｢高級日詰会話｣における思考力を高める試み－TAE交差を中心に

Investigating to which extent language learning context affect Iranian EFL students’ critical thinking, this study was conducted to clarify the relationship between the variables. To achieve this purpose 90 EFL students in upper intermediate level of Payamnoor University selected, and equally divided to two groups of 45 person, the experimental group (n=45) with modern context of language learning by a web 2.0 environment on the internet and control group (n=45) with traditional context of language learning in regular classes. Sandra Lee M.C. Kay’s Researching Second Language Classroom book, published in 2008, was given to the both groups during 10 session of 120 minutes of study as a material. Pretest/posttest assessments and statistical package of social science (SPSS) t-test analyzed procedures clarified that experimental group’s language learner have a stronger critical thinking ability than control group ones. Confirming positive relation between language learning context and critical thinking ability of EFL learners, the results also show a strong willing of students to use modern, technological, more accessible, and new ways of learning.

This study focuses on primary foreign language teaching and learning. It seeks to reveal the perspectives and practice of three different stakeholders: specialist teachers, generalist teachers and head teachers. The study then places these beliefs and practice within a local, national and international context, considering the supporting factors for Primary Foreign Languages (PFL), as well as the challenges. It is a timely piece of research as it was conducted during the period when foreign language learning, for the first time in England, became statutory in primary schools. Furthermore, it took place during a timeframe of rapid change at all levels of education, which has had an effect on the translation of policy to practice. Data collection took place in two phases. In Phase One, an initial PFL practice mapping online questionnaire was sent to all schools in the Local Authority (LA) (n=69). Three schools agreed to participate. In Phase Two data collection methods employed in each of the three schools consisted of participant observations, semi-structured interviews, a self-reflective diary, informal conversation with staff and analysis of policy documents. The findings of the study show that all stakeholders in each school were supportive of PFL. However, this support did not translate into practice as the responsibility for PFL often rested solely with the specialist. As a result, the subject and specialists could be described as annexed, not fully integrated into the curriculum, and the specialists sought support from private companies instead of internally within the school. The majority of generalist teachers did not feel qualified to deliver the subject and there was a lack of future training options open to teachers wishing to train as PFL specialists. Those teachers who did express an interest in learning how to teach PFL felt that they could not engage fully with this endeavour due to internal and external pressure imposed upon them to achieve the highest possible pupil attainment in English and Maths. A disconnect was also revealed between the teachers’ most popular rationale for PFL teaching, which was preparing children to be ‘21st century global citizens’, and their actual practice. The teachers in the study recognised that, through learning a language and experiencing its culture, it may be possible to move from “egocentricity and ethnocentricity to a more altruistic sense of mutual benefit” (Byram, 2008:131). However, while espousing support for the teaching of intercultural understanding (ICU), the study reveals a lack of understanding in practice from stakeholders, policy writers and teachers. Overall, there is much goodwill for PFL as a subject, however, due to national and international drivers, it occupies a vulnerable place within the curriculum.

This paper had discussed how to cultivate high-quality cardiovascular ultrasound diagnostician.The teaching methods and guiding ideology should include the following aspects: cultivating systematic and comprehensive thinking consciousness, cultivating spatial thinking and abstract thinking ability, cultivating clinical thinking and divergent thinking, cultivating individual operational consciousness and non-intelligence quality and cultivating autonomous learning ability and innovative thinking ability.Through deep thought and practice, it was believed that these methods were quite helpful to cultivate new medical talents of 21st century, and help them to adapt to the modern society. Key words: Cultivate; Cardiovascular ultrasound; Teaching methods and thinking

<p>J Spec Educ Rehab 2009; 10(3-4):89-101.</p>

Acquiring a foreign language requires a student to master the two elements of language, vocabulary and grammar, and the four language skills, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Within each skill, these two language elements play a considerably essential role since they are seen as the very core aspects of language learning and that they are regarded inherent in each of these skills. Thus, vocabulary and grammatical aspects cannot be separated from the four language skills in language acquisition as without any one of which each skill is never acquired. Since the implementation of communicative approach in 1984 to the application of the competency-based language teaching in Indonesia, English programs at high schools have been meaning or message based rather than language usage or form oriented. As a result, grammar learning has been significantly kept aside if not totally ignored in class interactions, and that communication success becomes the main target in instructional objectives. This study attempts to map grammatical errors the students make in their speech productions. It employs an interview technique for data collection by recording the conversations of twenty respondents - - junior and senior students - - on a selected issue of a particular topic and transcribing them in the form of written transcripts which are then to be analyzed from a grammatical perspective with the reference of grammar books. Those violating the grammatical norms will be considered as grammatical errors. It has been found out that learners’ grammatical errors are derived from two major causes - - translating concepts of L1 into L2 and their approximative system. This study concludes that the communicative classrooms which utilize the competency-based language teaching bring about a positive impact upon grammar learning. This research is significant as it gives a great contribution to structure and speaking class teachers, students, as well as to the department for policy making.

