Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice: TESOL Quarterly December 2006

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Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice
Article in TESOL Quarterly · December 2006

DOI: 10.2307/40264319
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Volumes Menu
QUARTERLY
CONTENTS
ARTICLES
Literacy and the Processing of Oral Recasts in SLA 665
Martha Bigelow, Robert delMas, Kit Hansen, and Elaine Tarone
Respecifying Display Questions: Interactional Resources for
Language Teaching 691
Yo-An Lee
Language Learners’ Perceptions of Accent 715
Julie Scales, Ann Wennerstrom, Dara Richard, and Su Hui Wu
A Cross-Varietal Comparison of Deaccenting and Given Information:
Implications for International Intelligibility and Pronunciation Teaching 739
Ee Ling Low
Speech Rhythm in World Englishes: The Case of Hong Kong 763
Jane Setter
Transfer of Learning From a University Content-Based EAP Course 783
Mark Andrew James
FORUM
Classrooms as Communities of Practice: A Reevaluation 807
Mari Haneda
Readers Respond to TESOL’s 40th Anniversary Issue
Comments on J. Zuengler and E. R. Miller’s “Cognitive and Sociocultural
Perspectives: Two Parallel SLA Worlds?”
A Reader Responds. A Sociocognitive Perspective:
The Best of Both Worlds 819
Kent Hill
The Authors Reply 826
Jane Zuengler and Elizabeth R. Miller
Comments on R. Ellis’s “Current Issues in the Teaching of Grammar:
An SLA Perspective”
A Reader Responds 828
Ron Sheen
The Author Replies. A Balanced Perspective: Replying to Sheen 833
Rod Ellis
Readers Respond. “Teach the Whole of the Grammar” 837
Michael Swan and Catherine Walter
The Author Replies 839
Rod Ellis
Volume 40, Number 4 December 2006
BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES

Paralinguistic Focus on Form 841
Matthew Davies
TEACHING ISSUES
Teacher Training and the English Language in Uganda 857
Juliet Tembe
English Teaching and Training Issues in Palestine 861
Nasima Yamchi
BOOK REVIEWS
Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice 867
Patrick R. Moran
Reviewed by Mubarak Alkhatnai, Adel Al-Omrani, Karen Ashley Greenstone,
Susan Salminen, and Qisi Zhang
Converging Worlds: Play, Literacy, and Culture in Early Childhood 870
Maureen Kendrick
Reviewed by Elaine M. Day
Values in English Language Teaching 872
Bill Johnston
Reviewed by Glenn Deckert
Language Minority Students in American Schools: An Education
in English 875
H. D. Adamson
Reviewed by Juliet E. Hart
Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community 877
Barbara Rogoff, Carolyn Goodman Turkanis, and
Leslee Bartlett (Eds.)
Reviewed by Hoang Tinh Bao
Second Language Teacher Education: International Perspectives 880
Diane J. Tedick (Ed.)
Reviewed by Noelle Vance
Teaching, Learning and Researching in an ESL Context 882
Cindy L. Gunn
Reviewed by Chun-Chun Yeh
Information for Contributors 885
Cumulative Index for TESOL Quarterly, 891
Volumes 39 and 40, 2005–2006
Literacy and the Processing of Oral
Recasts in SLA
MARTHA BIGELOW, ROBERT DELMAS, KIT HANSEN,
and ELAINE TARONE
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
In this exploratory study, we examine the role of literacy in the acqui-

sition of second-language (L2) oral skills through a partial replica-
tion of Jenefer Philp’s (2003) study of recasts in native speaker
(NS)-non-native speaker (NNS) interaction. The principal research
question was the following: Is the ability to recall a recast related to
the learner’s alphabetic print literacy level? The participants in the
study were eight first language (L1) speakers of Somali with limited
formal schooling, who were grouped according to scores on L1 and
L2 literacy measures. Procedures involved interactive tasks in which
participants received and recalled recasts on their grammatically
incorrect interrogative sentences. Unlike Philp’s more educated par-
ticipants, our overall less educated participants showed no significant
effects for recast length or, as a group, for number of changes in the
recasts. This suggests that findings on the oral L2 processing of more
educated L2 learners may not hold for the oral L2 processing of less
educated learners. Within our less educated population, the more
literate group recalled all recasts significantly better than the less
literate group when correct and modified recalls were combined.
Literacy level was also significantly related to ability to recall recasts
with two or more (2+) changes, with the more literate group doing
better than the less literate group. Theoretical implications of these
findings are discussed.
LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL

RECASTS IN SLA
R esearch to date on adolescent and adult second language acquisi-

tion (SLA) has focused almost exclusively on a population of liter-
ate learners. Bigelow and Tarone (2004) and Tarone and Bigelow (2005)
argue that second language acquisition researchers should expand the
database for research on SLA to include adolescent and adult learners
TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 40, No. 4, December 2006 665

with low alphabetic print literacy levels in both their L1 and L2,1
particularly in light of the growing numbers of such learners in class-
rooms in the United States and elsewhere. In our own community, we
have most recently experienced a large influx of African refugees who
are largely Somali and have low alphabetic literacy skills. As a field,
we know that L1 literacy facilitates L2 literacy and vice-versa (see,
e.g., Cobo-Lewis, Eilers, Pearson, & Umbel, 2002; Cummins, 1991;
Verhoeven, 1994). Cummins (1979) accounts for this in his linguistic
interdependence hypothesis, which has been confirmed in many stud-
ies that compare L1 and L2 literacy skills. But there is evidence that
lack of L1 literacy may affect not just the acquisition of L2 literacy,
but also the use and acquisition of L2 oral skills (Tarone & Bigelow,
2005); comparing illiterate and low-literate L2 learners with high-
literate L2 learners can show specific ways in which learners’ literacy
levels may affect their processing of oral L2 input, with important
consequences for SLA theories that accord central importance to L2
input and L2 input processing. The current study aims to initiate
research on the impact of literacy in an alphabetic script on the
processing of oral corrective feedback in SLA.
Scholarship in L1 language acquisition shows that a child’s language
competence is significantly altered and extended by the acquisition of
alphabetic literacy skills (e.g., Olson, 2002). Recent international
research in cognition and neuropsychology also shows that illiterate
adults significantly differ from literate adults in their performance of
oral processing tasks that require awareness of linguistic segments.
These studies, summarized in the next section, suggest that the acquisi-
tion of the ability to decode an alphabetic script changes the way in
which the individual processes oral language.
ORAL PROCESSING AND CHILD L1 LITERACY
Researchers of monolingual language development have claimed

that the acquisition of L1 literacy transforms the way in which learners
think and process language in all its modalities (cf. Olson, 2002; Ong,
1988). Olson (2002) shows that preliterate children assume that writ-
ten signs represent events and meanings rather than words or sen-
tences about those events. For example, a preliterate child asked to
write “two cats” writes two scribbles; when asked to write “no cats” the
1
By literacy, we mean the ability to decode and encode written text, as opposed to broader
definitions of literacy that may include oral literacies, media literacies, and others. Illiteracy
or low literacy in this article mean the inability or limited ability to decode or encode written
text.
666 TESOL QUARTERLY

same child refuses to write anything. Olson concludes that the preliter-
ate child does not have the metalinguistic concept of word and states:
“Children’s important discovery is that their own and others’ more or
less continuous speech may be thought of as a sequence of lexical
items or ‘words’” (p. 158).
Olson (2002) goes so far as to argue that literacy is what makes
metalinguistic awareness2 possible:
Writing is what introduces our speech to us, revealing our speech as

having a particular structure. Children do not know that they speak words,
that is, that the flow of speech can be thought of as a string of lexical
items. But children in an alphabetic society do come to think about
language, minds, and world in terms of the category systems used in
writing. (p. 164)
One of Olson’s most interesting claims, in light of the current inter-

est in L2 learners’ processing of corrective feedback, is that our ability
to correct grammatical errors is inextricably tied to our literacy—our
notions of prescriptive grammar, used to correct ourselves and others,
come from standards acquired through literacy. “With writing, editing
becomes inevitable” (p. 162).
Ravid and Tolchinsky (2002) call for L1 acquisition researchers to
extend their study of child language acquisition into the school years.
They propose that children only then acquire linguistic literacy, which
is the ability to produce different language varieties appropriate to
different addressees and contexts, and to create linguistic representa-
tions that can be manipulated for metalinguistic reflection. Children
become more aware of language when they add the linguistic modality
of written language to the earlier acquired modality of speech and are
only then able to acquire the more complex structures of the
language.
ORAL PROCESSING AND ADULT ILLITERACY
This transformative effect of literacy is supported by experimental

studies with adults in cognitive psychology and neuropsychology. These
studies demonstrate that illiterate adults—that is, adults who do not
have the ability to decode an alphabetic script—consistently perform
oral cognitive tasks requiring awareness of linguistic units differently
from literate adults. Studies in this area are reviewed in Tarone and
2
Olson defines metalinguistic awareness as the ability “to think about language … in terms of
the category systems employed in writing” (p. 164).
LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL RECASTS IN SLA 667

Bigelow (2005) and include, for example, Adrian, Alegría, and Morais
(1995), Loureiro, Braga, Souza, Filho, Queiroz, and Dellatolas (2004),
Morais, Bertelson, Cary, and Alegría (1986), and Read, Zhang, Nie,
and Ding (1986).3
The oral cognitive processing tasks given in these studies focused on
skills such as phonetic discrimination (e.g., ta-sa: same or different?),
rhyme detection (e.g., mepu/pepu: rhyme or not?), syllable detection
(e.g., is [pa] contained in [pati]? or, if you delete [pa] from [pati],
what do you have?), phoneme detection (e.g., do these words begin
with the same sound? [kar], [kus]), syllable deletion (e.g., if we subtract
[de] from the word [kade], we have … ?), phoneme deletion (e.g., if
we subtract [t] from the syllable [tal], we have … ?), word reversal
(e.g., say zanahoria rota backwards), syllable reversal (e.g., say [taro]
backwards), and phoneme reversal (e.g., how would you say [los] back-
wards?). Though illiterate participants do equally well on tasks such as
rhyming and phonetic discrimination, they typically do worse than liter-
ate comparison groups on all tests that require conscious awareness of
individual phonemes (i.e., matching, monitoring, deletion, and reversal
of phonemes) and some tests requiring syllable manipulation.
Reis and Castro-Caldas (1997) conclude that illiterate participants
use only strategies that involve semantic processing but not phonologi-
cal analysis, while individuals literate in an alphabetic script can use
parallel semantic and phonological strategies, which greatly improves
their short-term memory and their accuracy on these tasks. Reis and
Castro-Caldas believe that literate individuals develop a strategy where
they assign visual-graphic meaning to units that are smaller than words
and have no semantic meaning. This strategy allows them to introduce
these units sequentially in a working memory system with the aid of
visual experience.
Learning to match graphemes and phonemes is learning an operation

in which units of auditory verbal information heard in temporal
sequence are matched to units of visual verbal information which
is spatially arranged. … Learning to read and write introduces into the
system qualitatively new strategies for dealing with oral language; that
is, conscious phonological processing, visual formal lexical representa-
tion, and all the associations that these strategies allow. (Reis & Castro-
Caldas, p. 445)
3
Read and colleagues studied older adults in China, some of whom had learned to read only
logographic script, and some of whom had also learned Pinyin, an alphabetic script. These
adults, all educated, showed the same patterns as in the other studies cited in this article:
those with alphabetic literacy greatly outperformed those without alphabetic literacy on
oral tasks requiring phonemic awareness. For example, those with alphabetic literacy scored
83% correct and those without scored 21% correct on a task of adding or deleting a single
consonant at the beginning of a spoken nonsense syllable.
668 TESOL QUARTERLY

Such findings suggest that literacy promotes awareness of linguistic
segments in oral language processing. These findings have implica-
tions for research on SLA. For example, Schmidt’s (1994) noticing
hypothesis postulates that the L2 learner must consciously notice the
L2’s linguistic forms to learn them. But is it only literate learners who
can acquire L2s this way? The research in cognitive psychology cited
earlier would suggest that L2 learners who are not literate in an alpha-
betic script may not be as capable of mentally manipulating the L2 in
terms of phonemes, syllables, and possibly words—but we know that
they do successfully acquire L2s (cf. Bigelow & Tarone, 2004). How is
Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis reconciled with such an L2 learner?
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: INTERACTION

AND NEGATIVE EVIDENCE
SLA findings to date suggest that the processes engaged by literate
learners while interacting in an L2 can promote language learning.
For example, interaction gives learners opportunities to test hypothe-
ses about the L2, receive negative and positive evidence, notice syntac-
tic or lexical gaps in the L2, and in general negotiate both form and
meaning with native or nonnative interlocutors (e.g., Chun, Day,
Chenoweth, & Luppescu, 1982; Gass, 1985). One area of particular
interest to researchers and practitioners is the use that learners make
of corrective feedback such as recasts in oral interaction (Long, Inagaki,
& Ortega, 1998; Lyster, 1998; Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Mackey & Philp,
1998; Ortega & Long, 1997). Recasts, which provide an immediate
correct reformulation of a learner’s erroneous utterance, can direct
learner attention to nontarget components of their speech at moments
when they are focused on meaning. This can be a very effective way
to help learners make form–meaning connections that will help them
acquire the L2. Nevertheless, sometimes a learner does not notice or
misinterprets the intended focus of the recast (Lyster 1998; Mackey,
Gass, & McDonough, 2000). The learner may misunderstand because
of his or her proficiency level or metalinguistic skills, or because of
qualities of the recast, such as the length of the recast or the number
of lexical or syntactic changes in the recast to the original utterance.
At the beginning of this article, we referred to the growing numbers
of adult Somali students in our own community who have low literacy
skills. Given that Somalis tend to have a strong oral culture and quickly
developing L2 oral skills (Berns McGown, 1999), one might hypothe-
size that they have a strong ability to use oral feedback provided dur-
ing interaction. At the same time, if Olson (2002), Reis and
Castro-Caldas (1997), and the other cognitive psychologists whose work

we cited earlier are right, these learners’ low levels of literacy may
restrict their ability to make use of oral corrective feedback. The role
of recasts in SLA has been addressed in a great deal of current research
with literate learners who are mostly adults but not with learners who
are not literate in any alphabetic script and who may lack the meta-
linguistic tools to make use of recasts. Consequently, the current study
aims to contribute to research on the impact of corrective feedback
on SLA and simultaneously to initiate research on the impact of liter-
acy in an alphabetic script on oral L2 processing. With this small-scale
study, we hope to begin to address this gap in the SLA literature and
inspire others to do the same.
Our point of departure in studying the SLA processes of low-literate
learners is to partially replicate Philp’s (2003) study exploring recasts
on question formation with 33 college-age, highly educated L2 learners
with 6 different L1s. In this study, Philp operationalized noticing as accu-
rate immediate recall of recasts produced in elicitation tasks. The
researcher gave the recasts immediately after a participant made an
error in an utterance. Philp’s participants were divided into high-,
intermediate-, and low-level groups according to their stage of acquisi-
tion of question formation (Pienemann & Johnston, 1987). They showed
average accurate immediate recall of these recasts 60%–70% of the time
across the three groups. Philp found that when the participants’ level
of acquisition of question forms matched the level of forms provided
in the recasts on questions, accurate recall was at least 70%, with 90%
of the recalls showing some modification from the trigger utterance.
Philp hypothesizes that the learners’ processing biases and familiarity
with, or readiness to learn, the target structure caused these results.
Participants’ accurate recall was also constrained by certain qualities
of the recasts such as the length of the recast and the number of
changes made to the learner’s initial nontarget question. Philp links
the issue of recast length to the limitations of working memory, citing
Baddeley (1986), Cowan (1995) and N. Ellis (1996). Philp (2003)
argues that her data, and the literature reviewed,
suggest that shorter recasts may be of more benefit to learners because
they can be accurately retained in working memory and thus made
available for comparison and further processing. Lengthy recasts (over
five morphemes) may overload time limitations of phonological store
and are difficult to retain in working memory in precisely the form
given. (p. 117)
In addition to length of recast, the number of changes made to the

learners’ trigger utterance was a factor. Philp notes that according to
the recast literature, recasts are less likely to be offered when the
learner utterance has many errors (e.g., Farrar, 1992; Oliver, 1995),
670 TESOL QUARTERLY

and her data show that recasts on such trigger utterances are also less
likely to be noticed by learners. She attributes this result to factors
related to working memory and cites the hypothesis that the learner
is less likely to perceive a recast that differs significantly from the ini-
tial utterance, thereby giving the learner less opportunity to compare
his or her utterance with the input provided; that is, it does not enable
“cognitive comparison” (R. Ellis, 1994, pp. 95–96).
Although the field is developing a broad knowledge base of how
teaching techniques designed to promote noticing work with literate
learners,4 it is important to note that many of these techniques use
the reading and writing modes. This fact narrows the types of tech-
niques that can be tested with participants who are not print literate.
We chose to use the recast in this study because recasts function
entirely orally and do not require literacy skills. By using recasts, we
are able to add low-literate learners to the focus-on-form research
corpus. The current study seeks to add information on low-literate
learners to the SLA literature by partially replicating Philp’s study with
eight participants who are Somali teens or young adults with low lit-
eracy levels in both their L1 and L2. Our research questions and
hypotheses are similar to Philp’s; however, we investigate learner level
not just in terms of stage of question acquisition but also in terms of
literacy level. To explore the impact of literacy level on the processing
of oral recasts, we formulated three general research questions to
guide the data analysis:
1. Is the ability to recall a recast related to the literacy level of the
learner?
2. Is the ability to recall a recast related to the length of the recast? Do
learners at higher literacy levels have better recall of longer recasts
than learners at lower literacy levels?
3. Is the ability to recall a recast related to the number of changes made
by the recast? Do learners at higher literacy levels have better recall
of recasts with more changes than learners at lower literacy levels?
METHODOLOGY
Participants
The participants were recruited from a community where a large

number of Somali families live and from an educational center for
4
See Doughty and Williams (1998) for an outline of focus-on-form techniques.

