China urgently needs a large number of interpreters, guides and teachers who are competent communicators in the English Language. One of the foreign language institutes that is attempting to satisfy this need is the Beijing Second Foreign Language Institute (or Erwai). It is argued that Erwai fails to produce competent communicators in English, a failure that is seen to be due to three interdependent factors: 1) the lack of teacher training, especially in the area of teaching methodology; 2) the resultant inability to select and effectively exploit teaching materials; and 3) the inappropriateness of currently-used teaching approaches to the perceived goals of the Institute. It is the third of these factors that receives particular attention in this paper. A survey is made of the merits and shortcomings of the three teaching approaches that have been used at Erwai, namely the 'grammar-translation,' 'audio-lingual' and 'cognitive' approaches. This serves as back-ground to the proposal that a 'communicative approach' to teaching be introduced at Erwai. It is claimed that the communicative approach is the most appropriate to the goals of Erwai students, the majority of whom will need to be communicatively competent in their future professions. The communicative approach is applied to the four basic skills of language and it is suggested that these skill areas be integrated in the classroom, rather than be taught in separate courses, as is presently the case at Erwai. Finally, the adoption of a communicative approach is seen to involve changes not only in classroom activities and materials, but also in the role of the student and the role of the teacher.

Foreign language teaching in recent years is very much concerned with the concepts of authenticity and relevance to students' needs and interests. Using newspapers in foreign language classes is one way of working towards the development of an authentic environment and promoting the language learning process. For EFL students in the Institute of International Relations (IIR) newspapers are not simply an important source of learning material, but an important source of information. Vietnamese EFL students who learn to read English newspapers, however, constantly encounter difficulties in comprehension. This study report attempts to identify the common areas of comprehension difficulty for Vietnamese learners, when confronted with newspapers. To achieve this aim, the study first reviews schema theory in order to establish the factors which affect the reading process. It also examines studies on news reporting style in English. Attempts have also been made in the contrastive study of the differences in reporting styles of international news in English and Vietnamese to investigate what might cause difficulties for Vietnamese readers. Accordingly, the study considers implications for teaching newspaper reading to Vietnamese EFL students at intermediate level, who have not practised this before. Finally, the study also suggests further areas of research in using newspapers in a foreign language class.

English is the language studied by the majority of students at the Institute of International Relations in Vietnam. News broadcasts are used as teaching material since, for instance, graduates will need to monitor news broadcasts as part of their work. Students constantly encounter difficulties in listening to the news broadcasts on English-speaking radio. The purpose of this Study is therefore to identify factors which may cause problems for Vietnamese listeners to English news broadcasts. This Study presents the findings from questionnaires related to radio listening and the findings from an analysis of news extracts in English and Vietnamese. In the conclusion to the study implications for the teaching of radio broadcast listening in Vietnam are discussed.

Chapter 1 introduces the aims and objectives of the study. It is followed by an analysis of the present situation at the Hanoi Foreign Language Teachers College and the problems encountered by teachers and administrators in ensuring the maximum efficiency of the EFL programme. The Report continues by asking a number of pertinent questions about the methodology and techniques used in the teaching of reading. This, in turn, is linked with theoretical considerations which the writer examines at some length taking into account numerous issues about language processing, cognition, expectation and motivation, comprehending, discourse analysis, text cohesion and so on. Attention is then focused on the reader and the environment in which he operates. In addition the reading lesson comes under scrutiny and procedures, as well as material selection and teaching systems are discussed. Finally the writer attempts to make suggestions to his colleagues in the EFL field based on his own experience and convictions.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Oregon State University, 2008. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-107). Also available on the World Wide Web.

This dissertation investigates an area of notorious difficulty for learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. Research from previous studies has indicated that phrasal verb learning may be more effective if a Cognitive Linguistic approach is adopted. However, the quantitative and qualitative research in this dissertation demonstrates that the approach, once integrated into a regular, classroom-based EFL programme, does not consistently yield significant learning gains. Further qualitative investigations highlighted the fact that the benefits of the approach have less to do with the Cognitive Linguistic explanations than with their compatibility with other learning strategies, such as employing imagery and grouping information. In addition, the approach is most suited to phrasal verbs that are already partially familiar to students. However, for other phrasal verbs the Cognitive Linguistic approach may even impede learning. In addition, the implications for phrasal verb pedagogy are then presented and discussed.

