In spoken English, “I think” is a frequently-used chunk. The frequent use of “I think” in the Chinese non-native speakers' (NNSs') speech has been interpreted as being somewhat overused in previous studies, such as Xu and Xu (2007) and Yang and Wei (2005). The same phenomenon is also found in the present study, which is based on a detailed analysis of three corpora: The Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL), MICASE and ICE-GB. “I think” is over-represented in the Chinese NNSs' speech in SECCL. However, it is questionable as to whether the Chinese NNSs use “I think” too much, and inappropriately. The investigation into the frequency information and contexts provides an explanation of the generic constraints and national backgrounds underlying the over-representation of “I think” in the speech of Chinese NNSs as well as revealing differences between Chinese NNSs and NSs.

This article concerns a corpus-based lexical study that is aimed at teaching academic vocabulary to address the specific needs of Chinese undergraduates majoring in information engineering. A 1,024,882-word corpus of Information Engineering English Corpus (IEEC) was built on the basis of university-level textbook materials drawn from ten compulsory courses for information engineering students. A quantitative analysis was carried out to seek for an optimal frequency threshold for extracting frequently occurring academic vocabulary specific to the discipline of information engineering based on Coxhead’s Academic Word List (2000). An innovative 2-dimensional categorization of AWL for EAP students was adopted in the study. As a result, a 100-word highly frequent core AWL and a 147-word frequent AWL were compiled for IEEC under two parameters of lexical frequency and specificity to individual sub-corpora. The present study further explored the application of corpus tools to highlight and effectively teach the discipline-specific academic vocabulary and collocations to promote learners’ autonomy and enhance their lexical competence in the study of specialized courses.

Informed by a bridging activities model (Thorne & Reinhardt, 2008), the authors designed and implemented a series of activities using Facebook to develop elementary level Korean learners’ socio-pragmatic awareness of the use of Korean honorifics. Nine students took part in the activities, which involved student collaboration to create five invented profiles and shared resources, guided analysis of expert/native use, role play activities to practice new socio-grammatical understandings, and analysis of peer production. Based on analysis of student work and post-instructional surveys, the authors found evidence for the development of socio-pragmatic awareness, as demonstrated by the practice of pragmatic flouting, the understanding of contextual constraints on use, and the creative use of Facebook affordances.

This paper seeks to assess the potential for Social Networking Sites (SNSs) to play a role in language learning in the UK Higher Education (HE) sector. These sites are characterised by certain features including learning materials, synchronous and asynchronous video and text chat facilities, a peer review feature, and some sites also incorporate an award system, in the form of points (http://www.livemocha.com) or ‘berries’ (http://www.busuu.com). This serves to motivate participants by rewarding them for their progress and for their peer review activities. In order to consider if, or how, to integrate SNSs into the UK HE curriculum it is important to consider the views of practitioners and learners towards such sites and whether they consider them to have a potential role in HE language education. The paper will report on the outcomes of two small research projects which have sought to establish the view of both practitioners and students towards SNSs in the HE context. When considered overall the practitioners were more positive about the site than the learners.

This study explores 19 Taiwanese students’ writing in weekly online forum posts and traditional essays. Results drawn from discourse analysis of students’ writing in both types of writing tasks showed that the semester-long online writing accompanied by explicit instruction on essays and basic academic writing conventions appeared to help raise EFL students’ consciousness of register in the two writing contexts and help them make appropriate linguistic adjustments. Quantitative analysis using three measures of syntactic complexity revealed that the students tended to use syntactically more complex sentence structures in essays than in online forums. A number of typical informal or online linguistic features characterize the students’ online forums more frequently than in essays. Finally, although most of these EFL college students seemed able to take different approaches to online writing and essay writing at the end of the semester, some students adopted the same rigorous approach to both types of writing as a result of a strategic response to avoid losing face or being misunderstood when writing in a public domain. The results suggest that providing EFL learners a forum where they can express themselves in less formal language is beneficial.

Due to the continuing linguistic and cultural diversity among K-12 students in the US and across the English-speaking world and the increasing influence of digital technologies on learning, this qualitative study explores pre-service teachers’ perceptions of learning a foreign language online, and how such experience influence teaching linguistically, culturally, and technologically diverse students in the U.S. Participants comprised 35 teacher education students, all of whom took a 9-week online Chinese language/culture course designed specifically for pre-service teachers. Surveys with closed and open-ended questions were conducted before, during, and after the course. Data were collected online and then coded and analyzed. The participants’ responses suggested that: 1) new forms of online learning were engaging to teacher-learners with diverse learning styles, prior technological experience, needs and goals; 2) the pre-service teachers perceived that online foreign language learning during their teacher education program enhanced their linguistic, cultural and technological awareness; and 3) the participants felt that they benefited from being prepared to work with linguistic, cultural, and technological diversity in classrooms. This study has implications for similar contexts around the world.

This study explores how Vietnamese EFL students view blogs as tools with which to practise writing, examines whether student comments assist in peer revision, and evaluates whether peer comments result in substantive revisions of written drafts. Participants in this study included 11 students in an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) classroom in Vietnam. Data collected included students’ first and final drafts for two writing topics, comments posted online, and student responses to a questionnaire. Student responses to the questionnaire were analysed and their comments were coded as revision-oriented or non-revision-oriented (Liu & Sadler, 2003). This study’s findings indicate that most students expressed positive attitudes toward using blogs to practise second language (L2) writing and that most students made revision-oriented comments on their peers’ drafts. There is also evidence that students used their peers’ comments to revise their own final drafts. The implications of this study for language teaching practice are discussed.

This study investigates the effects of employing extended online thematic listening tasks on the development of listening comprehension in an English course focusing on reading and writing skill development. To accomplish this aim, extended online thematic listening tasks were designed and implemented in English as a Foreign-Language (EFL) college level General English course. Pre- and post-tests were conducted to examine students’ gains in overall listening proficiency. Moreover, students’ mid-term and final exams were compared in order to track student progress. Data on student perceptions of online thematic tasks was also collected and analyzed. Findings suggest that extended online thematic listening tasks may constitute a dynamic forum which fosters significant gains in listening comprehension, test performance, and development of learning strategies. In addition, the findings reveal that students’ initial enthusiasm toward extended online listening tasks faded and the efforts that they put into the tasks gradually decreased as the semester progressed. Therefore, time availability and management become an important pedagogical issue in e-learning.

This paper addresses postgraduate students’ perspectives toward online interaction between on-campus and distance students through online collaboration tools such as online discussion boards and Wikis. Data were collected from eight interview participants and 29 written survey respondents. Seven interrelated categories capturing the main features of on-campus students’ perspectives were generated from the data using a sequential mixed method approach, namely, a quantitative survey approach both preceded and followed by qualitative interviews. Among these categories, on-campus students’ “unwillingness” to participate in online interaction with their distance peers emerged as the core phenomenon. Drawing on the analysis of these data, this article identifies the major impediments to active online interaction and collaboration and puts forward three recommendations for promoting more frequent interaction between distance and on-campus students.