Somalis in the same area. In order to learn about and build trust with
the community before recruitment, we spent a number of months
working in collaborative projects with community youth groups. The
participants in the current study were eight adolescent and young
adult Somali learners of English as an L2; their ages ranged from 15
to 27. They were selected from an initial pool of 35 participants, based
on their scores on the literacy measures: Four had obtained the high-
est scores and four had obtained the lowest scores on the literacy
measures. Though this procedure resulted in a small participant pool,
we used this approach in an attempt to identify possible performance
differences related to literacy level. The profiles of the participants are
provided in Table 1.
Group Assignment
The participants’ L1 and L2 literacy levels were determined using

the Native Language Literacy Screening Device (Hudson River Center
for Program Development, 1999). This tool is not a comprehensive
literacy test; rather, it is a means for practitioners to establish the
learner’s relative comfort with reading and writing in their native lan-
guage for the purpose of placement in English as a second language
classes.5 The instructions are written in the native language and the
administrator asks individuals to complete the test on their own. In
this study, the researcher watched the participant for evidence of rela-
tive ease or effort with a series of reading and writing prompts and
took detailed notes about such things as following along with a finger,
subvocalization, fluency if reading aloud, and speed in turning
pages.
The test begins with writing simple personal information (e.g.,
name, address, and phone number) and answering questions (e.g.,
Where were you born? In what year did you come to the United
States?). This task is followed by a number of short personal narratives
that the participant reads silently; then the participant is asked to write
a similar short narrative. Our participants did these tasks first in Somali
(also an alphabetic language) and later in English. The two research-
ers who collected the data (the first and third authors) ranked partici-
pants’ observed behavior and writing sample on a scale from one to
5
The Office of Workforce Preparation and Continuing Education in the New York State
Education Department expresses its confidence in the measure as a “means of assessment
that … [assists] practitioners in appropriately placing adult learners in ESOL programs and
designing instructional strategies appropriate to their skill levels” (Hudson River Center for
Program Development, 1999, p. 4).
672 TESOL QUARTERLY

TABLE 1
Participant Profiles
Years
Literacy level SPEAK schooling Years in
Developmental proficiency United
ID Age Gender Mean L1 L2 stage level L1 L2 States
Abukar 15 M 5 4 6 5 50 0 4.5 4.5

Najma 27 F 5.5 5 6 5 40 7 1.5 3
Ubax 17 F 3.5 0 7 5 40 0 3 3
Fawzia 20 F 6 6 6 5 30 0 3 3
Khalid 16 M 8.5 8.5 8.5 5 50 0 7 7
Faadumo 18 F 9 9 9 5 40 0 3 3
Moxammed 17 M 9 9 9 5 40 0 7 7
Sufia 15 F 8 9 7 5 30 0 3 3
Note. All names are pseudonyms.
nine according to an analytic rubric describing their fluency and com-

fort level in reading and writing.6 The researchers conferred and
agreed on all of their rankings by comparing their observational notes
and by examining the writing sample.7
L1 and L2 literacy test results were first calculated separately and
then the mean score was used to place participants into one of two
literacy groups. The rationale for use of a mean score rather than
separate scores for L1 and L2 literacy is that the literature reviewed
suggests that the effects of literacy in either L1 or L2 may affect oral
processing in both languages. As Olson (2002) has argued, it is the
process of becoming literate in an alphabetic script that forms one’s
ability to notice and think in terms such as word.
Participants with mean scores between one and six formed a low-
literacy group, whereas participants with mean scores from eight to
nine formed a moderate-literacy group.8 All the participants’ literacy
levels fell far below what is normally assumed for SLA studies involving
adolescents and adults. Participants were also assigned English oral
proficiency scores. Two experienced Speaking Proficiency English
Assessment Kit (SPEAK) test (Educational Testing Service, 1982) raters
assigned each participant a score on a scale of 10–60 using the SPEAK
rating criteria to rate speech samples from the data set (rather than
6
We developed a rubric specifically for use in this study. It is available on request.
7
It was not possible to videotape participants or have two researchers present during the
administration of the literacy tests. Either of these options would have increased the relia-
bility of the scores obtained on these measures.
8
We use the term moderate rather than high intentionally. None of the participants appeared
to have a literacy level commensurate with their grade in school.

SPEAK test items). Table 1 shows that the groups were evenly matched
in terms of English oral proficiency.
Like Philp (2003), we established the developmental stage of our
participants according to whether they could produce nonformulaic
interrogatives of a given stage in at least two different contexts. Using
this criterion, we determined that all of the participants were at Stage
5. They produced between 6 and 28 spontaneous and accurate Stage
5 questions. Because all our participants were at Stage 5, we did not
replicate that part of Philp’s study that asks whether the ability to
recall a recast is influenced by the stage of question acquisition.9
Theoretically, none of the participants were asked to recall any ques-
tions that were beyond their stage of acquisition.
Data Collection
The data were typically collected in two sessions.10 Each participant

met individually with a researcher in a quiet setting such as an empty
homework help center or a library study room. Each session began
with small talk and some questions about past and present schooling
experiences. Participants were asked when they had come to the
United States and what other languages they spoke. Participants told
us about their schools, teachers, classes, and friends. It was common
for them to report many years spent in refugee camps and multiple
moves before settling in their current home in the United States.
We began the task protocol by telling participants about the tasks
and telling them that while they were doing the tasks, we might cor-
rect some of the things they said. We explained that when we cor-
rected them we would knock twice on the table, say the correction,
and then ask them to repeat what we had said.11 During the two ses-
sions, four spot-the-difference tasks were administered. In these tasks,
9
After carrying out our study, we learned of Young-Scholten, Ijuin and Vainikka’s (2005)
Organic Grammar, which may enable researchers to establish stage of L2 acquisition more
precisely with populations like the one we studied. Future research should explore this
option.
10
In this article we only report on the tasks that serve to replicate Philp (2003). We did collect
oral narrations of the story completion task, after it was completed, without offering any
corrective feedback. Results are reported in Tarone, Swierzbin & Bigelow (in press).
Additionally, at the end of the session, we carried out an elicited imitation task, reported in
Hansen (2005).
11
Philp (2003) offers an argument for using an auditory nonverbal prompt in her article (see
p. 109). In our study, the knocking typically became unnecessary as students became accus-
tomed to the procedure.
674 TESOL QUARTERLY

the researcher and participant each had a card with similar pictures
of objects or a scene. The participant’s task was to ask questions to
discover the minor differences in each picture pair. In addition, six
story-completion tasks were administered; in each one, the researcher
presented to the participant a sequence of drawings depicting a story.
The researcher laid one card at a time on the table, at which time
the participant asked the researcher questions to discover the plot of
the story.12 The native language literacy measure was completed after
the participant had finished the first round of tasks. Participants then
either returned for a second session or took a break before beginning
the second session. This second session consisted of the same sequence
of tasks, although they completed the English language literacy meas-
ure at the end. Although Philp’s (2003) participants did the tasks in
five meetings, each 20 minutes long, our participants did them in two
sessions ranging from 60 to 150 minutes. Some needed more time to
complete the tasks; others were given breaks to pray or eat.
Data Analysis
The target of this acquisition study, as in Philp (2003), is question

formation in English. We follow Philp in adopting Pienemann, Johnston
and Brindley’s (1988) framework, which predicts six stages in the
acquisition of English question forms. Participant nontarget questions
(triggers), researcher recasts of the triggers, and the participant repeti-
tions of the recasts (recalls) were transcribed and coded. We followed
Philp’s coding procedure and categorized (a) the length of the recast,
(b) the number and type of corrections in the recast, (c) the degree
of accuracy of the recall, and (d) the question stages of both the trig-
ger and the recast. The interrater agreement rate was 99.5%.
Consistent with Philp, recast length was operationalized in terms of
morphemes, with a recast consisting of six or more morphemes clas-
sified as long and a recast of five or fewer morphemes as short.13 The
number of changes to the trigger that appeared in the recast was also
12
Three spot-the-difference tasks and three story-completion tasks were exactly the same
tasks used in Philp (2003). We created four of our own tasks based on these models. The
original picture tasks were developed at the Language Acquisition Research Centre (LARC)
with funding from Language Australia.
13
Morpheme counts were based on guidelines used in Johnson’s (n.d.) child language devel-
opment study (n.d.) at the University of Florida. Each word counts as a morpheme, and
prefix and suffix bound morphemes (i.e., plural –s, past tense –ed, progressive –ing, third
person present tense –s, possessive’s, and contractions) all counted as additional
morphemes.

counted according to Philp’s (1999; 2003) procedures. Most correc-
tions to a trigger fell into Philp’s categories: (a) inversion (Where he
is?),14 (b) insertion (Where he go?), (c) fronting (He mad?), (d) substitution
(What does he doing?), and (e) auxiliary verb (What he has a neighbor?),
with the exception of (f) deletion (Why is he is mad?) and (g) sub-
ject duplication (Are these people they watching him?), which we added to
account for our data. Each correction to the trigger utterance was
counted as one change. Recast changes unrelated to question con-
structions were neither counted nor included in data analysis.
Degree of accuracy was categorized as correct, modified or no recall.
Recall accuracy was judged correct when the recall of the question form
exactly matched that of the recast, as in the following example:
Trigger: What she doing?
Recast: What is she doing? [2 knocks]
Recall: What is she doing? [correct]
The recall was judged as modified if only some of the changes mod-
eled in the recast were made, as in the following example:
Trigger: He is surprised?
Recast: Is he surprised? [2 knocks]
Recall: Is he is surprised? [modified]
If none of the target changes were recalled, the recall was judged
no recall, as in the following example:
Trigger: What color it is?
Recast: What color is it? [2 knocks]
Recall: What colorrrrr [no recall]
Analyses approximated those of Philp with the addition of two vari-

ables: literacy level, as operationalized earlier, and proportion of cor-
rect or modified recalls. Analyses were conducted with dependent
variables being (a) proportion of correct recall, (b) recast length, and
14
The parenthetical examples show the learner utterance that then received some type of
correction (inversion, insertion, etc.).
676 TESOL QUARTERLY

(c) number of changes in recast. The independent variable was literacy
level. In order to get large enough counts for recasts with more than
one change, the counts for two changes and three or more (3+)
changes were combined into a single category of two or more (2+)
changes. We believe that this choice does not change the construct
behind Philp’s decision, namely, that the participants can more easily
process one change in the recast than they can process multiple
changes, thereby dividing their attentional resources. Examples of this
second dependent variable are as follows.
Recalling recasts with one change:
Trigger: Why he’s so happy?
Recast: Why is he so happy? [2 knocks]
Recall: Why is he so happy? [correct]
Recalling recasts with 2 + changes:
Trigger: What he doing, the man in the sitting chair?
Recast: What is the man sitting in the chair doing? [2 knocks]
Recall: What is the man sitting in the chair doing? [correct]
The small sample size makes it difficult to assess the assumption of

normally distributed variables that is needed for standard parametric
statistical analyses. Fortunately, there are statistical methods that can
be used to establish significance with small, nonnormally distributed
samples. Exact permutation tests, which have never to our knowledge
been used in an applied linguistics study, are ideal for small sample
sizes such as ours because they do not assume an underlying distribu-
tion for the test statistic (Effron & Tibshirani, 1993; Good, 2001).
The logic of the exact permutation tests reported in this article is
the same familiar logic used to test for the difference between the
means from two independent samples. Under the null hypothesis, it
is assumed that there is only one underlying population of values from
which both samples were drawn. The data are then analyzed to see if
they produce convincing evidence that the null hypothesis is not ten-
able. This evidence takes the form of a difference between the two
samples means that is so large that the probability is very small of
obtaining a difference of this magnitude or larger. This probability,
often referred to as the p value of the test statistic, is estimated, typi-
cally by making an assumption about the nature of the underlying
probability distribution for the test statistic. The normal distribution

and student’s t-distribution are two possible models for the underlying
probability distribution of the difference between two sample means,
but they are not the only possibilities. In fact, permutation tests do
not assume an underlying theoretical probability distribution, yet pro-
duce extremely accurate results with respect to the Type I error rate
(Effron & Tibshirani, 1993, p. 210). Because permutation tests are
more general in their application, they do not have the same statistical
power as their parametric counterparts, which means that some real
population differences are not as likely to be detected.
An exact permutation test is based on a permutation distribution.
Under the null hypothesis, the combined observations from both sam-
ples are free to be assigned to either group because they are assumed
to come from the same population. When the sample sizes are small,
the permutation test consists of generating all possible assignments of
the values to the two groups, calculating the test statistic for each
group, and generating an empirical probability distribution for the test
statistic. The empirical one-tailed p value for the observed test statistic
(i.e., the observed difference between the two sample means) is the
proportion of test statistic values which have a magnitude (in the
hypothesized direction) that is as large, or larger, than the observed
test statistic. One-tailed p values are reported for all tests where a
measure of recall is the dependent variable because higher literacy
levels are predicted to produce better recall. Two-tailed p values are
reported for all statistical tests where morpheme length of a recast is
the dependent variable because no theoretical rationale was found to
predict an effect of literacy level on morpheme length.
The small sample sizes in this study made it relatively easy to pro-
duce all combinations of group assignments to scores. As an example,
for two samples with 4 observations each, there are 8!/(4!4!) = 70
possible permutations of the 8 observed values. For each exact permu-
tation test reported in this study, Microsoft Excel was used to generate
all possible assignments of the values, compute the test statistic for
each assignment, and determine the one-tailed p value for the observed
test statistic. In reporting the results, the level of significance was set
at α = 0.05, but because this is an exploratory study, comments are
also given for findings with probability levels between 0.05 and 0.10.
RESULTS
Research Question 1
Is the ability to recall a recast related to the literacy level of the
learner?
678 TESOL QUARTERLY

To address this question, two separate sets of analyses were con-
ducted for each dependent measure: proportion of correct recall, and
proportion of correct and modified recall. The second analysis was
done in order to examine whether any uptake from the recast occurred,
including any recast that did not result in exact recall.
The average recall of all recasts by the moderate literacy group as
compared with that of the low literacy group is in the expected direction
for all tests on both dependent measures: In every test, the mean scores
of the moderate literacy group are higher than those of the low literacy
group. This pattern on the first dependent measure (the mean proportion
of correct recalls) approached but did not reach significance at p < .05
for several tests according to recast type, with the test for correct recall
of all recasts and the test for correct recall of short recasts showing
differences due to literacy level that fall between p = 0.05 and p = 0.10.
However, the impact of literacy level on the second dependent
measure (the mean proportion of correct and modified recall) pro-
duced much lower p values, two of which reached significance at the
p < .05 level. The more literate group recalled, in correct or modified
form, all recasts significantly more often than the less literate group
(p = 0.043). The more literate group also recalled correct or modified
recasts with 2+ changes significantly more than the less literate group
(p = 0.014). These results show that literacy level was significantly
related to the ability to recall recasts.15
Research Question 2
Is the ability to recall a recast related to the length of the recast?

Do learners at higher literacy levels have better recall of longer recasts
than learners at lower literacy levels?
To address this question, two new dependent measures were calcu-
lated by subtracting the proportion of recall (correct, or correct and
modified) for short recasts from the proportion of recall for long recasts.
The average difference in proportion of correct recall was –0.037 (SD ⫽ 0.21).
15
An anonymous reviewer asks why we did not apply a Bonferroni adjustment to control for
experimentwise error. Because of the exploratory nature of this study, we would argue
against using a Bonferroni adjustment to the Type I Error rate per comparison. Reducing
the error rate per comparison will lower the overall Type I Error rate for each set of com-
parisons, but it will also increase the Type II Error rate (the likelihood of not rejecting the
null hypothesis when in fact it is false and should be rejected). See Maxwell and Delaney
(2004) for an interesting discussion of this issue. Given the exploratory nature of the study,
we want to identify potential trends of theoretical interest. We have set the per comparison
Type I Error rate at 0.10, which is consistent with this intention.

TABLE 2
Mean Proportion of Recalls Under Two Criteria by Literacy Level
Correct recall
Mean literacy level
Recast type Low 1–6 Moderate 8 or 9 p value
All .633 .779 .057
Long .676 .751 .214
Short .657 .844 .086
1 change .533 .597 .243
2+ changes .429 .723 .143
Correct or modified recall
All .852 .928 .043
Long .827 .907 .086
Short .851 .974 .071
1 change .849 .909 .114
2+ changes .820 1.000 .014
Note. Range of literacy measure is 1–9. All p values are one-tailed.
An exact permutation test (Good, 2001) was conducted by computing

the mean difference score for all 256 possible assignments of negative
and positive signs to the absolute values of the difference scores.
The resulting one-tailed p value (p ⫽ 0.344) suggests there is no statisti-
cal evidence that, for the group as a whole, the participants’ proportion
of correct recall was dependent on the length of the recast.
A similar analysis was conducted for the difference between long
and short recasts based on proportion of correct and modified recall. The average
difference in proportion of correct and modified recall was –0.046
(SD ⫽ 0.11). An exact permutation test of the mean difference score
resulted in a one-tailed p value of p ⫽ 0.133. There is no statistical
evidence that, for the group as a whole, the participants’ proportion of
correct and modified recall was dependent on the length of the recast.
Additional analyses were conducted to see if the participants’ mean
literacy levels interacted with recast length. Differences between the
two mean literacy level groups with respect to the length of the recasts
they received were tested via permutation tests. Table 3 indicates that
there were no statistically significant differences in recast length
between the two literacy level groups. The mean difference in propor-
tion of correct recall of long and short recasts between the high and low
mean literacy groups is presented in Table 4. The p value suggests no
evidence of a difference in trend between recalling short and long
recasts for the different mean literacy groups.
To sum up, for this group as a whole, the ability to recall a recast
is not related to the length of the recast. The same lack of influence
680 TESOL QUARTERLY

TABLE 3
Mean Morpheme Length of Recasts by Literacy Level
Mean literacy level

Recast type Low 1–6 Moderate 8 or 9 p value
All 5.46 6.13 .229
Long 6.73 7.25 .329
Short 4.46 4.17 .600
Note. All p values are two-tailed.
of recast length on recall is shown for learners at higher and lower

literacy levels.
Research Question 3
Is the ability to recall a recast related to the number of changes

made by the recast? Do learners at higher literacy levels have better
recall of recasts with more changes than learners at lower literacy
levels?
A direct answer to this question would say whether there is a dif-
ference for the group as a whole16 in the dependent measures between
recasts with one change and recasts with 2+ changes. The proportion of
correct recall for recasts with one change was subtracted from the proportion
of correct recall for recasts with 2+ changes to form the dependent measure.
An exact permutation test produced a one-tailed p value of p = 0.449,
so there is no statistical evidence that, as a group, the participants’
recall was dependent on the number of changes in the recast.
A similar analysis was conducted for the difference between recasts
with one and 2+ changes based on the proportion of correct and modified
recalls combined. An exact permutation test produced no statistical
evidence (p = 0.270) that, for the group as a whole, the participants’
recall was dependent on the number of changes in the recast, even
when modified recalls are included.
Another way of answering Research Question 3 is to determine
whether, within the participant group, the number of changes in the
recast had a significantly different impact on the more literate versus
less literate groups. As with Research Question 2, the first analysis
considers difference in proportion of correct recall and the second analysis
16
Again, results for the group as a whole on this measure are presented in the text, while
results broken down by developmental stage and literacy level appear in Tables 2 and 4.

TABLE 4
Mean Difference in Proportion of Recalled Recasts by Literacy Level
Correct recall
Mean literacy level
Type of difference Low 1–6 Moderate 8 or 9 p value
Long-short .019 – 0.094 .343

2+ changes – 1 change – 0.104 .126 .186
Correct or modified recall
Long-short – 0.025 – 0.068 .329

2+ changes – 1 change – 0.029 .091 .171
Note. All p values are one-tailed.
looks at differences in proportion of correct and modified recall

combined.
Proportion of Correct Recall
Table 2 presents the proportion of correct recall of recasts with only

one change and with 2+ changes for the moderate and low literacy
levels. Table 4 presents the difference between proportion of correct
recall of recasts with 2+ and one change for the moderate and low
literacy levels. The p values present no statistical evidence of a differ-
ence between the two literacy levels for correct recall of recasts as a
function of the number of changes presented in the recast.
Proportion of Correct and Modiﬁed Recall

Table 2 presents the proportion of correct or modified recalls of
recasts with only one change and with 2+ changes for the moderate
and low-literacy groups. The difference between the two literacy groups
for recasts with 2+ changes is significant at the 0.05 level (p = 0.014).
This suggests that the moderate literacy group recalled correctly or in
modified form a larger proportion of recasts with 2+ changes when
compared with the lower literacy group. The difference between the
two literacy groups for recasts with one change was not statistically
significant (but in the expected direction, moderate > low).
Table 4 presents the difference between proportion of correct
or modified recalls of recasts with 2+ and one change for the higher
682 TESOL QUARTERLY

and lower mean literacy groups. The p value suggests no evidence
of a different trend between the higher and lower literacy groups in
differentially recalling recasts on the basis of the number of changes.
If we consider the difference in mean recall for one change and
for 2+ changes between the two groups in Table 2, we see (a) the dif-
ference between the two groups is larger for 2+ changes and (b) the
low-literacy group has a lower average for 2+ changes compared with
one change, whereas the moderate literacy group has the opposite
trend (higher average recall for 2+ changes). So, the two groups went
in opposite directions going from one change to 2+ changes. Again,
this pattern results in a larger difference between groups for 2+
changes, and the difference is statistically significant. However, the
overall difference between one change and 2+ changes for each group
is so small (relative to the overall variability in the two groups) that a
difference between the groups on this measure cannot be established
statistically. Even though the moderate literacy group does have a
larger difference between one change and 2+ changes (and in a posi-
tive direction, in contrast to the small negative change for the low-
literacy group), the size of the difference is not large enough to establish
that the difference between one and 2+ changes for the moderate
group is different than that observed for the low-literacy group.
To sum up, the ability of these participants as a group to recall a
recast, in general, is not significantly related to the number of changes
made in the recast, in contrast to Philp’s participants whose recall was
constrained by the number of changes made in the recast. However,
within our group, learners at moderate literacy levels performed sig-
nificantly better than low-literate learners on one of our two measures
in producing correct or modified recalls of recasts with 2+ changes.
In other words, our participants in the moderate literacy group per-
formed more like those of Philp’s participants who were at a similar
developmental stage of question development.
DISCUSSION
This study is a partial replication of Philp’s (2003) study with a

population of less educated, less literate learners. The permutation test
suggests that, within our participant group, relative literacy level is
significantly related to ability to produce correct or modified recall of
oral recasts. The more literate group recalled, in correct or modified
form, all recasts significantly better than the less literate group.
However, the overall uptake levels of our participants are only slightly
lower than those in Philp’s study, suggesting that recasts facilitate SLA,
perhaps along continua of literacy, proficiency, and so on.