This dissertation investigates an area of notorious difficulty for learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. Research from previous studies has indicated that phrasal verb learning may be more effective if a Cognitive Linguistic approach is adopted. However, the quantitative and qualitative research in this dissertation demonstrates that the approach, once integrated into a regular, classroom-based EFL programme, does not consistently yield significant learning gains. Further qualitative investigations highlighted the fact that the benefits of the approach have less to do with the Cognitive Linguistic explanations than with their compatibility with other learning strategies, such as employing imagery and grouping information. In addition, the approach is most suited to phrasal verbs that are already partially familiar to students. However, for other phrasal verbs the Cognitive Linguistic approach may even impede learning. In addition, the implications for phrasal verb pedagogy are then presented and discussed.

This is a study of English language learning for adult immigrant students in Sweden, and how it affects their integration into society. The primary aim of this study is to highlight and analyze the problems that adult immigrant students face, based on teachers beliefs, when learning English in a foreign country, and is backed up by various secondary sources in the subject as well as data collected in qualitative face-to-face interviews with teachers from adult education centres designed to help immigrant learn the native language as well as English. The results show the teacher viewpoint on the learning problems, which stem from cultural, lexical and mental blockades. They are analyzed according to the research questions and theoretical concepts, and presented with an accompanying discussion that aims to inform of the reader of the current learning situations.

Each year a group of university students from English speaking countries go to Chile and work as volunteers under the National Volunteer Centre Program. The purpose of this case study is to examine how a group of novice volunteer teachers describe their experiences in a foreign country and how these experiences shape their understanding of teaching. Participants went through the process of open-ended questionnaires and one-on-one interviews of their experience. This study was sustained in the literature by the domains of volunteerism, English Language Teaching, and volunteerism and ELT, and a socio constructivist and experiential lens was adopted. Even though volunteer teaching abroad is an increasing worldwide trend, there are few studies that combine these areas, showing that the existing blend of volunteerism and English language teaching needs to be further examined. The analysis of the data showed that novice volunteer teachers experience five types of experiences when teaching English: language teaching experiences, language learning experiences, challenges, general experiences, and volunteering experiences. Novice teachers recalled their expectations before teaching and those were maintained, modified, or unfulfilled. Volunteers stated what teaching means to them after working in public schools, they were able to describe diverse language teaching experiences, and make recommendations to future volunteers.

This study investigated relationships between individual learner differences and the learning of two English structures that differed in their grammatical difficulty. Using a quasi-experimental design, 66 secondary-level learners of English as a foreign language from three intact classes were provided with four hours of instruction on two L2 structures –one considered relatively easy to learn (i.e., past progressive) and the other relatively difficult to learn (i.e. passive construction). The participants were pretested on their knowledge of both structures and posttested immediately after the instruction. Learners’ progress was measured via written grammaticality judgment tests (GJT) and oral production tasks (OPT). The instruments to measure individual learner differences included a computerized language aptitude test, an L1 metalinguistic awareness test, a motivation questionnaire, a backward digit span test, and a learner retrospection questionnaire. The results revealed that aptitude and motivation were the two variables that significantly contributed to learners’ gains with respect to the ‘passive’ and that L1 metalinguistic awareness explained significant variation in learners’ gains regarding the ‘past progressive’. These relationships were observed with learners’ performance on the written but not oral measures. A detailed analysis of the aptitude test components revealed that the grammatical inferencing subtask was significantly related to L2 gains on the ‘passive’ – again only with respect to learners’ performance on the written GJT. The results also revealed that learners with different aptitude profiles (i.e., low, medium, high) benefited differently from instruction on the two target features. High aptitude learners performed better than low aptitude learners on the ‘passive’ as measured by the GJT posttest. With respect to the ‘past progressive’ only learners in the medium aptitude profile group improved significantly on the written GJT. These findings confirm that language aptitude holds a role in language learning but that there are other factors (i.e., motivation and L1 metalinguistic awareness) that also contribute to L2 progress. These results also provide evidence from a classroom-based study that the grammatical difficulty of what is to be learned is a factor in determining what cognitive abilities L2 learners rely on in their efforts to learn a new language.