Learning and teaching languages in technology-mediated environments : why modes and meaning making matter

A range of studies have now demonstrated that multi-word sequences play a prominent role in language learning and use (Biber, 2009; Lin, 2013; Schmitt, 2010; Wray, 2002). At the same time, EFL textbooks have been considered as the basis for much of the language input that English language learners receive (Tomlinson, 2011). It stands to reason, therefore, that pedagogical materials should deal with the sequences commonly used in natural conversation. This study investigates the extent to which EFL textbooks used in Taiwanese junior high schools present the recurrent multi-word patterns found in natural spoken communication. The framework used for this analysis is principally adapted from work by Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992), comprising three central functions: social interaction, necessary topics, and discourse devices. In addition, a corpus-driven approach, keyness method (Scott, 2008), is applied to highlight the sequences that occur significantly more or less frequently in the textbook dialogues than in naturally occurring discourse. The research findings identify gaps between the two datasets, and I suggest opportunities for how teachers might bridge these gaps and support learners to achieve better spoken communication.

This paper aims at contextualizing and presenting the first volume of the journal Research in Corpus Linguistics and is, therefore, divided into two main parts. First of all, it provides an introduction to the field of corpus linguistics and its increasingly relevant role in language teaching and learning. Secondly, it briefly introduces and discusses the six articles of the volume. Stemming from oral presentations delivered at the 4th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC2012, Jaen, Spain), these articles have a number of features in common. They all make extensive use of corpora and at the same time deal with language teaching and language learning, the underlying assumption being that a genuine and mutually beneficial connection can be established between teaching and research. For this reason, each of them constitutes an illustrative sample of how different corpora can be exploited for different research purposes.

The article is devoted to distance – in class role playing blend (DICRPB) for ESP spoken communication and video communication university students’ language learning and teaching description. The combination of distance online and face-to-face in class teaching and learning approaches as well as the use of DICRPB are vital for constructing situations of professional communication in the modern developed technologies conditions, that promote critical thinking, communication and long-life learning skills.

This study focuses on how communicative competence should be developed through effective reading. The basic idea of developing communicative competence comes from different points. For instance, syllabus may not give much concern and sufficient activities to improve learners’ communicative competence in all cases. In addition to the problems of pronunciation, stress, intonation, grammatical structures and vocabulary of English language, this may be attributed to the lack of listening materials and limited exposure to conversational English. The direct cause may be rooted in the methods, strategies, activities and the characteristics of effective reading, deveolping students’ communicative competence, determining to what extend effective reading helps in developing learners’ communicative competence. The tool used for collecting data for this study is a questionnaire which is base on 13 statements. The sample of the study consists of 50 teachers of English at the basic level chosen randomly from teachers of English at AlShagra in the South of Khartoum state. SPSS programmed was used to analyze the data. The analysis of the data leads to the fact that communicative competence can be successfully developed through effective reading. Most of English language teachers are unqualified and untrained, the lack of continuous follow-up of teachers and parents. In the light of the results reached so far, it is recommended that communicative competence should be developed through effective reading, communicative competence should be given more attention in the present syllabus and students should be given adequate opportunities to practice English in authentic communicative situations. Also teachers and parents should follow-up closely and encourage learners to develop their language.

Lateral thinking is a unique form of thinking proposed by Edward De Bono. He believes that innovation is the ability to see the changes as an opportunity not as a threat. It results in the generation of new ideas and breaking out of the concept prisons of old ideas. This type of thinking decides the outcome of one's speaking and the job of lateral thinking is to enable the brain to find multiple possibilities or perceptions. The attitude of the present set of tertiary learners, lack of confidence and positive approach, their habits hinder their brain to intake, create and present the information in the demanding context. The major reasons for their inability are the cultural and psychological background of the learners. Developing lateral thinking skills of the tertiary level learners may pave the way to keep a constructive mind to acquire new language competencies. 'Think out of the box' is the crucial motto of the language teachers these days. De Bono's concept of Lateral thinking would enable the language teachers to break a new ground in inculcating speaking skills for the learners of English as a second language. The present study proposes Design , one of the lateral thinking techniques of Bono and its effectiveness as a tool that can be adapted by the language teachers to enrich the communicative competence of the tertiary level learners of English as a second language. The criteria for speaking activity are assessed based on stage III of Canadian Language Benchmark for assessing speaking skills.