Overall, length of the recast was much less important in our study
of less literate learners than it was in Philp’s study of highly literate
learners. Although she found that length of recast had a significant
impact on her participants’ recall performance, the less literate par-
ticipants in our study did not show this result. Permutation analysis
showed no significant relationship between recast length and partici-
pants’ recall. We suspect that this result occurred because some of our
participants had a good deal of difficulty even with very short recasts,
such as the following:
Trigger: *Where he is?
Recast: Where is he?
Recall: *Where he is? (no recall)
The lack of significance of recast length could also have occurred

because lower literacy participants have developed coping strategies for
holding a great deal of meaningful oral language in short-term mem-
ory, thereby pointing to a potential strength low-literate learners bring
to language learning.
We did find a relationship between recast complexity and partici-
pants’ uptake, with respect to literacy. The group with the higher mean
literacy levels were more like Philp’s high- and intermediate-level groups,
in that they produced a higher percentage of correct or modified recalls
of recasts with 2+ changes than did the lower literacy group. The per-
mutation analysis suggests that this difference between the two literacy
level groups was significant. This finding is consistent with Olson’s
(2002) view that more literate learners have more metalinguistic aware-
ness, and Reis and Castro-Caldas’s (1997) claim that this awareness can
assist working memory. Consider that remembering 2+ changes to the
linguistic form of an utterance will be easier if the learner is able to
keep straight the different grammatical categories that were changed.
If, as Reis and Castro-Caldas claim, literate individuals have a strategy
for working memory that illiterate individuals do not—the ability to
assign visual-graphic meaning to units that have formal significance but
no semantic meaning—then the more literate individuals in our study
would have been able to use this tool to process several changes in
working memory. This ability, as Reis and Castro-Caldas would say, would
necessarily involve conscious phonological processing, visual formal lexi-
cal representations, and their associations—all of which are strategies
available to literate, but not to illiterate individuals. We argue that such
strategies are required for conscious noticing (Schmidt & Frota, 1986)
and may not be available for use by low-literate L2 learners such as
684 TESOL QUARTERLY

those in this study. Given the relatively high level of oral L2 question
development of our study participants, such a finding may even suggest
that conscious noticing may not always be required for successful SLA.
(In Tarone & Bigelow, in press, we explore these issues further with an
in-depth analysis of one of this study’s low-literate participants.)
Our findings that less literate learners may be less able to recall
certain linguistic forms in oral corrective feedback suggest that con-
scious noticing during oral interaction may be only one of many roads
to SLA and of substantially more use for literate populations than for
illiterate ones. This is useful for teachers to know. Although it is pre-
mature to draw firm pedagogical recommendations about the role of
literacy in noticing corrective feedback offered via recasts, our findings
suggest that students with little or low alphabetic print literacy might
not be using oral interaction, including corrective feedback, in the
same ways as students who have strong L1 or L2 print literacy. Students
with low print literacy may be relying on semantic processing strategies
as opposed to morphosyntactic processing strategies. The implication
of learning a language this way, an implication easily confirmed with
teachers, is that low-literate students are likely to have excellent stra-
tegic competence. This is clearly a strength such students bring to an
academic setting. The flip side is that L2 learners with low print liter-
acy may find it much harder to acquire semantically redundant mor-
phological and the more complex syntactic features of the L2.17 This
possibility suggests that teachers of low-literate students should not just
provide corrective feedback during oral interaction, but also explore
the use of more explicit instruction and feedback strategies that can
facilitate their noticing and monitoring of L2 morphosyntactic fea-
tures. It is clear that adolescent and adult English language learners
with low literacy require specialized literacy instruction that includes
not only engagement with age-appropriate and meaningful text
through the oral modes, but also explicit instruction on how to decode
text. Teachers of older students may not have learned how to teach
basic bottom-up decoding skills. Therefore, it is essential that teacher
education programs prepare teachers for this challenge.
CONCLUSION
It is not a new finding in the field of SLA that there are relation-
ships among and between the L1 and L2 language modalities. However,
the relationship between alphabetic literacy and the processing of oral
17
Tarone, Swierzbin, and Bigelow (in press) provide evidence that literacy level is related to
the interlanguage forms used in oral narratives.

L2 input has been neglected in current explorations of the role of
attention in SLA. We believe that this gap has occurred, in part, because
SLA researchers rarely study language learners outside the walls of
academia, particularly refugees or immigrants with limited or no formal
schooling. Such learners may be difficult to find and recruit, but they
must be included in SLA research much more frequently than they
have been to date. The results of the current study show that replicat-
ing a study with quite different populations can make results hard to
predict. Differences in relative literacy level among the participants in
our study were related to differences in accuracy of recall within our
participant group that reached significance. Literacy was also a factor
when recasts contained 2+ changes. Those with higher literacy levels
were significantly better at producing correct or modified recalls of
recasts containing multiple changes than those with lower literacy lev-
els, indicating an area that warrants further testing: Literacy may aug-
ment language learners’ ability to use visual formal lexical representations
in short-term memory in processing corrective feedback. The length of
the recast for our less literate participants was not significantly related
to their ability to produce a correct recall, though it was for Philp’s
participants. Whether these results are due to our participants’ reliance
on semantic memory strategies over phonological strategies, practice
with oral language memorization, greater difficulty recalling even short
recasts, or some other factor is an issue for further exploration.
In conclusion, the literacy level of the learner was a significant fac-
tor in participants’ ability to correctly recall recasts. The results of this
small-scale study show promise for further study of the role of literacy
in the processing and acquisition of oral L2 and suggest that the field
of SLA will benefit from further study of neglected populations of L2
learners such as those with minimal alphabetic literacy levels. Although
the number of participants in this pioneering study is small, our ability
to use a statistical measure appropriate to small data samples enables
us to claim significance for the pattern of relationship we found for
these learners between literacy level and accuracy of processing oral
negative feedback. But the current study should be only the first in a
series that explores the general extent of this relationship in the L2
learner population at large. We therefore call for the earliest possible
replication of the current study in order to establish most firmly the
generalizability of our findings.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are very grateful to the Somali participants who trusted us enough to provide us
the data for this study. Kim Johnson, Larry Davis, Mike Hinrichs, and Becky Uran
Markman helped us with research, transcription, and data analysis. We benefited
686 TESOL QUARTERLY

greatly from feedback from Anne Lazaraton, Michael Graves, and Lourdes Ortega
on earlier versions of the paper. Some of the findings presented in this paper were
presented at AAAL in Portland, Oregon, in 2004 and at AILA in Madison, Wisconsin,
in 2005.
THE AUTHORS
Martha Bigelow is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and
Instruction at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. Her research inter-
ests are language teacher education and school-age English language learners’ liter-
acy practices and processes, with a focus on refugee and immigrant communities.
Robert delMas is an associate professor of statistics in the Department of Educational

Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. He conducts research
on activity-based approaches to teaching statistics, with a current focus on students’
understanding of statistical variability, and is also working on an assessment project
funded by the National Science Foundation.
Kit Hansen holds master’s degrees in psycholinguistics and English as a second lan-
guage, both from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA, where she is an
instructor and non-native-speaker specialist in the English Composition Department
and a consultant in the Center for Writing. Her research interests are in cognition,
literacy, and second language acquisition.
Elaine Tarone is a professor of English as a second language at the University of

Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA, where she also directs the Center for Advanced
Research on Language Acquisition. Her first publication appeared in TESOL Quarterly
in 1972; she has since published many books and papers on second language acquisi-
tion and applied linguistics.
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Respecifying Display Questions:
Interactional Resources for Language
Teaching
YO-AN LEE
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Previous research into teachers’ questions has focused on what types

of questions are more conducive for developing students’ communi-
cative language use. In this regard, display questions, whose answers
the teacher already knows, are considered less effective because they
limit opportunities for students to use genuine language use (Long
& Sato, 1983). Although the research into teacher questions has been
refined in recent years, it is not certain how much we know about
how display questions work, especially how they are produced and
acted on in the course of classroom interaction by language teachers
and students. This article uses a sequential analysis (Koshik, 2002;
Markee, 2000; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, Koshik,
Jacoby, & Olsher, 2002) to examine teachers’ display questions.
Sequential analysis considers how classroom talk is the outcome of
the contingent coordination of interactional work of common under-
standing (Moerman & Sacks, 1971/1988). Through analysis of tran-
scribed interaction in an English as a second language (ESL)
classroom, this article argues that display questions are central
resources whereby language teachers and students organize their les-
sons and produce language pedagogy.
INTRODUCTION
Q uestioning is one of the most familiar forms of teacher talk in

language classrooms. In their seminal study of teacher questions,
Long and Sato (1983) observed a total of 938 questions in six elemen-
tary ESL classes. Teachers in White and Lightbown’s (1984) study
asked nearly 200 questions per class period. This frequent use of ques-
tions prompted an analytic interest in identifying the types of ques-
tions that would facilitate communicative language use from ESL

students (see Chaudron, 1988, pp. 126–132; Ellis, 1994, pp. 586–592,
for early reviews).
Particular attention was paid to two types of questions: display questions
and referential questions (Long & Sato, 1983; Nunn, 1999). Display questions
call for the information that the teacher already knows or has established
at least the parameters for the students’ answers.1 Accordingly, display
questions are deemed less effective in generating opportunities for stu-
dents to use the target language than are referential questions, which ask
for information the teacher may not know (Brock, 1986; Long & Sato,
1983). Subsequent research has uncovered a more complex array of the
functions that teachers’ questions perform and, thus, has generated more
refined systems for categorizing them (e.g., Banbrook & Skehan, 1990;
Cullen, 1998; Nunn, 1999).
As informative as these studies have been, they represent a distinc-
tive way of formulating teachers’ questions, one that relies on func-
tional typology to identify and sort out the pedagogical merits of each
question type. This analytic route corresponds with the process–
product paradigm in second language acquisition literature (e.g.,
Doughty & Long, 2003; Long, 1996) that considers teacher questions
as an important input and process variable for language acquisition to
take place.
While recognizing this development, I wonder whether these cat-
egorical formulations provide an adequate account of what questions
do in the practical realities of classroom interaction: How are they
used and acted on by language teachers and their students in the
course of interaction? The present article takes on a procedural
approach in examining teacher questions. It recognizes that ques-
tioning is an important part of teacher talk through which a variety
of pedagogical and social actions are carried out, for example, intro-
ducing topics, demonstrating concepts, eliciting forms of reason-
ing, correcting grammar, or even reproaching. It is what teachers
and students do with the questions and what they accomplish in
doing so that are of interest. Focusing on the sequential production
of the questions and the interpretive choices and methods they enact,
I demonstrate that display questions are one of the central resources
whereby language teachers and their students collaboratively
organize their lessons and produce language pedagogy as courses
of action.
1
This type of question is also known as Question with Known Answer in educational litera-
ture (Mehan, 1978). Searle (1969) calls this test question. Such questions can be traced
back to the Socratic method (Meno, 1981).
692 TESOL QUARTERLY

DISPLAY QUESTIONS AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
The analytic interest in display questions developed from process–

product studies that treat teacher questions as an important input
variable for students’ language acquisition. The following is a typical
example of a display question.2
T: What is the capital of Peru?
S: Lima.
T: Good. (Long & Sato, 1983, p. 271).
In their study of teachers’ questions in ESL classrooms, Long and

Sato (1983) found that the speech of six ESL teachers differed greatly
from that of native English speakers speaking to nonnative English
speakers outside the classroom. One noticeable difference was that
these teachers used display questions in their classrooms far more
often than referential questions. This practice was alarming because
display questions are considered less likely to engage students in the
meaningful interaction that would prepare them for language interac-
tion outside the classrooms. Several researchers in subsequent studies
also confirmed this restrictive nature of display questions and sug-
gested that teachers use questions, such as referential questions, that
would allow more opportunities for communicative language use and
less control over the interactional sequence (Brock, 1986; Lynch, 1991;
Pica & Long, 1986; White & Lightbown, 1984).3
In the ensuing years, however, many critiques have questioned
whether the proposed distinction adequately represents teachers’ ques-
tions. Van Lier (1988), for example, argued that this distinction is too
simplistic:
The practice of questioning in L2 classrooms, pervasive though it is, has so
far received only superficial treatment…. An analysis must go beyond sim-
ple distinctions such as display and referential to carefully examine the
purposes and the effects of questions, not only in terms of linguistic pro-
duction, but also in terms of cognitive demands and interactive purpose.
(p. 224)
2
Display questions are most common in classroom settings and also in childhood sociali-
zation (French & Maclure, 1981; Ochs, Schieffelin, & Platt, 1979).
3
One of the reviewers pointed out that deliberately simplistic classification of forms and
functions of display and referential questions was often preferred in order to facilitate
helping practicing teachers who are not familiar with or do not have access to the
research findings on this area.
RESPECIFYING DISPLAY QUESTIONS 693

Several researchers shared this assessment and incorporated a complex
array of the functions that teachers’ questions perform (e.g., Hakansson
& Lindberg, 1988; Koivukari, 1987).
Others paid closer attention to the classroom contexts in which
teachers’ questions are produced. Cullen (1998) criticized the ten-
dency to assess questions by reference to communications outside the
classroom and proposed that the realities of classroom contexts must
be considered on their own terms. Nunn (1999) identified three levels
of display questions that enabled him to capture the various pedagogi-
cal functions they perform in classrooms. Banbrook & Skehan (1990)
also argued for the need for a finer system of categories to represent
the complex ways in which classroom interaction is carried out through
questioning.
As research into teacher questions continues, a common thread
ties many studies of teacher questions together. They concentrate
on developing resources to categorize and characterize questions
conceptually, which allows researchers to organize discrete cases
of teachers’ questions into stable and manageable constructs. This
system accommodates distinctions among question types, such
as display and referential questions, and makes it possible to
determine the pedagogical consequences of each type of question
and their relevance to language acquisition. Teachers’ questions
are considered in light of these unifying categories and underlying
functions.
Note, however, that this conceptual formulation invokes only lim-
ited predetermined frames and that these frames do not guarantee
access to the multiple layers of meaning the participants might
experience. Markee’s (1995) research illustrates the difficulty of
representing each type of question in such broad methodological
categories. Using sequential analysis, he demonstrated that teach-
ers’ display questions can generate more interpretations than the
methodological categories project. Markee even suggests that dis-
play questions can be potentially useful for students’ language
acquisition because they can offer “a pedagogical opportunity for
the teacher-as-expert to play a classic scaffolding role in the interac-
tion” (p. 82).
Markee’s research is a useful demonstration that reliance on for-
mal categorization often bypasses the very process in which display
questions are occasioned and acted on by those who use them.
Conceptual categories may help identify teachers’ questions as for-
mal constructs, yet they do not account for the processes through
which display questions are made intelligible by those who use
them in actual classroom interaction and what they accomplish in
doing so.
694 TESOL QUARTERLY

Display Questions in Three-Turn Sequence
Rather than relying on formal categories, I focus on the production

of display questions in their natural contexts of real-time interaction.
By natural context, I mean the sequential contexts of talk in which the
parties display their understanding of what is going on in the course
of interaction, most prominently in their next turn at talk. Meaning
making is members’ task first, and their work is made available to
each other and to us, analysts, in the way they respond to and act on
the prior turns within sequences of action (Sacks, Schegloff, &
Jefferson, 1974).
One of the most familiar sequential contexts in which display ques-
tions are found in the classroom is the three-turn sequence of initia-
tion-response-evaluation (IRE) (Mehan, 1979; McHoul, 1978; Sinclair &
Coulthard, 1975). The teacher initiates a sequence by asking a question
in the first turn, which calls for a reply from the students in the next
turn. The turn routinely goes back to the teacher who then comments
on the adequacy of the reply in the third turn (McHoul, 1978; Mehan,
1979). Because teachers tend to know the answers to their display ques-
tions, not all student answers have equal standing; some answers are
preferred over others (Levinson, 1983; Pomerantz, 1984; Schegloff,
1972).
These three-turn sequences are considered structurally robust and
studies as well as criticisms of them are familiar in the literature
(Cazden, 2001; Lemke, 1990; Nassaji & Wells, 2000; Nunan, 1987;
Wells, 1993). Accordingly, many researchers look beyond the organiza-
tion of the three-turn sequence itself to find underlying variables that
motivate and shape the sequences. Some have noted that IRE sequences
are an effective means of monitoring and guiding students’ learning
(Christie, 1995; Mercer, 1992). Others have taken a negative position
that considers IRE sequences a major source of teachers’ power and
control that limits students’ construction of knowledge by imposing
the teacher’s own (Allwright & Bailey, 1991; Dinsmore, 1985; Ellis,
1994, Lemke, 1990; Wood, 1992; Young, 1992).
From a sequential perspective, however, the three-turn sequence is
a major resource for teachers and their students in organizing their
lessons as a course of action (Macbeth, 2003; Mehan, 1979). Each posi-
tion in the sequence displays how the teacher and students make sense
of the preceding turns: The students display in their second turn how
they understand the teacher’s question, and the teacher shows his or
her hearing of the students’ response to the initial questions in the
third turn. Consequently, the intelligibility of teachers’ display ques-
tions is very much contingent on the real-time interpretive work of the

students. The following excerpt illustrates this contingent meaning
making process that evolves around display questions. The teacher and
her students are doing a grammar exercise based on the course
textbook.
Fragment 14
440. T: Let’s try number one, I bought all: my textboo:ks, (1.0) a time clause.
441. B: Yesterday.
442. T: Let’s make it a ti:me clau::se now, (.) Bernage just said yes::terday=
443. [((pointing to Bernage))]
444. B: =The day [before yesterday.
445. T: [but what is it- hehehe, ˚no, the day before doesn’t work either˚ what
446. is a clause, what do you have to have, to have a clause?=
447. J: =Subject [and verb-
448. T: [( ) ˚too fast I didn’t understand˚ uh a subject -(.) plus verb, ˚so
449. that yesterday is just˚ and then:: so you can you make a clause, I bought all my
450. textbooks?
This segment begins with the teacher’s call for “a time clause” in
line 440 and one of the students, named Bernage, offered “yesterday”
in the second turn (441) completing the turn that the teacher began
in line 440, “I bought all my textbooks.”
Sequentially, it is in the following third turn where Bernage can see
how his response fared as an answer. The teacher’s third turn begins
as if she continues her call for a time clause, “Let’s make a time
clause,” but she organizes her turn in a way that shows how she under-
stands Bernage’s answer. First, the teacher gives a distinctive phonetic
mark on the word clause by stretching the word, “Let’s make a ti:me
clau::se.” Second, in her next turn, the teacher announces, “Bernage
just said yes::terday” (442) with somewhat an exaggerated pitch on the
word “yes::terday.”
Bernage correctly heard this as negative feedback and tried another
answer in the very next turn, “The day before yesterday” (444).
Unfortunately, Bernage’s second attempt did not get a positive answer,
either, because the teacher gives more explicit feedback, “no, the day
before doesn’t work either” (445). This exchange is followed by another
set of questions from the teacher, “what is a clause, what do you have
to have, to have a clause?” (445–446).
4
See appendix for transcript notations.
696 TESOL QUARTERLY

These are display questions about grammar for which the answers
are known. However, simply identifying them as display questions and
nothing more would miss the local contingencies of interpretive actions
that give the questions their sensible context. Though the initial ques-
tion in line 440 called for a time clause, the questions in lines 445–446
focus on the clause part, “what is a clause, what do you have to have,
to have a clause?” That is to say, the teacher reformulates her initial
question about the time clause to emphasize and make noticeable one
particular aspect of her initial call, namely, the clause part. This refor-
mulation is largely occasioned by her exchange with Bernage. With
her questions, the teacher points to what became problematic with
Bernage’s repeated attempts and offers a clue to the answer she is
looking for. The teacher is instructing Bernage and the cohort about
the kind of problems Bernage has, for which the contingent course of
her exchange in prior turns is her central resource. That is to say, the
lesson is being produced as an interactional move.
The next turn is, therefore, one of the primary venues where the
participants construct and show the authorship of their own discourse:
how they recognize what others are doing and act on them accord-
ingly. Through these interpretive actions, new topics are introduced,
problems are identified, negative feedback is understood, and hints
are given. The pedagogical properties of display questions are then
not something contained in preformulated categories, but, rather, are
reflexive to their production, as their meanings and actions become
available in the ways members take up prior turns in next turns
(Garfinkel, 1967; Macbeth, 2001).
This sequential organization of talk also brings into view how thor-
oughly contingent and ad hoc the teacher’s task is (Erickson, 1982;
Macbeth, 2000). The sense of each turn at talk is tied to what went
on before. Therefore, the teacher and students are engaged in con-
stant moment-by-moment negotiation as every next turn opens up a
new horizon of possible meaning and action, and renews the tasks of
understanding. It is in these contingent sequential contexts of talk-
in-interaction that we glimpse the range of interpretive analyses that
produce display questions as a course of action.
This reflexive and contingent nature of classroom questioning
reveals that display questions are more than a linguistic means that
transfer propositional content knowledge (e.g., Searle, 1975). Rather,
it reveals the work of common understanding in which the sense of
questions is locally determined and interactionally organized in the
evolving sequence of talk (Heap, 1985; Macbeth, 2000; Moerman &
Sacks, 1971/1988). It is from this analytic perspective that I want to
further examine the instructional work of display questions through a
small collection of exhibits.

