical challenges as well as pedagogical recommendations for teachers. Chapter six concludes the Report by answering my guiding questions succinctly, summarizing the pedagogical lesson proposed, and explaining the reasons why I think the lesson is a useful resource for teachers. / text

In recent years, US elementary and secondary education has put more emphasis on advancing students’ academic literacy. To address this need, many teachers have looked to systemic functional linguistics (SFL) theory to frame writing instruction. Drawing from this literature, this report identifies major pedagogical principles relevant for an English as a foreign language (EFL) instructional context, delineates the linguistic markers characteristic of academic registers, and expands on the existing literature in regards to feedback and error correction. SFL-informed literacy instruction can benefit English language instruction in countries such as South Korea, where learners’ writing development has traditionally been neglected. The report begins with a brief overview of systemic functional linguistics, and follows with a review of the literature on SFL-based writing pedagogy. Implications for EFL educational settings are discussed. / text

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is identified as dismissing translation, applying to all "translation" the restricted expression of translation within the discredited Grammar Translation Method (GTM). Recent, negative classifications of the GTM are considered and, this dissertation observes, the concept of the GTM is shown as prone to being mythologized. A summary definition of the GTM is offered. Of the five Prussian language teachers viewed by history as originating the GTM, Joahnn Valentin Meidinger and, to a lesser degree, Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff are shown offering methods and an approach to translation that are most similar to the definition of the GTM used today. Johann Heinrich Philipp Seidenstücker, Johann Franz Ahn, and Carl Julius Ploetz are found also to stand in the lineage of the GTM, but with important qualifications. The name "Grammar Translation Method" is asserted by this dissertation to originate in the Reform Movement, specifically, Wilhelm Viëtor’s Der Sprachunterricht muß umkehren! (1882) and a lecture of Viëtor’s from 1899. Viëtor is noted characterizing "traditional" methodologies with the terms "Grammatik" and "Übersetzung," beginning with Meidinger’s Practische Französische Grammatik (1783). Translation is found to remain problematic for the Reform Movement. A separate, concurrent movement, resulting in the Direct Method, is seen banishing all use of translation, and arguably lives on in CLT today. The formulation of a novel definition of the translation of texts is attempted. This definition, along with opinions from Translation Studies, is applied to a statement by Viëtor, where translation is particularly problematized, with the goal of mitigating this problematic. The dissertation recommends that CLT similarly use this definition of translation, so as to mitigate its own skepticism towards translation.

While much of the literature in the field of second language (L2) motivational variance has focused on macro-level or societal variables to account for males’ disinterest to learn French, very few studies consider micro-level factors, that is, those within the language learning classroom. To fill this gap in the literature, this exploratory and descriptive study examines, from both the perspective of male Core French learners and Core French teachers, possible pedagogical elements that boys perceive as contributing factors to their demotivation to learn French. A mixed method design was employed and data were collected from a sample of 75 male Core French students and six Core French teachers on southern Vancouver Island. The quantitative data were collected through the use of modified questionnaires, while the qualitative data were gathered using focus group interviews. There are three major findings in the current study. First, male Core French learners reported being disinterested in the topics of study used in the Core French classroom and demotivated by the Core French textbook. Second, male Core French learners criticized the overdependence of written modality exercises implemented in the language classroom, suggesting that the repetitive nature of the written exercises discourages them to learn French. Third, male Core French learners were shown to strongly disfavour the teacher-centered approach most often described by learners. They reported that a more student-centered approach, which incorporated games and a significant increase in speaking and interactive activities, might encourage them to be more motivated to learn French. Based on these findings, implications and future research directions are discussed. / Graduate / dtrerice@uvic.ca