Behavioral intention to continuously use learning apps: A comparative study from Taiwan universities

The lack of informed knowledge about listening subskills and their relationships has hindered the development of the diagnostic English language track assessment (DELTA) in three participating Hong Kong universities. This study investigates English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' listening proficiency development in understanding different spoken genres in the Hong Kong Chinese tertiary contexts. It aims to: i) identify the subskills and/or cognitive processes that underlie student performance on the DELTA listening component; ii) examine the difficulty levels of the DELTA listening subskills, and, consequentially, their hierarchical order; iii) investigate the impact of text type on difficulty level and the hierarchical order of the subskills; and iv) infer principles underlying the development of listening proficiency in the Hong Kong tertiary education contexts. A multi-method approach was employed for data collection and analysis. The primary quantitative data were derived from the DELTA listening component items answered by 2830 Chinese ELF learners who studied in their first or second year in the DELTA participating universities in the 2013-14 academic year. The item pool included 207 multiple-choice questions (MCQ) from 33 texts of three text types – conversation, interview and lecture. Each MCQ is intended to measure a particular listening subskill, including: 1) identifying specific information (SSK1); 2) understanding main idea and supporting ideas (SSK2); 3) understanding information and making an inference (SSK3); 4) interpreting a word or phrase as used by the speaker (SSK4); 5) inferring the attitude or intention of the speaker (SSK5); and 6) inferring the speaker's reasoning (SSK6). By adopting inter-related Rasch analyses using Winsteps and Facets, all test items were calibrated and analysed to determine their difficulty measures and their respective difficulties across the three text types. Qualitative Stimulated Recall Protocol (SRP) discussions were then conducted with 62 examinees of varying estimated listening abilities one month later, in a simulated test situation, where the test-taking process was video-recorded and the participants were asked to recall and to verbalise their thought processes and strategies they used to answer each question. The SRP results reveal an array of both cognitive processes and test-taking strategies in the listening comprehension and test-answering process. Firstly, various combinations of cognitive processes were utilised by both the high and low ability examinees to answer questions targeting the same listening sub-skill; however, the dominant cognitive process that was reported to have been used to answer each question corresponded with the particular listening subskill intended by DELTA item writers. Secondly, an array of test-taking strategies best identified as elimination, and guessing, were reported as used by examinees during the test. While this finding might not be surprising given the exam-oriented atmosphere prevailing in Hong Kong secondary school education, it alerted the researcher to scrutinise the validity of the DELTA listening component. The most striking observation from the listening test analysis is that, the DELTA listening subskills are measurably separable from each other, and a hierarchical pattern is established. In terms of their interaction with text type, the results showed that SSK1 and SSK6 were, respectively, the easiest and the most difficult subskills, whereas the hierarchical orders of the other four subskills varied across the three text types. More generally, these findings provide empirical evidence for the proposition that EFL listening comprehension is composed of multiple listening subskills, which operate interactively and interdependently in the listening process. The results regarding the difficulty level and the hierarchy of listening subskills corroborate the findings of prior research that low-level processing, such as identifying specific information, poses less challenge than high-level processing, such as summarising and inferencing. Because of the complexity in the interaction between text type and listening subskills, it is difficult to identify an overarching hierarchical order of the six listening subskills across the three text types. A general pattern, however, is that the difficulty increased from SSK1, SSK2 to SSK6 irrespective of the text type, and this corresponds to the general subskill hierarchy. The study will benefit teachers and students with diagnostic profiling and bridge the gap in diagnostic test design with targeted items of appropriate difficulty for predicting learners' listening development. It will extend second language acquisition theory with a hierarchical trajectory of listening proficiency growth. Limitations and future research recommendations are discussed.

In countries where learning English as a Second Language (ESL) is made compulsory, yet it is actually a foreign language to many learners, problems occur among learners. Language is the reflection of culture itself as the language can shape the society. Problems in language learning may occur due to several barriers. Firstly, cultural barrier is one of the barriers that is difficult to resolve. The barriers may influence the motivations to learn. The aim of this study is to investigate cultural barriers and motivation issues that might influence the process of learning English. 69 respondents participated in this quantitative study. The instrument used is a survey and it has 3 parts; 1) demographic profile, 2) culture and language learning and 3) motivation and language learning. Findings reveal that cultural barriers and motivational issues do have influence on learners’ language learning. Findings of this study bear interesting implications towards the teaching and learning of English as second language. 
 
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It seems that someone, given appropriate circumstances, can communicate almost anything by almost any kind of doing. Of course, usually we communicate by means of language, but even the moving of furniture can be a communicative act (as used in this chapter, the expression ‘communicative act’ applies exclusively to concrete acts performed by someone at a particular time and at a particular place). Since the concept of a communicative act (or: the act type to communicate-something-to-someone) involves no reference to a particular type of doing, it seems that the only possibility to fix the concept of a communicative act is to focus on the effects brought about by the respective doings. If one restricts oneself, as I will do here, to cases where these effects have been intended, the concept of an intentional communicative act can be defined via the notion of a communicative intention. Let me say that an agent X communicates (intentionally) to an addressee Y that A only if X, by her doing (like an utterance or a gesture), intends to bring it about that it is communicated to Y that A. Given this condition, a first step to define the notion of a communicative act is to define the notion of a communicative intention without reference to the notion of communication. The way to do the latter is to characterize the goal of a communicative intention (i.e. the fact that X intends to bring about) without reference to the notion of communication — for example, by adopting the view that it is communicated to Y that A just if Y acquires the belief that A.