EXHIBITS
Methodology
I have been building collections of materials that show the organiza-

tion of ESL teaching based on a corpus of 36 hours of class sessions
from three different ESL courses in a midwestern U.S. university. The
following materials reflect my interest in the topic of display questions
as a practical and regular task of ESL teaching and therefore, these
excerpts are by no means an exhaustive list of teacher questions that
can be found in language classrooms. Rather, these are telling cases
(Mitchell, 1984) of the collection of display questions that demonstrate
the range of instructional work that language teachers accomplish
when they use them.
The students in these classes are either immigrant students or
international students who were learning English to pursue their
academic degrees at North American universities. Most students are
from East Asian or Middle Eastern countries. Their language profi-
ciency ranges from a low- to high-intermediate level; their listening
ability is fluent enough to understand the teacher’s talk most of the
time, and their verbal participation in the teacher-led discussion
often involves linguistic and/or pragmatic errors that invite occa-
sional prompts and corrections from their teachers.5 These data
sets feature two teachers, both female, native-English-speaking
ESL teachers who have had several years of teaching nonnative-
English-speaking students in the United States and other contexts
worldwide.
The data were collected through video- and audio-taping of 10 class
sessions for two writing courses, respectively, and six class sessions for
the speaking class.6 The collected materials were transcribed following
the conventions of conversation analysis. Transcripts provide a practi-
cal solution to those who want to describe actual social events in the
details of their formative and interactional production (Heritage, 1997;
Markee, 2000; Sacks, 1984; ten Have, 1999).7 Accordingly, I take the
5
I agree with a reviewer’s suggestion that such labels as “intermediate” vary so much
across different institutions and teaching contexts as to be largely meaningless. I offer
this remark to show how students’ proficiency influences typical teacher-fronted discus-
sions in these classes.
6
One writing course has 2-hour sessions, and the other has a 1-hour session. The speak-
ing class was a 1-hour session.
7
Jefferson (1985) who is largely credited with developing CA’s notational system, com-
mented “Transcription is one way we try to get our hands on’ actual occurrences in
order to study social order in fine detail” (p. 26).
698 TESOL QUARTERLY

transcripts as records of participants’ analyses of their own discourse,
in which they display their orientation to how questions are formu-
lated and acted on.
Making Display Questions Answerable
Though teachers use display questions to elicit known information,

for the students, finding the correct answer involves more than recogniz-
ing the content of questions. It also involves seeing how these ques-
tions are organized as social actions as the teacher steers the interactions
purposefully and interactionally through his or her display questions.
Questioning sequences also entail more than a single IRE sequence
when the teacher uses his or her third turn to offer feedback on the
second turn while initiating the next IRE sequence.8 The following
excerpt is a case in point; the teacher asks a series of display questions
in her third turns, each of which is different in what it called for and
how. The teacher has just underlined parts of the sentences that her
students have written on the board.
Fragment 2
227. T: OK, let’s look at what I circled (1.0) and let’s look at::
228. [((The teacher is underlining a few selected clauses written on the board))
229. T: The underlined parts (.) grammatically (1.0) what are these?
230. (3.0)
231. S1: Dependent [( )
232. S2: [Fragment=
233. T: =They are:: they are like fragments, because they are::: they are <dependent- (.)
234. clauses,> can you tell me what kinds of dependent clauses they are?=
235. S1: =The reason.
236. T: They are showing us a [reason.
237. S1: [Ad- adverb clause.
238. T: Adverbial clauses, very good.
239. [((The teacher is writing ‘adverb clauses’ on the board))
240. T: Jungsun wins a brownie point for the day, adverb clauses, so::: how do we know that,
241. >in sentence number 2 and number 4< there is an adverb clause other than the fact that
242. I underlined them, (.) what i::s an adverb clause, how do you recognize them,
243. (0.5)
244. T: Why do we use them,
245. (1.5)
246. S5: Describe,
247. T: Descri:bes, kind of- an adverb- (.) describes a verb, right? (.) I walk slo:::wly, >I walk
248. [((walking slowly then quickly))
8
I want to acknowledge one of the reviewers who reminded me of this point.

249. quickly<right, [kind of walking slo::wly >quickly.<
250. S9: [( ) describe adjectives,
251. T: It may describe adjective too, I am very tired, OK, (1.0) no:w, what about the
252. sentences though,
The first question in line 229 is a display question that asks students
to find an appropriate grammar label for the underlined segments.
Two students offered answers in the subsequent turns (231–232). These
are two different kinds of answers, but, in her third turn, the teacher
acknowledges both answers by tying them together in lines 233–234.
Then, she asks the following question: “Can you tell me what kinds of
dependent clauses they are?” (234).
This is not just another question in a series. Rather, it shows its
interactional development across the sequence. First, it is built on the
confirmation that the underlined segments are indeed dependent clauses
as is shown in her third-turn evaluation of students’ answers. At the
same time, this third turn moves the interaction forward by setting up
a new parameter for the students; it transforms the previous question,
“what are these?” (229), to a more specific one, “can you tell me what
kinds of dependent clauses they are?” (234). That is to say, the interac-
tion develops progressively as the teacher uses her third turn to steer
the discourse in a particular direction.
This steering work continues in her subsequent exchanges with S1
(235–238). This student offers an answer, “the reason,” which the
teacher accepts. Although “the reason” is not the grammatical formula-
tion that is called for, the student hears in the third turn her accept-
ance and then offers the correct grammatical label in his overlapped
answer (237). This response receives positive feedback from the teacher
(238 and 340). This is not the end of the questioning sequence, how-
ever, as the teacher continues to build another set of questions in the
next turns (240–242).
These questions are still display questions, but they are qualita-
tively different from the previous ones. This time, the teacher is ask-
ing students to account for the process by which they found the
answer, adverb clause. Calling the underlined parts, adverb clause, is
quite different from explaining how one recognizes them as such. By
asking “how do we know that, >in sentence number 2 and number
4< there is an adverb clause other than the fact that I underlined
them?” (240–242), the teacher transforms what is on the board into
a visible resource to help her students to identify the underlined
segments as “adverb clauses.” Then the teacher asks the students to
characterize how they came to recognize them as such. What hap-
pened in the previous IRE becomes an interpretive resource for the
next IRE sequence.
700 TESOL QUARTERLY

The teacher’s subsequent questions continue to focus on the pro-
cedures by which adverb clauses are recognized and used (242 and
244). We could say that the first question asks for a definition, “what
is an adverb clause,” but the second and third ones are pragmatic
questions, “how do you recognize them,” (242) and “why do we use
it,” (244). The next student offers “Describe”(246), and the teacher
accepts it. This is followed by her demonstrations of the answer just
given in lines 247–251. Again, there is a purposeful progression through
which the teacher uses the students’ second turn to build the next
course of action in her third-turn position.
It is possible to consider the linguistic and functional properties of
the display questions in reference to the quantities and qualities of the
responses they generate. However, that type of analysis would not tell
us the array of interactional work embedded in producing the next
display questions or the instructional work they accomplish. Each next
question in the series reveals how the teacher makes use of the con-
tingent interactional context that the prior exchange of question and
answer has generated. It is in this contingent work of common under-
standing and resultant interpretive actions that the students come to
recognize what is called for and to offer their answers, which in turn,
becomes a basis for the teacher’s production of her next question in
her third-turn position. The teacher is instructing the students in the
kind of reply she has in mind, as different than what we might say is
known from the outset. In a way, she makes her questions answerable
and calling for recognition of it from her students, for which the
contingent course of the questioning and answering is her central
resource. The teachers’ display questions are “engaged in pulling a
world-for-remark into view, and students are not simply responding,
they are finding the world she is pointing to” (Macbeth, 2000,
p. 23).
Using Common Sense Knowledge
In the following sequence, the teacher uses students’ common sense

knowledge to demonstrate the particulars of the lesson that she intends
to teach. This excerpt is from an ESL composition class, where the
students were finishing up an activity that entailed paraphrasing the
title of an article from the school newspaper. The teacher begins the
sequence telling them a narrative scenario and then invites the stu-
dents to answer the questions she draws from the scenario. Note how
the students find the relevance of the story to the lesson underway
through interactions.

Fragment 3
204. T: Let me stop you=I know you are- some of you are still (.) writing away (.) let me ask
205. you something (.) have any of you ever, ever, ever in your life, been in the situation,
206. (1.0) when you’re trying to explain something to somebody, (2.0) and they didn’t
207. understand what you were saying?
208. ((Several students are nodding))
209. T: For example, maybe, maybe when you- think wa::y back when. (.) >farther back for
210. some of you than others< if you think back when you first arrived in America,
211. (0.5)
212. T: everybody remember that, the day you first arrived? (.) and the first time you said
213. [((Looking around the class))
214. something and they (.) say something to some ( ) Americans >they didn’t understand
215. what you said?< you remember a moment like that? you said the word, they didn’t
216. understand, what did you do- when they didn’t understand, did you give up?
217. (1.0)
218. T: ˚Possibly, hopefully not˚ you’ve come this far, you didn’t give up entirely, what did you
219. do when they didn’t understand that word (.) maybe one word that you were saying?
220. S2: Explain another way,=
221. T: =You explained another way, what did you do- you::
222. [((T’s eye gaze turns from S2 to the class))
223. S3: Rephrase.
224. T: You rephrase it, you::?
225. [((T’s eye gaze turns from S3 to the class and back to S3 quickly))
226. S7: Paraphrase
227. T: What?
228. S7: Paraphrase
229. T: You paraphrase, Okay- this is something you’ve been doing for a long time whether
230. you know or not- (1.0) OK, (1.5) something we do, a lot of times when you go to
231. another country and have to deal with the new language, OK, ultimately there’s gonna
232. be a word or two that tripped us up.
The teacher’s question (204–207) asks students to recall their

past experiences with having trouble communicating. On students’
acknowledgment of the question being asked (208), the teacher offers
a concrete scenario (209–216). The students in this classroom are
international students who came to the United States at some point,
and, therefore, it is most likely that they had encountered the situation
that this scenario describes. As a result, this story establishes a com-
mon reference for everyone in the room.
Note, however, how the teacher organizes her questions in her
scenario. The teacher focuses on one particular aspect of communi-
cation problem, namely, “they didn’t understand what you said?”
(214–215). By specifying the situation this way, the teacher prompts
the students to recognize a range of things they would have done
within the framework of the presented scenario, “you remember a
moment like that? You said the word, they didn’t understand? What
did you do when they didn’t understand, did you give up?” (215–
216). This does not get any visible response from the students (217).
The students may not know why the teacher is bringing up this issue
or even whether she is just asking rhetorical questions to make a
702 TESOL QUARTERLY

point, and thus, at various places where answers are called for, they
say nothing, and the teacher has to answer herself to continue the
narrative (218).
This is followed by another question, where the teacher further
reformulates the question “what did you do when they didn’t under-
stand that word, maybe one word that you were saying?”(218–219),
thus pointing to a particular course of action the students might have
taken in the presented situation. In this way, the questions are built
into the story, and we can expect that the students are attending to
both the story and questions to find out what is called for.
These questions embedded in the scenario can be considered ref-
erential questions because it is not likely that the teacher knows what
each of her students may have done in their respective situation.
Note, however, that it is not what they actually said in each situation
that is of interest for the teacher, but how to characterize the type
of responses students would have made in the scenario, indeed
should have made. In this sense, her question is a call for recogni-
tion of the scenario and what its story structure projects next. In
other words, the presented story works like a presequence (see
Levinson, 1983, for a review; Schegloff, 1988) that sets up the next
series of questions on which the teacher draws her pedagogical
point.9
In his answer “Explain another way” (220), one student (S1) recog-
nizes what is called for. In her third turn, the teacher acknowledges
the answer by repeating “you explained another way,” but she repeats
her question “what did you do-” (221) in her third turn, showing that
it is not exactly what she has been looking for. At the same time, the
teacher constructs her question to be hearably incomplete “you::” and
by doing this, invites her students to complete the turn by producing
the missing part (see Koshik, 2002; Lerner, 1995, for more examples
of how language teachers use incomplete turns to elicit students’
responses). In other words, the teacher organizes her question in such
a way as to formulate the answer as a feature of the scenario. With
this work in hand, her question then becomes a display question, and
the students’ task is to find a word that would fit the question and
complete the turn.
The subsequent exchanges show how the teacher and students
continue to close in on the answer that the teacher has been setting
in place, first by S2 (“Rephrase”: 223), and finally by S7, who pro-
vided what proves to be the correct answer (“Paraphrase”: 226 and
9
One of the reviewers offered this point.

228). The students’ responses in the series, therefore, show that
they have come to recognize how the teacher has been speaking,
how they are being invited to speak next, and what kind of answer
is called for.
What began as an indefinite question that asked students to recall
their own experiences in the distant past has now become a concrete
display question that calls for the recognition and placement of a
particular lesson-relevant term. It is not news that classroom teachers
draw on students’ common sense experiences, and yet it is quite a
different matter to describe analytically how they do this, and how
doing so relies on the students’ interactional competence to recog-
nize what is being called for in the developing sequence of their
exchange. In this excerpt, the teacher uses a narrative scenario that
everyone in the class has access to, which then frames her next
course of actions to lead the students to recognize the word para-
phrase through a series of display questions. The scenario then
becomes both a resource for bringing out the lesson-relevant term
and also a demonstration that paraphrasing is an everyday activity
with which students are already familiar, the point the teacher makes
in lines 229–230: “this is something you’ve been doing for a long
time whether you know or not.”
Prior literature tends to consider the pedagogical merits of display
questions in reference to preformulated criteria. This approach might
obscure the full complexity of practices (Koshik, 1999) enacted in
display questions. Although display questions call for known infor-
mation, it is through the discursive work enacted in questioning
sequences that the teacher organizes her questions and makes them
recognizable. The instructional work of display questions is, there-
fore, not contained in display questions themselves; the questions
are rather the consequences of that work. What is so instructive
about display questions is not their categorical properties, but the
process by which they are made intelligible, accountable, and thus
recognizable.
Negotiating What Is Being Asked

Though teachers routinely know the answers to their questions, the
questions themselves do not necessarily provide for how answers or
the sense of the question will be found. Rather, the sense of the ques-
tion and its intelligibility often become matters of interactional nego-
tiation and interpretive adjustment. This is not a complaint that
some display questions are unclear or ambiguous. Instead, this is
704 TESOL QUARTERLY

an allusion to the inherent indexical character of natural language
(Bar-Hillel, 1954; Garfinkel, 1967): The sense and relevance of a
given question is constantly elaborated, revised, and negotiated as the
teacher assesses students’ understanding and organizes her next ques-
tions accordingly.
The following sequence shows an example of a display question
undergoing continuous interactional revisions as the teacher responds
to and acts on the sense-making efforts revealed in the students’
answers. This excerpt begins with the teacher’s question about a part
of Kentucky that was mentioned in the assigned reading.
Fragment 4
921. T: So if you drive like my husband, it’ll only take you one hour to get to Cincinnati,
922. (1.0) so in an hour and some minutes you’d be in Kentucky, so it’s not very far
923. away, but what (.) part of Kentucky is this?
924. (2.0)
925. S1: Ea[stern
926. S2: [Eastern
927. T: The Eastern, (1.0) what- what did you learn about eastern Kentu- Kentucky from
928. reading the story and these argument essays, what-, what is eastern Kentucky like?
929. S4: Moun[tain.
930. S3: [Mountains.
931. T: OK, mountains are there (1.0) [what else?
932. S4: [Poor-
933. S4: Poor people.
934. T: Very poor people, (2.0) >can you recall talking about this with you before< (.) what
935. do we call that area?
936. S5: [Subculture.
937. S?: [( )
938. T: Oh, it’s ah sub-culture, what do we call the are- I mean geographically?
939. (1.0)
940. S6: Rural?
941. T: ((Bending over to S6))
942. S6: Rural,
943. T: Rural, well, we can have rural area all over the world (.) what’s that part of America
944. called?=
945. S?: =( )
946. S4: Reservation?
947. T: No, that’s what the Indians used to live.
948. S7: ( )
949. T: Wh[at?
950. S7: ( [ )
951. Ss: [((laughter))
952. T: ( ) hear her, S7, you’re right behind her, wha:ja, wha-ja, which appendix was that?
953. [((Looking through the pages of the assigned article))
954. Turn to page one oh fi:ve, I have had you do this before, I know I am not
955. dreaming this (.) <Appala:chia> (.) <Appalachia> (.) OK, trust me it’s very very
956. interesting part of the world, my grand parents live in- (1.0) Appalachian area.

The sequence shows a string of at least six display questions. The
first is, “what part of Kentucky is this?” (923). A couple of students
offer the same answer in lines 925–926, “Eastern” and the teacher
accepts it in her third turn. She continues by tying the question and
the answer to the assigned reading to formulate a next one: “What
did you learn about eastern Kentucky … what is eastern Kentucky
like?” (927–928).
We can say that “what is eastern Kentucky like?” is exploratory in
nature because multiple answers are possible from the assigned read-
ing. Two students offered the response, “mountains” (929–930), and
the teacher accepts it in her third turn “Okay, mountains are there”
(931). Then the teacher poses her next question, which invites more
formulation, “What else?” (931). S4 answers “Poor people,” and the
teacher accepts it and agrees, “Very poor people” (934–935).
In the next turn, the teacher initiates another question, a recall
question: “Can you recall talking about this with you before, what do
we call that area?” (934–935). This is a question of accountability, as
it invokes not only the shared reading but also the history of the dis-
cussion. By pointing to the shared history, the teacher indicates that
the students already possess resources to find the answer.
S5’s answer in the next turn, “Subculture” in line 936, however, opens
up a somewhat unexpected category of naming. This answer, subculture,
is not the kind of naming the teacher is looking for, but is nonetheless
an admissible answer; the teacher’s third turn begins with the token of
surprise “Oh” (see Heritage, 1984), and then, she accepts the answer
“it’s ah subculture” (938). This response is followed by another ques-
tion, whereby the teacher clarifies the kind of answer she has in mind:
“What do we call the are- I mean geographically?” (938).
Notice here how the teacher’s question is produced as a repair.
Repair is a conversational practice in which the members of conversa-
tion try to fix a piece of talk, either in the course of its production
or in subsequent turns (see Schegloff, 1996; Schegloff et al., 1977, on
conversational repair, and see Macbeth, 2004; McHoul, 1990, on repairs
in classroom interaction). Wherever it is found, the repair organization
routinely displays the speaker’s analysis of the talk for its intelligibility
and common understanding, for example, what it means, how it sounds
and how it could be recognized. The teacher begins her question as
a repetition of the previous question, “what do we call the are-,” and
then, repairs it by adding, “I mean geographically?” (938). This repair
shows how the teacher comes to terms with the different possibilities
her previous question invoked. By offering a categorical prompt, “geo-
graphically,” this repair attempts to delimit the scope of the possible
answer toward what she had in mind (see Hester & Eglin, 1997, for a
706 TESOL QUARTERLY

review of research and exemplary studies on membership category; Sacks,
1992, p. 40–48).
This renewed question calling for a geographical term receives the
answer “rural” by S6 (940 and 942). Again, it is not a wrong answer,
as seen in how the teacher responds to it, “Rural, well, we can have
rural area all over the world” (943). There are apparently more catego-
ries of reasonable answers than the teacher expected when she asked
the question, and she attempts to repair her way of speaking of the
answer, again, calling for a name: “what’s that part of America called?”
(943–944). By reformulating her question this way, the teacher’s ques-
tion now takes on a more cultural cast, pointing to a way of speaking
about a part of the United States that is itself an American way of
speaking, or how Americans themselves describe this part.
S4’s answer, “reservation” (946), seems to hear her clarifying ques-
tion that way: He produces a distinctively American locational descrip-
tion of a geographical part of the United States, and we can see the
competence and good sense of his answer. It turns out that Appalachia
was the answer the teacher has been looking for (955), and she answers
her own question in the next turn, while assuring the students that
they did indeed already have the resources for answering correctly
(954–955). Those resources, however, are not within the discursive
resources of the sequences, but rather in the reading and prior discus-
sion. This is not a criticism. It is a reminder of the indefinite possibili-
ties for sense and meaning that any next question may possess. That
is to say, this does not mean that the teacher does not know what she
is doing, but it indicates the contingent and local interpretive work
through which the sense of questions is negotiated, what students
know becomes available, their understanding is made public and is
addressed in the very course of speaking.
As in other examples, this excerpt displays the methodic revision
and negotiation between teacher and students of the sense of her
questions. Questions become reformulated based on the teacher’s
analysis of student replies, just as their replies are themselves products
of an analysis. Each next question then becomes a repair of previous
ones; each repair becomes an interpretive resource that shows how the
teacher comes to terms with, and thus acts on, the local contingencies
the prior exchange creates in the course of interaction. One might
propose that the teacher should have asked a better question that
would have elicited the correct answer more quickly. This proposition
would, however, miss the ways in which the teacher–student exchange
brings into view how the teacher comes to learn what the students
make of her questions and uses this knowledge as a resource for deter-
mining what to do next.

Asking display questions is then more than a matter of eliciting
substantive contents or linguistic functions, as the previous literature
has proposed. Rather, display questions point to an array of interac-
tional work of understanding whereby teachers and students mend the
indefinite character of questions. In this way, the sense of a question
is made manageable and sensible through the ongoing exercise of the
participants’ communicative and interactional competence. Functional
typologies often gloss over this work, and, as a result, they lose the
interactional tasks and contingencies. It is the interpretive work of
common understanding that makes display questions pedagogical in
the detail of the question’s sequential production.
CONCLUSION
The prior literature on teachers’ questions had a strong pedagogical

agenda to discern the type of questions that might be conducive to
language acquisition (Long, 1996). The common use of display ques-
tions has raised concerns because they are considered a less effective
means of encouraging communicative language use. Yet, our materials
showed that display questions are central resources for classroom
teaching and that they cannot proceed without communicative lan-
guage use. The three excerpts provide evidence of how participants
orient to the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction, which brings
into view that display questions are situated accomplishments that
involve negotiating the sense of the questions through repairs, using
a narrative to link commonsense knowledge to lesson-relevant terms,
and steering the discourse into a particular direction using multiple
IRE sequences.
Thus, it would be premature to dismiss display questions as an inef-
fective teaching variable for language acquisition before looking into
the process by which the teachers and students produce and use them,
and what they accomplish in doing so. Close sequential analysis shows
that it is in the production of interactional exchanges that display
questions are made intelligible; topics are introduced, meanings are
clarified, answers are tried, and resources are produced. The alterna-
tive analysis presented in this article describes these methods of talk
and choices of actions to emphasize and illustrate how the teacher and
her or his students produce, recognize, and assemble their resources
for understanding their lessons.
We can draw a couple of practical implications from the current
study. First, the analyses in this article show how we might begin to
examine display questions differently. Rather than judging display
questions only in reference to preformulated categories, the alternative
708 TESOL QUARTERLY

considers them to be enabling resources that encourage us to begin
a practical inquiry (Lee, 2006). Particularly useful to examine are the
ways in which language teachers generate the second and/or third
question as they come to terms with the contingency of questioning
sequences. Second, seeing display questions this way helps teachers
gain access to the procedural aspects of questioning sequences as their
students experience them. The process–product research paradigm
treats classroom teaching as a plan–execution binary, but sequential
analysis taps into students’ choices by examining how they respond to
and act on teachers’ questions. The students’ responses cannot be
seen or planned in advance, but they are vital in bringing out the
teachers’ practical knowledge and pedagogical expertise enacted in
the midst of teaching and learning activities; considering student-
teacher interaction this way allows us to figure out how display ques-
tions function in the first place.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. I also thank
Douglas Macbeth, who offered a very close reading and helpful suggestions on
earlier drafts, and I thank Karen Macbeth for proofreading the final draft of the
manuscript.
THE AUTHOR
Yo-An Lee is an assistant professor of bilingual and bicultural education at DePaul
University, Chicago, Illinois, USA. He specializes in ESL and applied linguistics.
Informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, his research interests
include face-to-face interaction between native and nonnative English speakers, class-
room discourse, and qualitative ethnography.
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APPENDIX
TRANSCRIPT NOTATIONS
[ ] Overlapping utterances
(2.0) Timed silence within or between adjacent utterances.
() An uncertain hearing of what the speaker said.
(()) Scenic description and accounts
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(.) A short untimed pause.
= Latching that indicates no interval between adjacent utterances.
- A halting, abrupt cutoff
. Falling intonation, e.g. sentence final.
˚ Quieter than surrounding talk
: A prolonged stretch
_ Stressed syllable
-¯ Marked change in pitch: upward or downward.
(h) Aspirations
(.h) Inhalations
< > Utterance is delivered at slower pace than surrounding talk
> < Utterance is delivered at quicker pace than surrounding talk.
A line of a particular interest in the discussion
(cf. Atkinson & Heritage, 1984).

Language Learners’ Perceptions
of Accent
JULIE SCALES
Miramar College
San Diego, California, United States
ANN WENNERSTROM
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, United States
DARA RICHARD
Cf Bt Education Trust
Bentong, Pahang, Malaysia
SU HUI WU
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Manoa, Hawaii, United States
This study analyzed the accent perceptions of a group of 37 English

language learners and 10 American undergraduate students. Each
subject listened to a one-minute passage read by four speakers with
different accents of English: General American, British English,
Chinese English, and Mexican English. Participants then attempted
to identify the different accents and stated their preferences and opin-
ions about each. They also provided background information, includ-
ing reasons for studying English and pronunciation goals. Additionally,
11 participants were individually interviewed about the different
accents. Although more than half (62%) of the learners stated that
their goal was to sound like a native English speaker, only 29% were
able to correctly identify the American accent. No strong correlations
were found between the ability to identify accents and the amount of
time spent in the United States nor time studying English. However,
an almost perfect correlation was found between the accent voted
easiest to understand and the one that participants preferred. The
lack of consistency in identifying accents may reflect an idealized con-
ception of what the native accent aspired to actually sounds like. This
finding and the priority placed on listening comprehension suggest a
need for more thorough consideration of accent in ESOL programs.
R ecently, the field of TESOL has seen increasing interest in the role
of English as an international language. One facet of this topic is
TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 40, No. 4, December 2006

715
deciding which varieties of English should serve as instructional models
for pronunciation. As Lewis (2005) points out, two contradictory prin-
ciples have traditionally informed pronunciation teaching: the native-
ness principle, whereby learners model a standard dialect from the
United Kingdom or North America, and the intelligibility principle,
whereby learners seek to be understood despite speech being (heavily)
accented. Nonetheless the implicit norm in instructional materials has
traditionally been the native speaker model Cook (1999), despite the
fact that this is an unrealistic target for most speakers. A growing
number of studies have also suggested that many learners themselves
prefer to model native speakers (Bayard, Gallois, Ray, Weatherall, &
Sullivan, 2002; Chiba, Matsuura, & Yamamoto, 1995; Dalton-Puffer,
Kaltenboeck, & Smit, 1997; Timmis, 2002).
ENGLISH AS AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE
Unlike learners, a growing number of scholars (Crystal, 1997;

Jenkins, 2000, 2006; Kachru, 1997) have stressed the importance of
global intelligibility, rather than a particular native accent. Given that
much of the world’s communication takes place among speakers of
nonstandard varieties of English, both native and nonnative (see also
Modiano, 2001; Strevens, 1992; Yano, 2001), Jenkins (2005) advocates
an international version of English, a so-called lingua franca core, as
a more realistic model for pronunciation teaching. Given these trends,
it is unsurprising that many people outside of the inner circle1 (tradi-
tional native-English-speaking countries) have made English part of
their identity. Fishman (1992) explains that
The growth of English speaking “false foreigners” in various parts of the non-
English mother-tongue world (e.g., West Africa, East Africa, India, Puerto
Rico) is an indication that a non-native variety of English may succeed not
only in stabilizing itself cross-generationally (i.e., in nativizing itself), but also
in becoming a mother tongue in certain speech networks. (p. 21)
Yano (2001) concurs, noting that many native Singaporeans “feel that
they are native speakers of English and they do have native speaker’s
intuition” (p. 122). Said another way, members of the outer and expand-
ing circles are asserting their independence from those who have tradi-
tionally been the guardians of English. One natural extension of the
nativization of English is that people from all parts of the world, regardless
1
We are using Kachru’s widely cited concentric circle model to describe the various
realms where English is used. See Kachru (1997) for a detailed explanation of this
model.
716 TESOL QUARTERLY

of their native language, are increasingly creating cultural artifacts in
English to express their ideas, thoughts, and emotions. Widdowson (1997)
quotes the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, who wrote in 1975:
I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my
African experience…. But it will have to be a new English, still in
communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African
surroundings. (Quoted in Widdowson, 1997, p. 139)
For Achebe, his English will remain intelligible to an international

community of English speakers, but it will also be an African product
and controlled by an African user.
Thus, the view that all English users should express themselves by using
an inner-circle model has been seen as heedless and disrespectful of EIL
identities. It also disregards the fact that users’ goals for English use are
extremely varied and may be mainly instrumental. Modiano (2001)
describes millions in the expanding circle when he observes that
For learners who primarily want to acquire [English] because it is a useful

cross-cultural communicative tool, pressure to attain near-native profi-
ciency may result in establishing them as auxiliary members of the culture
which is represented by the prescriptive educational standard, something
not in harmony with their own self-image. (p. 340)
Modiano’s statement can be further understood in light of the facts

about language acquisition, which suggest that native proficiency is an
unrealistic standard for nonnative speakers. Numerous studies have
shown that “a native-like accent is impossible unless first exposure is
quite early, probably around the age six” (Larsen-Freeman & Long,
1991, p.158). Thus, members of the outer and expanding circles who
are asked to attain inner-circle accents are set up to fall short.
A final argument against the inner-circle accent standard is that
native accent is unnecessary for intelligibility, even from the point of
view of native speakers in inner-circle countries. Derwing and Munro
(1997) asked untrained Canadian raters to rate nonnative speakers of
English on degrees of accentedness, intelligibility, and comprehensibil-
ity. The raters were clearly able to distinguish the three; that is, a
speaker judged as having a foreign accent might or might not be rated
as comprehensible. Moreover, the raters were able to accurately tran-
scribe much of the speech they judged as accented, demonstrating
that they found it intelligible. Munro (2003), who decries the patholo-
gizing of accent, concludes that “an objection to accents on the
grounds that they are unintelligible may sometimes have more to do
with an unwillingness to accommodate differences in one’s interlocu-
tors than with a genuine concern about comprehension” (p. 3).
LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF ACCENT 717

STUDIES OF LEARNERS’ OPINIONS
Given these discussions about the shifting epicenter of English, a

number of studies have begun to inquire how English language learn-
ers themselves weigh in on this issue. As cited earlier, Widdowson
(1997) and Yano (2001) both describe outer-circle, fluent English
speakers from Nigeria and Singapore who do not wish to adhere to
an inner-circle model of pronunciation. The majority of English lan-
guage learners, however, are not fluent and are in the expanding
circle. What pronunciation models, then, do these learners prefer?
The answer appears to be that many prefer standard inner-circle mod-
els, either General American (GA) or Received Pronunciation (RP).
Ladegaard’s (1998) study of Danish learners, for example, found
that “RP appears to be the unsurpassed prestige variety” (p. 265). He
believes this is because RP has traditionally been the model of correct
pronunciation in Danish classrooms, where a strong prescriptivism is
practiced. Bayard et al. (2002) found that students from Europe,
Southeast Asia, the United States, and Austronesia preferred GA. The
researchers attribute this dominance to the prevalence of American
media worldwide. However, in both of these studies the subjects were
given a narrow choice among accents of inner-circle countries, namely
the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.
Studies that have included other international accents, such as
those of fluent L2 English users from the subjects’ own countries, have
nevertheless again found that learners preferred inner-circle stand-
ards. In a study conducted in Austria by Dalton-Puffer et al. (1997),
advanced EFL students listened to unidentified speech samples of
both native and nonnative speakers of RP and GA. They were asked
to respond to a number of questions about the accents and to rate
the speakers on a series of twelve positive descriptors. The RP accent
was the highest ranked on most measures and the lowest ranked
accent was an Austrian-British one, similar to the subjects’ own. The
study also revealed accent stereotypes: The speaker with the RP accent
was rated as being the most educated, organized, and courteous,
among other positive descriptors (p. 122). However, those subjects
who had traveled to the United States were more positive in their
evaluations of the speaker with the GA accent, showing that familiarity
with an accent can affect one’s opinions. A final finding of interest
was that a fluent Austrian speaker of GA was misidentified by many
subjects as a native speaker. Even these advanced learners had diffi-
culty perceiving the difference between a fluent nonnative accent and
a native accent.
One might ask whether the subjects in the Austrian study, most of
whom planned to become English teachers, felt more constrained to
718 TESOL QUARTERLY

emulate native pronunciation standards than would the average learner.
Yet, even studies of more varied populations have had similar results.
A study by Chiba, Matsuura, and Yamamoto (1995) found that among
Japanese undergraduate students, ratings using positive descriptors
(e.g., friendly, elegant, skilled, etc.) were higher for inner-circle speak-
ers from the United Kingdom and the United States than for English
speakers from Japan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. In both
this study and the Austrian one, the researchers concluded that the
subjects’ familiarity with the inner-circle accents led to a favorable view
of them, but this does not explain the subjects’ dispreference, in both
studies, for accents similar to their own, which were presumably very
familiar. Nor does it explain a second finding in Chiba et al.’s study
that despite the high ratings given to American accents, less than one-
third of the subjects were able to identify them as such (p. 80).
An even larger study by Timmis (2002) found that among 400 learn-
ers in more than 45 countries, the majority stated that they preferred
to strive for native-speaker norms in pronunciation and grammar, both
informal and formal. The only exceptions were the subjects from
India, Pakistan, and South Africa, most of whom preferred to retain
the accent of their own outer-circle countries. In addition, many sub-
jects expressed a wish to use the informal grammar of native speakers.
Yet, Timmis found that when he supplied the subjects with examples
of authentic, native English speech in both informal and formal reg-
isters, most subjects expressed uncertainty about which speech sample
was which, and many stated that they did not want to use the informal
samples. From this Timmis concludes, “it may be, then, that those
students who aspire to native-speaker spoken norms have an idealized
notion of what these norms are” (p. 248).
In sum, these studies point to a tendency among expanding-circle
learners to set inner-circle standards for their own speech, although
not all could actually identify native speech when listening to speech
samples. There is also evidence of accent stereotyping and of an ide-
alization of native speech. A third trend is at least some association
between familiarity with accents and the ability to make accurate judg-
ments about them.
FURTHER QUESTIONS
There appears, then, to be a gap between the view that inner-circle
varieties of English need not and should not set the standards for pro-
nunciation teaching, and the wish expressed by many expanding-circle
learners to emulate inner-circle varieties. In reconciling this discrepancy,
we would wish to avoid two simplistic conclusions: first, that learners are

simply naïve and need to have their consciousness raised about what
accents of English are most appropriate for them; and second, that the
EIL argument is elitist and out of touch with students’ practical needs.
Instead, we continue this discussion with an exploratory study involv-
ing an accent perception task and survey of English learners’ judg-
ments and attitudes about their own and others’ accents. Because all
of the studies reviewed here took place in outer- and expanding-circle
countries, the opinions of ESOL learners who live in inner-circle coun-
tries have not been heard. In particular we seek to better understand
the views of learners in the United States where the GA accent is
economically and culturally dominant. Despite previous work, there is
still a need to ascertain not only which accents these learners prefer
to emulate, but also why they hold these preferences and how they
perceive distinctions among various accents.
METHOD
Participants
Two groups of participants volunteered to participate in our accent

study in response to fliers distributed in a variety of classes. All volunteers
were included. The first group consisted of 37 English learners: 23 were
taking one or more classes in an intensive ESOL program and 14 were
mainstream students at a major university in the United States, taking a
required academic ESOL class. Their levels of English language profi-
ciency ranged from intermediate to advanced. All were between 18 and
30 years old. Most learners were from Asia (11 from Taiwan, five from
Japan, four from Korea, three from Thailand, and one from Vietnam),
several Spanish-speaking countries (four from Argentina, three from
Venezuela, two from Colombia, and one from both Mexico and Peru),
and two from Eritrea. Learners had been residing the United States for
an average of 15 months, ranging from one month to 7 years. However, the
average length of time studying English was longer: approximately 8 years.
The second group consisted of 10 American undergraduate students
from several majors at the same university. All were native speakers of
English and six had studied some Spanish. This group was included
in order to compare language attitudes and accent judgments between
native and nonnative speakers.
Listening Task
To assess the learners’ opinions about accents, we recorded a short

lecture read by four speakers with different accents of English and
720 TESOL QUARTERLY

asked participants to fill out a survey in reaction to each of the four
versions. The speakers were four female graduate students in an
MATESOL program between the ages of 25 and 35. All had had sig-
nificant experience with other languages through travel, living abroad,
and formal language and linguistics courses. All were fluent speakers,
who of English with different accents. Two were native speakers, one
of British English and the other of American English. The British
speaker, who was from Worcester, England, had spent most of her life
in London, and described herself as a speaker of “BBC English.” The
American speaker grew up near Portland, Oregon, in the northwest
coastal region of the United States, near where the study was con-
ducted. Both native speakers were born in their respective countries
and had native-speaking parents.
The other two were nonnative speakers from expanding-circle coun-
tries, Taiwan and Mexico. They were chosen as very fluent speakers of
English who had noticeable and (we thought) easily identifiable accents
from their first languages. Chinese and Spanish were also the lan-
guages spoken by the majority of the students in the ESOL programs
that the participants attended. The Mexican speaker was from
Guadalajara, a large city in western Mexico. The Chinese speaker was
from Taichung, a large city near the center of Taiwan. Taiwanese was
her first language and she learned Mandarin on starting elementary
school. She described herself as having a “Chinese accent” when speak-
ing English, and we refer to her accent as such. Both women had
studied English for more than 10 years at home and then lived in the
United States as graduate students for almost 2 years. Their TOEFL
scores were both above 600 and both had SPEAK scores of above
230.
To prepare the tape recordings, each of the four speakers read the
same short (about one minute) lecture about insects useful to humans
(see Appendix 1). This topic, taken from an intermediate ESOL text-
book, was chosen because it was thought to be simple but relatively
obscure and thus equally unfamiliar to all learners. The speakers were
given the passage in advance and encouraged to familiarize themselves
with it and to ask any questions if desired. They were then instructed
to read as naturally as possible. The speech rates of the four speakers
varied as shown in Table 1.
It is important to emphasize that in constructing and analyzing
these speech samples, our goal was not to generalize results from these
four speakers to all speakers from their respective language groups.
Naturally, a given listener may react to a particular speaker for a vari-
ety of reasons. Rather, we were interested in what sorts of factors might
be influencing these listeners’ perceptions and attitudes about these

TABLE 1
Rate of Speech
Accent Rate (words per minute)
American 147
Chinese 147
British 160
Mexican 180
speakers and whether any patterns of alignment among their various

survey responses would emerge.
Accent Survey
The four versions of the lecture were played in random order for
the two groups of participants (English learners and American
undergraduates). After listening to each speaker, participants filled
out a survey designed to probe their ability to identify the speakers’
accents and the attitudes associated with them (see Appendix B for
survey questions). First, they were asked to rate the accents on a
four-point scale using 10 descriptors, chosen to elicit their evalua-
tions of the language itself, their personal preferences, and their
judgments about the speakers. They were then asked a series of
short-answer and multiple choice questions, including which country
they judged each speaker to be from and how difficult the different
accents were to understand. Finally, they were asked to provide infor-
mation about their backgrounds and personal goals. The survey was
piloted with four English language learners from Taiwan, Japan,
Russia, and Brazil, and several ambiguous items were modified
thereafter.
Statistical Analysis
Descriptive statistics, including frequencies and means, were calcu-

lated to gain an overall picture of the participants’ backgrounds, goals,
opinions, and ability to identify the accents. Chi-squared tests were
used to compare accent preferences and ease of understanding
between the English learners and the American undergraduates, and
to compare the same variables between Spanish and Chinese sub-
groups of learners. In addition, Pearson correlations were computed
to determine whether the participants’ ability to correctly identify
722 TESOL QUARTERLY

accents was associated with any of the variables in their backgrounds.
Correlation analysis was also conducted on the ratings of the 10
descriptors to look for associated patterns in the preferences and atti-
tudes toward the four accents.
Follow-up Interviews
To obtain a more qualitative understanding of learners’ language

goals and attitudes, a subset of the learners, 11 Spanish speakers, were
interviewed orally after they had completed the listening task and sur-
vey. The interviews were conducted and transcribed by one of the
researchers in Spanish or English as each learner preferred. Participants
were encouraged to expand on what they had written in the survey.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Accent Goals
When asked to choose between wanting to be easily understood and

having a native accent, the majority (62%) of English learners stated
that their goal was to sound like a native speaker, compared with 38%
who listed intelligibility as their pronunciation goal. In addition, 68%
of those who preferred a native accent thought that practice would
help them sound like the speaker they preferred. Yet, most claimed to
have rather limited or temporary purposes for their use of English.
Only 16% listed living in the United States in the future as a reason
for studying English. A much larger number gave education (70%),
business (54%), or travel (24%) as their goals.2
Ability to Identify Accents
When asked to identify the country of origin of the four speakers,

the English learners overall had difficulty.3 According to a x2 test,
the American undergraduates were significantly more successful in
2
Subjects could choose more than one reason for studying English.
3
We were liberal in tabulating responses to the country-of-origin question: For the
American speaker, we counted the United States and Canada as correct answers; for the
British speaker, England and Australia; for the Chinese speaker, China and Taiwan, but
not Asia; and for the Mexican speaker, any Spanish-dominant country, South America,
and “Latin.”

FIGURE 1
Identification of Accents by All Subjects
identifying the American and Mexican accents (see Figure 1).4 Because
several of the American undergraduates were studying Spanish, they
may have been more familiar with that accent than with the Chinese
one. In the same vein, those English learners whose native languages
were Chinese and Spanish had higher accuracy rates in identifying the
accents of the speakers from their own language backgrounds. Figure 2
shows the accuracy rates for the 11 subjects each from Chinese and
Spanish language backgrounds.
The accuracy rate among Chinese students in identifying the Chinese
accent is quite high (nine guessed China or Taiwan and the rest Asia).
However, the Spanish speakers were only slightly better than their
Chinese counterparts in identifying the Mexican accent as Spanish. A
x2 test found significant differences only for the Chinese speakers.5
Again, familiarity may have played a role because the 11 Chinese speak-
ers in this study were all from Taiwan, the same country as the speaker
on the tape. Only one of the Spanish speakers was from Mexico, so
for the others, the Mexican accent was less similar to their own.
4
The x2 test results for the data in Figure 1 are as follows: (df = 1 for all cases; * p < 0.05).
American speaker: x2 = 8.261, p = 0.0405*; British speaker: x2 =4.305, p = 0.0380*; Chinese
speaker: x2 =0.0214 p = 0.8884; Mexican speaker: x2 =5.621, p = 0.0178*. Due to the small
sample size, x2 results were validated using Fisher’s exact test, which agreed with the x2
results in all cases except for the British speaker, where Fisher’s exact test was not signifi-
cant (p = 0.0774).
5
The x2 test results for the data in Figure 2 are as follows: (df = 1 for all cases; * p < 0.05).
American speaker: x2 =0.733, p = 0.392; British speaker: x2 =1.636, p = 0.201; Chinese
speaker: x2 =15.231, p = 0.0001*; Mexican speaker: x2 =0.733, p = 0.392. Fisher’s exact test
confirms the x2 results in every case.
724 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 2
Identification of Accents by Chinese and Spanish Speakers
In distinguishing native from nonnative accents, the task was again

straightforward for the American undergraduates but less so for the
English learners. Among the 10 undergraduates, only one person misi-
dentified native speaker: That person identified the American speaker
as being from Europe but the other 39 judgments were correct.6 In
contrast, the English learners’ accuracy rate was much lower on this
judgment: 73% and 62% rated the American and British speakers,
respectively, as nonnative, and 8% and 24% rated the Chinese and
Mexican speakers, respectively, as native. We speculate that perceptual
sensitivity to the subtleties of one’s native language may explain these
differences in accuracy rates.
Considering the American accent in particular, despite studying in the
Northwest region of the United States, less than one-third of the English
learners (29%) were able to correctly identify the accent of the American
speaker. In fact, 35% of the learners identified her as being from an Asian
country and other guesses spanned the globe, as shown in Figure 3.
Correspondingly, the other accents were misidentified as American
in several cases: 8% thought that the Chinese speaker was American;
11% thought the British speaker was American or Canadian; and 16%
thought the Mexican was American. Looking only at the subgroup of
learners who stated that their accent goal was to sound like a native
speaker, the percent who could identify the American accent was simi-
lar to the group as a whole: 30%. In other words, many learners who
were striving to achieve native speaker pronunciation were not able to
identify what that accent sounded like.
Curiously, attempts to find associations between the background
variables and the ability to correctly identify accents were not success-
ful. We used Pearson correlations to test the association between the
6
One subject correctly identified the American as a native speaker but guessed that she
was from Israel.

FIGURE 3
Identification of the American Accent by English Learners
ability to identify (a) the American accent and (b) a native accent in
general (either American or British) against the following background
variables: length of time in the United States; length of time studying
English; pronunciation goal (native speaker versus intelligible); and
most frequent interlocutor (27% claimed that they spoke English most
often with native speakers). However, although the highest correlation
was between the ability to identify the American accent and the length
7
For these and other correlation analyses reported here, the critical threshold of signifi-
cance for correlation coefficients with n = 37 at p < .05 is 0.324 which corresponds to an
r2 = 10.5%; r2 values indicate what percent of the data are explained by the correlation,
and may be obtained by squaring the correlation coefficients.
726 TESOL QUARTERLY

of time in the United States (r = .27) none of these correlations was
significant (p > .05).7
From this data, it is evident that the ability to identify accents is
difficult and complex for language learners. For those who were able
to correctly identity the British and American accents, factors beyond
what our survey could measure were evidently involved. We speculate
that these factors might include linguistic analysis abilities, as well as
prior travel experience, other languages studied, past friendships, and
other personal experiences of language contact.
Accent Preferences
In addition to being asked to identify accents, participants were asked

about their accent preferences. The important point is not to make
generalizations about which particular accent happened to be preferred
over others—obviously there are many reasons for preferring or dispre-
ferring particular speakers. Instead, the goal is to analyze which other
survey choices coincided with the subjects’ preferences in order to better
understand their priorities with respect to pronunciation and accent.
After listening to all four speakers, participants were asked to choose
which accent they liked the most and which they found easiest to
understand. As Figure 4 shows, about half (52%) of the learners pre-
ferred the American accent. The Mexican accent was the least pre-
ferred, not voted as a first preference by any of the learners. An almost
perfect correspondence was found between the accent most preferred
and the accent easiest to understand, the only difference being that
there were four nonresponses to the latter question.
These relationships between accent preference and ease of under-
standing may have involved the rate of speech as well. As we saw in
Table 1, the (most preferred) American speech rate was the slowest,
147 words per minute, while the (least preferred) Mexican speech rate
was the fastest, 180 words per minute. Rate does not explain the
Chinese accent ranking, however, because the Chinese speaker’s rate
was the same as the American’s.8
For the 10 American undergraduates, no such connections appeared
between preference, rate, and ease of understanding. Although 80%
also found the American accent easiest to understand, no one claimed
to prefer it; instead they most preferred the British and Mexican
accents (see Figure 5).
8
To investigate the role of speech rate further, many more speech samples with varied rates
would be needed. Studies such as Derwing and Munro (2001), and Munro and Derwing
(2001) present interesting research models for how to digitally manipulate speech rate.

FIGURE 4
Preference and Ease of Understanding of Accents for English Learners
Overall, these findings suggest that listening comprehension was a

priority among the English learners. They tended to like an accent
more if they found it easy to understand. Further support for this
preference comes from their vote on which accent was most difficult
to understand. No accent rated most difficult to understand was best
liked. This finding may indicate that an unfamiliarity with the charac-
teristic features of an accent, manifested in an inability to identify or
easily understand it, resulted in a dislike for it.
Turning to the participants’ ratings of the four accents using the
10 descriptors (see Appendix B, Part 1), we conducted a Pearson
correlation analysis for the English learners’ ratings only. Four sepa-
rate correlation analyses were conducted (rather than one large one)
because each participant rated the 10 items four times, so the 40
FIGURE 5
Preference and Ease of Understanding of Accents for American Undergraduates
728 TESOL QUARTERLY

ratings for each participant were not independent. The six correla-
tions that were statistically significant across all four speakers are
shown in Table 2.
It is not surprising that being rated as a native speaker was nega-
tively correlated with having a foreign accent. In addition, being easy
to understand was positively correlated with being nice to listen to,
being educated, and being a good ESOL teacher. The latter results
again confirm the priority that the English learners placed on listening
comprehension, especially valued in an ESOL teacher’s speech. A posi-
tive correlation was also found between being fluent and being a good
ESOL teacher, and between being educated and being nice to listen
to. Although most of these numbers are moderate, the trends indicate
a learner preference for clear speech that sounds “fluent,” though not
necessarily native.
We also calculated the overall means for each descriptor for both
groups. These means should be taken as further descriptive detail of
only this particular study because we do not have enough data to
compare means using inferential statistical tests. The English learners’
results are shown in Table 3.
Once again, we see a high priority placed on listening comprehen-
sion: The American speaker received the highest ratings in being easy
to understand, nice to listen to, and a good teacher. Rate of speech
was also important as shown by the fact that the Mexican speaker
received the highest score in speaks too fast and the lowest scores in
being easy to understand, nice to listen to, and a good teacher. The aver-
ages in Table 3 also reiterate the learners’ uncertainly in distinguish-
ing native and nonnative accents. Although the American and British
speakers did receive the highest ratings in being native speakers, these
numbers are comparatively low: 2.5 and 2.7, respectively, out of a
possible 4.0.
TABLE 2
Significant Correlations Among Descriptors
Speakers
Associated descriptors United States British Mexican Chinese
Native x foreign accent −.76 −.65 −.57 −.68

Easy to understand x good teacher .58 .52 .74 .53
Easy to understand x nice to listen to .48 .63 .81 .59
Easy to understand x educated .46 .59 .67 .46
Fluent x good teacher .38 .53 .55 .58
Educated x nice to listen to .35 .43 .55 .46

TABLE 3
English Learners’ Accent Ratings
Mean ratings
Descriptors United States British Mexican Chinese

native 2.5 2.7 2.2 1.8
speaks fluently 3.4 3.6 3.0 3.0
easy to understand 3.6 3.3 2.4 3.3
bad pronunciation 1.7 1.7 2.4 2.0
speaks too fast 1.6 1.8 3.1 1.6
foreign accent 2.6 2.7 3.1 3.2
nice to listen to 3.4 3.3 2.4 3.1
annoying/irritating 1.7 1.7 2.4 2.0
good ESOL teacher 3.2 3.0 2.1 2.7
educated 3.2 3.5 2.8 3.2
Note. Ratings are measured on a scale of 1–4. Underlined numbers are the highest rating in
their category.
For the 10 American undergraduates, Table 4 suggests that ease of

understanding was less a factor in liking an accent than it was for the
English learners. The Americans rated the British and Mexican accents
higher in nice to listen to than the American accent, even though they
found both of the former accents harder to understand. Both groups
did agree on one point, however: The British speaker was stereotyped
TABLE 4
American Undergraduates’ Accent Ratings
Mean ratings
Descriptors United States British Mexican Chinese

native 1.9 4.0 1.6 1.3
speaks fluently 4.0 4.0 3.4 3.4
easy to understand 4.0 3.6 2.9 3.0
bad pronunciation 1.0 1.4 1.8 1.9
speaks too fast 1.1 1.0 1.8 1.0
foreign accent 1.0 3.4 3.5 4.0
nice to listen to 3.0 3.9 3.7 2.9
annoying/irritating 1.3 1.5 1.5 1.4
good ESL teacher 3.8 3.4 3.0 3.2
educated 3.1 4.0 3.4 3.4
Note. Ratings are measured on a scale of 1–4. Underlined numbers are the highest rating in
their category.
730 TESOL QUARTERLY

as the most educated by both the American students and the English
learners’, reminiscent of Dalton-Puffer’s et al. (1997) result.
To summarize the main quantitative trends, the English learners as
a whole had difficulty identifying accents of English with the exception
of the learners from Taiwan identifying the Chinese accent. Less than
one-third could identify the American accent they claimed that they
wished to emulate. Native speakers were much more accurate identify-
ing native accents. No clear-cut relationships appeared between varia-
bles in the learners’ backgrounds and the ability to identify accents
correctly. Several of those who had lived in the United States for years
misidentified the American accent. Finally, learners’ accent prefer-
ences were associated with ease of understanding and speed, reflecting
the importance of listening comprehension in learning English.
Interviews With Spanish Speakers
A subgroup of the English learners, 11 Spanish speakers from a

variety of Spanish-speaking countries, volunteered to be interviewed
after filling out the survey. Participants’ ages ranged from 21 to 38;
they had been studying English from 11 months to 8 years (average
4.3 years), and had been in the United States from one month to 7
years (average 11.6 months).
Ability to Identify Accents
Although 6 of these 11 participants correctly identified the American

accent, it was difficult to link this ability to other factors from their
backgrounds. For example, Carolina and Sebastián9 were siblings who
had both lived in the United States for 1 year and had been studying
English for the same amount of time in the same intensive English
program. They both agreed that they spoke more often to interna-
tional students than to native speakers of English, yet Carolina identi-
fied the American accent correctly and Sebastián did not.
The case of another student, Marta, further exemplifies the com-
plexity of accent recognition. Although Marta, from Colombia, cor-
rectly identified the American accent, she identified the Mexican and
British speakers as being from the United States and thought the
Chinese speaker was from Argentina. During the interview, she admit-
ted being impressed by her Colombian housemate’s ability to switch
between English and Spanish only to find out later that “he doesn’t
9
Subjects were assigned pseudonyms to protect their identities.

speak it [English] well; he feels that he has a latino accent” (original
in Spanish).10 Although she claimed to be able to identify Spanish-
accented speech, she became aware of her compatriot’s accent not
because she perceived it herself, but because she was told.
Neither did English proficiency necessarily predict the participants’
ability to identify the American accent. Mercedes, who labeled the
American accent as simply “nonnative speaker” on the survey, was a
highly proficient speaker of English. She had passed the Cambridge
First Certificate in Perú, had recently graduated from an intensive
English program in the United States, and was taking an introductory
college writing course at the time of the study.
Some learners seemed to have an idealized view of what a native
speaker should sound like, as Timmis (2002) and Dalton-Puffer et al.
(1997) also found among their participants. For example, Mercedes,
when asked why she thought (incorrectly) that the American was a
nonnative speaker, said, “I thought she was European but wasn’t some-
body who spoke this “tea time” [British] English that I’m used to. But
there was a place where she tripped over her words. That isn’t natural.
You read your own language naturally” (original in Spanish). This quo-
tation shows Mercedes’ expectation that a native speaker would not
make mistakes. Her reference to tripping over words, we speculate,
concerns a pause of 0.3 seconds which occurred in the phrase, “get
rid of (.3) insects”. We detected no other disfluencies in the sample.
Familiarity with Spanish did not necessarily enable this subgroup to
successfully identify the Mexican accent. Six of the participants were able
to identify it as that of a Spanish speaker but only one guessed Mexico
(and it was not Gonzalo, from Mexico, interestingly). When asked to
explain how they made their decisions, several of those who correctly
guessed “Spanish speaker” or “Latin” stated that they had identified this
accent as similar to the way they spoke English themselves. Of those five
who guessed incorrectly, three were from Argentina, where the variety
of Spanish most commonly spoken differs greatly from Mexican with
regard to both segmental and suprasegmental features (Kaisse, 2001).
Several participants claimed to have made their accent guesses based
on a comparison with particular individuals. For example, Mercedes
commented that she associated the British accent with her English
teachers in Perú. Oscar, who guessed that the Chinese speaker was
from India, stated that he had recently listened to a lecture by a per-
son from India and thought that this accent was similar.
Some participants demonstrated greater awareness of phonetic char-
acteristics of the accents than others, and this analytical approach
10
All quotations are originally in English unless otherwise noted; quotations in Spanish
were translated by one of the researchers.
732 TESOL QUARTERLY

appeared to be helpful. When explaining his ability to correctly iden-
tify the British accent, Felipe was able to mimic the speaker’s pronun-
ciation of “hospital.” He was also confident in his ability to identify
the Chinese accent as Asian; he said that the accent sounded like an
“automatic machine,” possibly referring to the speaker’s tendency
toward syllable timing.
Accent Preferences
The Spanish-speaking subgroup was somewhat less likely to prefer

the American accent than the English language learners as a group:
36% preferred it, an equal number preferred the British accent, and
none preferred the Mexican accent. However, they were consistent
with the rest of the group in having a perfect correlation (100%)
between their preference and their vote on ease of understanding.
When asked to expound on their reasons for preferring a particular
accent, learners most often cited clarity of speech and speed. Graciela,
for example, preferred the Chinese accent (although she thought it
was Canadian) because she spoke, “slowly and clear.” Carolina pre-
ferred the American accent (correctly identified) because it was “very
clear to understand.” These comments echo the listening comprehen-
sion priority found among the larger group of English learners.
Correspondingly, difficulty of understanding and lack of preference
were correlated with regard to the Mexican accent. None of the Spanish
speakers preferred it or found it the easiest to understand. In fact, six
voted it the most difficult to understand. When giving her reasons for
these choices, Marta stated that the Mexican speaker (who she thought
was from the United States) spoke too fast and made mistakes. A fur-
ther reason cited for their preferences involved fluency. David, Oscar,
and Mercedes, who dispreferred the Mexican accent, all separately con-
cluded that the speaker was less “fluent” than the others. However, what
they meant by fluency was not readily apparent. In this study, fluency
cannot be related to grammar proficiency because all four speakers
read the same passage. Additionally, it is clear that they were not relat-
ing fluency to speed because this speaker actually spoke the fastest of
the group. Finally, we did not detect false starts or unnatural hesitations
in her sample. Excepting one unnatural pause (discussed previously),
all of her pauses occurred at the boundaries of thought groups.
Some participants revealed a tendency toward accent stereotyping
in the interviews. Marta, from Colombia, dispreferred the British
speaker, explaining that, “she sounded like a school teacher, like the
voice on a tape. I don’t like those tapes” (original in Spanish).
Mercedes, from Perú, also associated the British accent with her teach-
ers but claimed to admire the accent. She stated:

She is clear. She pronounces well. She’s the one that to me seems the
most … I associate her most with an educated person. She makes me feel
secure. I trust her. I feel that the words that she says are real, that they’ve
been scientifically proven (original in Spanish).
Another instance of accent stereotyping comes again from Marta,

from Colombia, who commented that her Asian classmates in her
intensive English program were difficult to understand. Yet in doing
our blind listening task she chose the Chinese accent as easiest to
understand and the one she liked most. She deemed this accent to
be that of a Spanish speaker from Argentina, perhaps associating the
ease of understanding with similarity to her native language.
Accent Goals
Among the Spanish speakers, 9 out of the 11 chose sounding like

a native speaker as their accent goal. Despite this clear-cut preference
for attaining a native accent, many were not readily able to articulate
the reasons behind their goals. For instance, to an interview question
about why she had a native-accent goal, Mercedes was silent for a full
5 seconds before answering:
[pause] well, because that’s what it’s all about. When one learns a lan-
guage, one has to learn diction, one has to learn pronunciation, and I feel
that the closer I am to a native speaker, the better off I’m going to be in
my task of … [pause] my language is going to be better when it is more
similar. I don’t want to have even a trace of an accent. (original in
Spanish)
This quote is representative of other participants’ answers to this

question. Although Mercedes’ rationale included a general expecta-
tion that her life would improve, she trailed off when attempting to
state a more specific reason.
Felipe, however, was aware that he could possibly face employment
limitations with a nonnative accent. He was enrolled in a master’s
program in Spanish literature at a United States university and had to
pass a test of spoken English before assuming a teaching assistantship.
He appeared to accept this requirement along with his position in the
academic community. “I have an academic purpose,” he stated, “so to
speak right is important.”
Only one learner, Oscar, raised the question of dialect in having a
native-accent goal in the United States, saying, “I don’t know which is
the American pronunciation, because there’s the north, the south, the
east, the west.” Nor did the interviews reveal much awareness of the
difficulty a learner might face in attempting to acquire a native accent.
734 TESOL QUARTERLY

Not a single person interviewed mentioned that a native accent might
be impossible for an adult to acquire.
To summarize, the interviews confirmed the difficulty and complex-
ity of accent identification for learners, as well as their preferences for
clear, comprehensible English. A number of criteria were cited for
their accent judgments, from awareness of segmental and supraseg-
mental details, to comparison with particular individuals’ accents, to
stereotypical notions of native speech (i.e., that it should be error-
free). Yet, the majority of their guesses as to the speakers’ language
backgrounds were incorrect. None of these participants exhibited a
particular awareness of the political discussions that surround accent
in the field of TESOL today. Instead, the majority assumed that the
native accent was a reasonable and obvious choice to strive for.
CONCLUSION
This study has revealed a mismatch between these learners’ own

accent goals and their ability to perceive accents. Although a majority
wanted to have a native accent, few were able to identify the accent
they claimed to want to internalize. Evidently, accent perception is a
complex task that requires more than mere length of exposure to an
accent. The study has also shown that these learners place a high pri-
ority on listening comprehension: For almost all of the English learn-
ers, the preferred speaker, and the best suited as an ESOL teacher,
was the one judged easiest to understand.
We recommend, therefore, a shift of focus in discussions of pronun-
ciation teaching in the field. In addition to asking, who will under-
stand the learners? (whether native speakers in inner-circle countries,
an international community, a local community, etc.), we should also
ask, who will the learners understand? That is, how can they become
more versatile in participating in a variety of interactions to meet their
communication goals? To this end, a more integrated and analytical
approach to the teaching of pronunciation would be a promising
direction. Courses could be expanded from the traditional focus on
learner pronunciation alone to include oral communication as a whole.
Instead of a single pronunciation model, English language learners
could hear, analyze, and compare key features among a variety of
accents. Such an approach would address both intelligibility and listen-
ing comprehension, increasing communicative flexibility and respect
for accent diversity.
Finally, we urge others to continue to test these results. Given our
small sample size and the particular configuration of countries and
backgrounds represented, a great deal remains to be learned about

accent perceptions of ESOL populations. Future research could range
from broad-based projects with large and varied samples of ESOL stu-
dents to more local studies by program administrators and teachers
who wish to gain a sense of their own students’ accent priorities. Along
these lines, we hope that the kinds of questions we have presented
about accent attitudes, goals, and perceptions can be raised more
widely in the field.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank Bill Harshbarger, Andrew Siegel, Flavio Kaplan, Xochitl Soriano,
Amanda Lloyd, Nanci Leiton, and a group of student volunteers from the University
of Washington English Language Programs.
THE AUTHORS
Julie Scales is a graduate of the University of Washington MATESOL program and
currently teaches at Miramar College in San Diego, California, USA. She is interested
in L2 accent and intonation and their role in comprehensibility.
Ann Wennerstrom teaches applied linguistics and ESOL at the University of
Washington, Seattle, USA. She is author of The Music of Everyday Speech (2001),
Discourse Analysis in the Language Classroom: Genres of Writing (2003), and Techniques
for Teachers (1991). Her research interests include intonation, discourse analysis, and
immigration law.
Dara Richard has a MATESOL degree from the University of Washington and
has taught in Japan and Uzbekistan. She currently works as a teacher trainer
in Malaysia. Her research interests include teacher education in developing
countries.
Su Hui Wu is a doctoral candidate in Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
She holds master’s degrees in English literature and MATESOL. She is interested in
elementary EFL preservice teacher education in Taiwan.
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APPENDIX A
SCRIPT FOR SHORT LECTURE
Useful Insects1
Most people do not like insects very much. We do everything we can to get rid of insects
in our house and garden. But actually, some insects are very useful to people. Today, insects
are being used in many surprising ways.
For example, insects are very useful in medicine. Believe it or not, maggots are now used
regularly in hospitals. When a person gets a very bad injury on their body, the dead skin
must be removed. Today, doctors are using maggots to eat the dead skin around the injury.
The doctors have found that maggots eat only the dead skin, so they make the injury very
clean. Many hospitals keep a supply of maggots for this purpose.
1
From Solorzano and Schmidt (1996, p. 28).
APPENDIX B
SURVEY QUESTIONS
Part I
(1=disagree; 2=slightly disagree; 3=slightly agree; 4=agree)
This speaker:
• is a native speaker
• speaks fluently
• is easy to understand
• has bad pronunciation
• speaks too fast
• has a foreign accent
• is nice to listen to
• has an annoying/irritating accent
• would be a good English (ESOL) teacher
• sounds educated
What country do you think this speaker is from?
How easy was this person to understand? (very easy; easy; ok; difficult; very difficult)
Part II
Which speaker was easiest to understand?
Which speaker did you like the most? Why?
Do you think practice would help you speak like this person?
Who was the hardest to understand?
Background Information
Check one:
a) I want people to understand me easily. Native accent isn’t important.
b) I want to speak like a native speaker.
What country are you from?
What is your first language?
How long have you studied English?
How long have you lived in the United States?
Who do you talk to in English with more? (international students; native speakers)
Reasons for speaking English in the future? (business; travel; study; live in U.S.)
What English classes are you taking now?
Are you happy with your accent?
738 TESOL QUARTERLY

A Cross-Varietal Comparison of
Deaccenting and Given Information:
Implications for International
Intelligibility and Pronounciation
Teaching
EE LING LOW
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore
Previous research has established that old or given information is often

deaccented. The assumption is that unimportant information ought to
be weakened and attenuated in speech. Consequently, given informa-
tion is often deaccented and new information is usually accented in
most varieties of English. However, some nonnative varieties, such as
Singapore English (SE) appear not to deaccent given information. The
present article seeks to investigate the apparent absence of deaccent-
ing in SE by attempting a cross-varietal comparison with British English
(BE). The data comprise three main categories of given information:
repeated lexical items, anaphoric reference, and sentences that cue
deaccenting by inference. Results indicate that SE speakers showed no
acoustic evidence of prosodically attenuating given information unlike
their BE counterparts and that in the informational domain, SE does
not appear to have a comparable prosodic means of signaling new and
given information. Implications are given for the international intelli-
gibility of nonnative varieties of English that do not distinguish between
new and old information via differences in accent placement. This
article will also discuss ramifications for pronunciation teaching.
P revious research has established that old or given information is

often deaccented (Bolinger, 1986; Couper-Kuhlen, 1986; Cruttenden,
1997, 2006; Eefting, 1991; Hawkins & Warren, 1994; Wennerstrom,
2001). The notion of givenness incorporates two key elements in
English, semantics and prosody. Semantically, givenness can be under-
stood as an extension of Grice’s (1975) rules of conversational interaction.
Grice outlines four conversational maxims: quantity (do not make your
contribution more informative than is required), quality (be truthful),

739
relation (be relevant), and manner (be brief). In particular, the maxims
of quantity and relevance assume that less important information ought
to be weakened and attenuated in some way. One way to do this is
through prosody. Thus, in English, given information is often deac-
cented, and new information is usually accented.
Connecting semantic function and prosody is common. Halliday
(1967) links accent placement to informational focus. Halliday defines
new information as information that is irrecoverable from preceding dis-
course. New information is often accented, and old or given information
tends to be deaccented. Later researchers have defined givenness and new-
ness from several different perspectives. Chafe (1976) says that the distinc-
tion between newness and givenness must consider the speaker’s ability
to correctly predict what is in the addressee’s consciousness. Defined
within that context, old information is knowledge that the speaker assumes
to be in the addressee’s consciousness at the time of the utterance.
Allerton (1978) defines givenness in terms of the hearer’s ability to recover
old information either textually (from preceding discourse) or situation-
ally (by taking into account the speaker’s memory of past events).
The precise acoustic correlates of givenness and newness have been
the subject of much debate. Bolinger (1965) suggests that in English,
what is informationally important is highlighted or made prominent usu-
ally by raising or lowering its pitch from a relatively constant pitch line
compared with surrounding syllables, and while what is considered unim-
portant is cast in the shadow. For example, in the sentence I amcold, the word
cold is highlighted because it is produced at a higher pitch than the pre-
ceding words. To give an example of a given item that is not prominent,
if a speaker responds to a preceding statement made such as: I amcold by
replying I amnot cold, the word cold in the reply is not given prominence
because it is produced at roughly the same pitch line as the other non-
highlighted words in the sentence. This nonprominence occurs because
the word cold has just been mentioned in the preceding statement.
The acoustic correlates of signaling new and given information seem
to be related to the amount of cognitive load needed to process infor-
mation, which determines the amount of physical effort that a speaker
has to expend to help the listener process the information. Chafe
(1994) purports that, because high pitched items are physically easier
for listeners to hear, new information is often produced with greater
acoustic energy and is especially marked by higher pitch. Chafe (1976)
states that given information is pronounced with lower pitch and weaker
stress compared with new items because the speaker assumes them to
be in a listener’s consciousness, thus requiring less cognitive effort to
process. Fowler and Hossum (1987) suggest that the acoustic correlate
of given information is the shorter duration of words containing old
information. This lack of prominence in given information seems to
740 TESOL QUARTERLY

be relative. Wennerstrom (2001, p. 38) discusses relative deaccenting
of given items in relation to surrounding items and indicates that given
information need not have the lowest pitch in the entire discourse; it
just has to be lower in pitch than its surrounding syllables.
Although it is not always easy to specify what discoursal structures
correlate with givenness, Cruttenden (2004, p. 5) states that one unar-
guable case of givenness appears to be that of repetition. He states
that deaccenting of repeated items is certainly obligatory for the vari-
ety of English that Halliday (1967) was describing, that is, standard
British English (BE) and for most other dialects of English. However,
this may not be true for other varieties. Research on Hawaiian English
(Vanderslice & Pierson, 1967), Indian English (Gumperz, 1982; Bansal,
1990), Nigerian English (Egbe, 1979), and London Jamaican English
(Wells, 1992) suggests that such a phenomenon may not occur in
these nonnative varieties of English. Although the terms native and
nonnative are terminologically loaded in regard to varieties of English,
in this article, native varieties refers to Kachru’s (1982) inner circle
varieties: British, American, Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian
English. All other varieties, which cannot be assumed to use the same
prosodic features to signal givenness and newness, are termed nonna-
tive varieties.
The contrast between an apparently obligatory need to deaccent
given information by native English speakers and the lack of such a
need by nonnative English speakers is of interest to English language
teachers, as it is important to find out whether the lack of deaccenting
attested in the nonnative varieties of English poses problems for intel-
ligibility when native speakers and nonnative speakers of English
communicate.
The absence of deaccenting associated with other nonnative varie-
ties of English also characterises Singapore English (SE). A previous
perceptual and acoustic study carried out by Low (1994) suggests that
although BE speakers deaccented lexical items which have been previ-
ously mentioned in an utterance, such deaccenting seems to be absent
in SE. This observation was supported by acoustic evidence. It was
found that while most of the BE speakers tested produced a step-down
in peak fundamental frequency (F0), which is the acoustic correlate
of pitch, and which is from the previous syllable for repeated lexical
items in the corpus, SE speakers uniformly exhibited a step-up in peak
F0 from the preceding syllable for these items. The current study
investigates further the apparent absence of deaccenting in SE and
discusses the implications of the findings for the international intelli-
gibility of those varieties of English that do not prosodically distinguish
between new and old information in the same way as the native varie-
ties. The ramifications for pronunciation teaching are also explored.
IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY 741

METHOD
Three categories of discoursal structures thought to correlate with

givenness, and thus to elicit deaccenting, were examined: verbatim
repetition (Cruttenden, 2006), anaphoric reference or anaphoric dis-
tressing (Cruttenden; Ladd, 1980), and inferential reference (Ladd).
Each of these will be described in turn.
The sentences containing verbatim repetition were termed Category
1 test items. The test sentences chosen were cited by Bolinger (1957)
as common examples of deaccenting repeated items and accenting
new items. An example of a Category 1 sentence is If you have a hun-
dred dollars then spend a hundred dollars. Category 2 items consisted of
sentences that contain anaphoric pronouns referring to something
that has been mentioned earlier in the sentence. An example Category
2 sentence is Jim likes green walls but his wife prefers them blue, where them
is coreferential with walls. According to Deterding (1994), function
words tend to be accented in SE. Thus, this category is used to inves-
tigate whether the function words will be deaccented in this context.
Category 3 was meant to cue deaccenting by inference as described in
Ladd (1980), where “the deaccented noun has been somehow referred
to or alluded to earlier in the discourse” (p. 180), for example, I went
to the shop to buy Mars Bars but they’d totally run out of chocolate bars. In
this sentence, the chocolate in chocolate bars implicitly refers to the choc-
olate in Mars Bars and is thus susceptible to deaccenting by inference.
The test sentences were randomized with four filler sentences. (A full
list of the sentences is given in the Appendix.) It should be pointed
out that the test items represent only three easily identifiable catego-
ries of given information. The study has not attempted to cover all the
categories of given information. Consequently, the experimental results
should also be interpreted with a degree of caution because the care-
fully controlled nature of the data may not directly represent naturally
occurring speech.
PROCEDURE
BE speakers were recorded in the sound-treated room at the

Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Cambridge using a Sennheiser
condenser microphone with a cardioid response. To ensure that the
recordings would not be clipped, the distance from the speakers’
mouths was varied according to the amplitude of their voices displayed
by the peak level signal bar. The SE speakers were recorded in the
teaching laboratory of the National Institute of Education in Singapore.
Although the room is not entirely sound treated, it is equipped for
742 TESOL QUARTERLY

recording purposes, specifically, for video-recording trainee teachers
during practical training sessions. A Sony TC-172 cassette recorder
with an attached microphone was used.
Sentences were produced in isolation, that is, out of context, and
all were declaratives. Thus, they were expected to be produced with
falling nuclear tones (O’Connor & Arnold, 1973, p. 53). In SE, as
reported in Low and Brown (2005), declaratives generally also have
falling tones.
Participants
Ten SE and ten BE speakers (five males and five females for both
varieties) matched for educational qualification (all were undergradu-
ates) and age (19–25 years old) were recorded. BE speakers were
either born or brought up in the south of England to control for
regional variation of accents, and the Singaporeans were all ethnically
Chinese and had not spent more than a year living away from
Singapore. The 120 test utterances (6 sentences produced by 20 speak-
ers) was digitized using waves+ software running on the Silicon
Graphics machines at the Phonetics Laboratory at Cambridge
University.
Fundamental Frequency (F0)
In Low’s (1994) study of deaccenting, peak F0 was used, including

the peak F0 of the syllable immediately preceding those containing
given information and the peak F0 of all the test items containing
given information. In the present study, peak F0 was measured for all
the syllables in the utterance. This procedure was necessary to exam-
ine the overall intonational pattern of the utterances. For this reason,
the F0 measurements are given in Hertz instead of in any perceptually
meaningful measurement because I am interested in the comparative
overall pitch pattern between the varieties. The F0 measurements were
taken by aligning the waveform display with the F0 contour for each
utterance using waves+. The peak F0 value of each syllable was deter-
mined using Cooper and Sorensen’s (1981) criteria. The purpose of
these criteria is to locate the highest F0 value for a given syllable while
excluding the occasional spurious F0 values which occur “in regions
of speech accompanied by very low amplitude or in regions of fast F0
transition such as at the onset of voicing after a stop consonant” (p.
17). When spurious F0 values were encountered, a direct measurement
of fundamental period was obtained manually by examining the

narrow-band spectrogram display of that portion, identifying the value
of a higher harmonic, for example, H3, and dividing this value by 3,
that is, the number.
Analysis
Because the test sentences contained examples of different syntactic

conditions hypothesized to cue the presence of deaccenting, a com-
mon means of classifying the results for each category was needed.
One way is to identify the last accented syllable in the utterances for
the BE speakers. This syllable is then termed the nucleus. The following
syllables would then form the tail of the utterance. Figure 1 shows the
measurement points for the nucleus and tail in a schematized repre-
sentation of a sentence produced by a BE speaker.
An average peak F0 value can then be calculated for all the syllables
in the tail by totaling the F0 values for all syllables in the tail and
dividing this value by the number of syllables in the tail. It was possible
to divide the phrase-final accent pattern information into the nucleus
and the tail for test items in Categories 1 and 3. For test items in
Category 2, however, the nucleus occurred in phrase-final position;
that is, it followed the item to be deaccented, at least in BE. For
Category 2 items, the peak F0 of the item containing the given infor-
mation was compared with the preceding unstressed syllable rather
than with the nucleus following it.
RESULTS
Pitch
In the current study, it was predicted that because all the sentences
in the corpus are statements, a falling intonation contour would occur
at the end of each utterance. According to the literature, BE (Low &
Brown, 2005) and SE (Pike, 1945) have falling tones for declaratives.
It was also predicted that BE speakers would deaccent given informa-
tion in the utterances, with a clear step down in average peak F0 from
the nucleus to the tail.1 SE speakers were predicted to exhibit a less
1
It should be noted that the terms nucleus and tail are used with reference to their posi-
tion in BE. Having identified these positions in BE, the same reference points were then
applied to the SE data. For convenience, the terms nucleus and tail will be used for the
descriptions of both BE and SE. Note, however, that no assumption is being made that
the nucleus or tail occurs in the same place in both varieties of English, or that SE actu-
ally has a nuclear accent comparable to that in BE.
744 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 1
Schematic Illustration of Measurements Taken
Note. The diagram depicts the F0 contour as predicted for British English.
clear step down in F0 or even a step up. In sentences produced by

BE speakers where the nucleus occurred in final position and no tail
could be found, for example, in Category 2 test items, it was predicted
that there would be a step down in average peak F0 from the preced-
ing syllable to the given item(s). SE speakers were expected to exhibit
a less obvious step-down or a step-up.
The peak F0 for each syllable was measured for each of the 120
utterances. Average peak F0 was then calculated for male and female
speakers separately because males and females are known to have dif-
ferent pitch ranges. The results for each category of sentences section
are presented separately.
Figure 2 shows the peak F0 results obtained for sentences in
Category 1 for SE and BE speakers. Results for males and females in
both SE and BE showed a similar decrease in F0 between the nucleus
and tail. It is also clear that there is a much steeper step down in
F0 from the nucleus to the tail for BE than for SE. A t-test (paired
samples for means) showed that this difference was significant for
males (p < 0.01, df 14, t −28.18) and females (p < 0.01, df
14, t −6.36).
Figure 3 presents the peak F0 results for test items in Category 2.
Although male and female BE speakers exhibited a step down in peak
F0 to the given item, the male SE speakers behaved differently from
their female counterparts. The male SE speakers produced a step up
in F0 from the preceding syllable to the given item. Female SE speak-
ers showed a step down in F0. The difference between male BE and
male SE speakers was significant (p < 0.01, df 9, t −8.14). For the
female BE and SE speakers, the difference was not significant (p >
0.01, df 9, t −0.4).
Figure 4 shows the peak F0 results for SE and BE for test items
in Category 3. Once again, a similar trend may be observed for SE

FIGURE 2
Peak F0 Results for Repeated Lexical Items in Category 1 for Male and Female Participants
and BE speakers. In both BE and SE, the speakers produced a step

down from the nucleus to the tail. However, BE speakers show a
much steeper slope downward to the tail than do SE speakers. The
difference was significant for both the male (p < 0.01, df 4, t
−5.7) and the female speakers (p < 0.01, df 4, t −2.97). In other
words, SE speakers exhibited a significantly gentler step down in
average peak F0 from the nucleus to the tail than did BE
speakers.
FIGURE 3
Average Peak F0 for Test Items in Category 2 for Male and Female Participants
Note. PS = preceding syllable. These graphs have been plotted on a different scale to accommodate
smaller values.
746 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 4
Peak F0 Results for Test Items in Category 3 for Male and Female Participants
Duration
Pitch is not the only acoustic clue to newness and givenness.

According to Fowler and Hossum (1987), significantly shorter durations
were found for the second mention of words in a passage, where they
defined given information as those words that had been mentioned
previously in an utterance. Hawkins and Warren (1994) have pointed
out that this approach provides good experimental control and is useful
for acoustic measurements because it enables the researcher to com-
pare the same words in an utterance, even though it does somewhat
simplify the distinction between new and given information. Finding
out whether SE speakers attenuated their production of old words dura-
tionally required utterances in which a word was repeated. In the data,
this criterion applies to sentences in Category 1, where lexical items
are repeated at the end of the utterance.
It was predicted that BE speakers would clearly shorten the duration
of given or old words relative to that of new words. SE speakers were
expected to exhibit less difference in duration between new and old
words in the data.
Duration measurements were taken for the vowels within each syl-
lable of all utterances. The total vowel durations for each word were
calculated. The decision to measure vowel durations was prompted by
Low, Grabe, and Nolan (2000), who showed that SE was found to have
more nearly equal vowel durations than BE because of the relative
absence of reduced vowels in SE compared with BE. Vowels were
identified by processing the speech data, sampled at 16 kHz with the

spectrographic analysis (s-gram) of waves+ set to wide band. For a
detailed account of vowel segmentation criteria, see Low et al. (2000,
p. 381).
Figure 5 presents the durational results for new and old words in
Sentence 1. The figure shows that although SE showed almost no dif-
ference in the vowel duration of new and given words, BE clearly
showed a shorter duration for given words. A t-test (two samples assum-
ing unequal variances) showed that the difference in vowel duration
of new and given words in SE was not significant (p > 0.01, df 17.97,
t 0.72). The difference in BE, however, was found to be significant
(p < 0.01, df 17.97, t 3.41).
Figure 6 shows the average vowel durations for test items in Sentence
2. Again, SE showed almost no difference between the vowel durations
of new and given words. BE, on the other hand, showed a considerably
larger difference in vowel duration for new and given words. A t-test
showed that the difference between the vowel durations in new and
given words in BE was significant (p < 0.01, df 17.97, t 2.57).
This difference was not found to be significant in SE (p > 0.01, df
17.97, t 0.19).
Figure 7 shows the average vowel durations for test items in Sentence
3. The difference in duration that SE speakers assigned to new and
given words was not significant (p > 0.01, df 17.97, t −0.26), but
FIGURE 5
Average Duration of Vowels in New and Given Words in the Category 1 Sentence If you have a
hundred dollars, then spend a hundred dollars
748 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 6
Average Duration of Vowels in New and Given Words in the Category 1 Sentence I had a
toothache, but fortunately, it wasn’t a bad toothache
the difference that BE speakers assigned was significant (p < 0.01,

df 17.97, t 5.45).
The durational results for all sentences support the predictions. BE
subjects clearly shortened their production of given items. SE speakers,
however, did not shorten duration in their production of given words.
DISCUSSION
The average peak F0 results suggest that both SE and BE speakers

attenuate their production of given items. This is evident in the step
down in F0 from the nucleus to the tail for test items in Categories 1
and 3. However, SE speakers also exhibited less of a step down in F0
than the BE speakers. For test items in Category 2, SE subjects did
not uniformly exhibit a step down to the given items; instead, the male
subjects assigned a step up in F0 to the given item.
The duration measurements show that BE speakers clearly shortened
the duration of vowels in given words. However, SE speakers did not
exhibit a significant difference in duration between the vowels in new
and given words. This finding suggests that SE speakers do not use
duration to attenuate given information in the way BE speakers do.
The F0 and the duration results seem to contradict each other. The
F0 results suggest that SE speakers attenuate their production of given

FIGURE 7
Average Duration of Vowels in New and Given Words in the Category 1 Sentence I won’t give it
to John because I know John
items (albeit to a lesser degree than BE speakers), but the duration

results suggest that SE speakers do not attenuate their production of
given items. One possible explanation for this apparent contradiction
is that the findings for deaccenting may be a function of the F0 meas-
ure chosen. In other words, SE may not, in fact, deaccent in the
domain of F0. The apparent deaccenting, measured as an average F0
value for all syllables in the tail, may be misleading because vital infor-
mation such as the shape of the F0 contour for the syllables in the
tail is lost. This information was examined to determine whether SE
speakers actually deaccented or reaccented their production of given
items.2 Figure 8 shows why the apparent deaccenting may in fact be
an instance of reaccenting of given information.
The F0 results showed that the step down in F0 from the nucleus
to the tail was much greater in BE than in SE. In Figure 8, the steep
slope for BE is schematized as the result of a flattening of the F0
contour on the postnuclear syllables. Additionally, Figure 8 shows two
possible reasons for SE’s smaller step down in F0. First, the smaller
2
The term reaccenting is used by Cruttenden (2006) to refer to the placement of accent
after the intonational nucleus. In other words, it refers to those languages which do not
flatten their pitch contour after focus but seem to have postfocal accents. The use of this
term for SE in the current study refers specifically to what happens to the pitch contour
in SE after the intonational nucleus as designated by BE speakers has been realized.
750 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 8
Why Attenuation in SE May Be an Instance of Reaccenting
step down in F0 could be an instance of deaccenting, just as in BE,

where the F0 contour flattens out. Second, it may be the case that SE
reaccents given information, which is shown in the second hump fol-
lowing the nucleus.
Thus, in order to find out whether SE has deaccented or reaccented
given information, it may be insufficient to look at the averaged F0
values for all syllables in the tail. By averaging the postnuclear syllables,
it is impossible to tell whether SE assigns (a) a step up in F0 to the
given item or (b) a step-down to the given item, as in BE. The next
section will investigate whether SE speakers deaccented or reaccented
given information.
SHAPE OF F0 CONTOUR
Method
The F0 results for both males and females were combined because
little difference was found in the overall trend displayed in their F0
patterns for test items in Categories 1 and 3. The results for Category
2 are not be presented because the values of the preceding syllable
and given item were already shown. Although peak F0 values for all

syllables in the tail were measured because the structure of the tail
varied across the different sentences, it was necessary to identify the
common syllables that could act as reference points for comparing
across the sentences. The F0 measurements of the following syllables
were presented where possible:
1. The nucleus, defined as the last accented syllable in BE.
2. The syllable preceding the given item (PS). The F0 value for this
syllable relative to that of the nuclear syllable can show whether SE
speakers assigned a step up or a step down to the given item.
3. The given item.
4. The final syllable (FS). This syllable is important as a reference to
show how the F0 contour ended for each utterance.
Although the nucleus and the given item were identifiable for all
sentences, it was not always possible to identify the PS and the FS.
Results
In this section, the results of the F0 measurements points in the tail

for SE and BE are presented using one sentence each from Categories
1 and 3.
Figure 9 shows the F0 values for Sentence 2 in Category 1. Once
again, the SE speakers exhibited a step up in F0 to the given item,
and the BE speakers showed a step down. This finding suggests that
the SE speakers did not deaccent the given items in this sentence. The
higher peak F0 on -ache for SE could be a result of the SE speakers
assigning an accent on -ache as well, but this cannot be ascertained
from the results shown in Figure 9.3 The accompanying F0 trace for
an SE and BE speaker producing the phrase bad toothache is given in
Figure 10. Portions of the F0 trace corresponding to the syllables pre-
sented in Figure 9 are marked.
From Figure 10, it is clear that the BE speaker deaccented tooth- and
the F0 contour flattens out after the nucleus bad, but that the SE
speaker appears to have reaccented tooth- by assigning it a slight step
up and has apparently accented -ache as well. This finding explains the
results obtained in Figure 9, where the peak F0 on -ache is slightly
higher than for -tooth.
Figure 11 shows the F0 results for Sentence 1 in Category 3. The
BE subjects clearly deaccented the given item choc-, but the SE subjects
3
The assignment of accent on -ache is not surprising considering the findings in Low
(2000), where SE speakers stressed the second element of compound words.
752 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 9
SE and BE Speakers Producing the Category 1 Sentence I had a toothache but fortunately, it
wasn’t a bad toothache
Note. FS = final syllable.
exhibited a step up in F0. Once again, the data suggests that SE reac-
cents given information. Example F0 traces of individual SE and BE
speakers are provided in Figures 12a and 12b.
Figure 12 shows that although SE speakers clearly assigned a step-up
to the given item choc-, the BE speakers did not do so. Furthermore,
evidence shows that the SE speakers reaccented after the nucleus out;
a relatively large F0 discontinuity characterises the succession from of
to choc-. In BE, however, the F0 contour flattens out after the nucleus
on out.
In summary, it is fair to conclude that although the average F0
results appear to suggest that SE attenuates given information to some
extent, this attenuation does not take the form of deaccenting. Rather,
from the example sentences shown in Categories 1 and 3 and the
accompanying F0 traces of these sentences, sufficient evidence is
provided to show that SE speakers, in fact, reaccented given
information.
IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY
According to Fowler and Hossum (1987), speakers sometimes signal

old or given information in a lexical item by shortening the duration
of the items. This result is confirmed by the BE speakers in this study.
Although Fowler and Hossum were not able to show a lowering of
peak F0 for given information in American English, the current study

FIGURE 10
F0 Traces of SE Speaker and BE Speaker Producing bad toothache
shows that the BE speakers consistently lowered peak F0 to signal

given information. This result concurs with Chafe (1976), where given
information was produced with lower pitch. The current findings sug-
gest that, for BE, both lowering of peak F0 and shortening duration
on given items are salient acoustic manifestations of speakers’ attempts
to prosodically attenuate given information.
SE speakers appeared not to prosodically attenuate given informa-
tion, either in terms of duration or F0. In the informational domain,
SE does not appear to have a comparable prosodic means of signaling
new and given information. This finding presents interesting questions
pertaining to the intelligibility of SE for global communication. In fact,
the need to establish international intelligibility was the theme of
Singapore’s 2001 Speak Good English Movement and articulated in
754 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 11
SE and BE Subjects Producing the Category 3 Sentence I went to the shop to buy Mars Bars but
they’d totally run out of chocolate bars
Note. PS = preceding syllable, FS = final syllable.
the words of Singapore’s current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong

(then the deputy prime minister): “We need not speak with a British
or American accent, a Singaporean accent is fine. But Singaporeans
must speak a form of English that is readily understood by people all
over the world” (Baruah, 2001).
Jenkins (2000) says that contrastive stress placement is key to a
speaker’s intended meaning and crucial for ensuring intelligibility. She
further emphasizes that “contrastive stress is especially important in
English, as the language does not have the morphological or syntactic
resources that many other languages have to highlight contrasts” (p.
153). Consequently, she suggests that nuclear stress placement and
production ought to occupy an important place in the lingua franca
core (LFC), and indeed, her LFC lists nuclear stress production and
placement and division of speech stream into word groups as core
features. Seen in this light, the findings from the current study have
important implications for the international intelligibility of nonnative
varieties of English that do not distinguish between new and old infor-
mation via differences in accent placement.
Given that Singaporeans do not deaccent but in some instances reac-
cent given information, a basic question is whether this way of speaking
causes a problem for intelligibility. To answer this question, we need
to consider broadly what constitutes intelligibility. Smith and Nelson
(1985) reserve the term intelligibility to refer to the ability to recognize
words and utterances, and they use the term comprehensibility to refer
to the meaning conveyed by the words and utterances; they define
interpretability as the ability to deduce the speaker’s intent behind

FIGURE 12
F0 Traces of SE Speaker and BE Speaker Producing out of chocolate bars
the utterance. It is hard to imagine anyone not being able to recognize

an utterance (i.e., intelligibility) spoken by an SE speaker simply
because of the reaccenting of given information. In fact, reaccenting
old information in SE appears to have the opposite illocutionary force
compared with what it is meant to convey in BE, that of drawing a
speaker’s attention to given information rather than away from it. A
more plausible hypothesis is that interpretability will be compromised.
Though the current study did not consider this aspect of intelligibility,
current research from the corpus of spoken Singapore English (National
Institute of Education Corpus of Spoken Singapore English; see
Deterding & Low, 2001) suggests that the SE speaker’s reaccenting of
old information causes a British interlocutor in at least a few instances
to misunderstand the SE speaker’s communicative intent (Deterding,
Brown, & Low, 2005). Anecdotally, a compromise in interpretability
756 TESOL QUARTERLY

makes sense. In cases where I merely reaccented repeated words, for
example, I looked around for the car but there was no car, I have often been
asked by foreigners whether I was angry when my communicative intent
has been far from conveying the feeling of anger.
The other interesting question to consider is what other discoursal
means Singaporeans may use to convey the same communicative intent
of distinguishing between new and given information. The answer
probably lies in the use of pragmatic particles (also known as discourse
particles) described in Low and Brown (2005, pp. 175–180). For exam-
ple, to highlight new lexical items, SE speakers can use the particle
lah as in It’s the man lah, I tell you, it’s him, where man is highlighted
by the use of the lah just after it (Low & Brown, 2005, p. 178). As for
downplaying given or old information, the particle what may be used.
For example:
A: Why do you play the piano?
B: I like, what.
This conversational exchange shows an example where the earlier
information is not referred to via the use of an anaphoric pronoun
(as in the Category 2 test items used in this study) but is instead
replaced by the particle what. From these examples, we can surmise
that SE does distinguish between new and old information but in a
different manner from BE. BE prosodically accents new information
and deaccents given information, but SE highlights new information
by adding the lah particle after the lexical item containing new infor-
mation and using the what particle to refer to something that has been
mentioned earlier in the conversation.
Moving on to pedagogical implications, we have to consider whether
the language of the students is simultaneously Singaporean enough
to inspire national pride while still being international enough to
keep Singapore in the mainstream of the English-speaking world. A
quintessential feature of SE such as the lack of deaccenting does not
compromise international intelligibility but, rather, international
interpretability, especially when one is communicating with native
English speakers. However, if Singaporeans are negotiating for busi-
ness deals or political agreements with nonnative-English-speaking
countries that also do not practice deaccenting (for examples, see
Cruttenden, 2006), then misinterpretability will not be an issue. I
recommend that a syllabus on pronunciation teaching should include
aspects of nuclear and contrastive stress placement, but also that it
should highlight features that differ from native varieties as differ-
ences and not errors. At the same time, how the student’s own variety
of English conveys the same discoursal intent should also be high-
lighted and not ignored. An effective way highlight discoursal intent

would be to design conversations that would cue the presence of
deaccenting in native varieties of English and to ask speakers of non-
native varieties to produce these conversations. The teacher can also
encourage the pupils to paraphrase the conversations with their own
words as long as they keep the context exactly the same. The teacher
can then observe how students make distinctions between new and
given information and, if possible, use this information for classroom
instruction.
CAVEATS AND DIRECTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
The present research has a few limitations. Although it was impor-

tant to the experimental design to devise carefully constructed sen-
tences that would cue the three different types of given information
under investigation, namely, through the mention of repeated lexi-
cal items, anaphoric reference, and by inference, this procedure
incurs certain opportunity costs. First, the sample size of 120 sen-
tences is small and therefore, the findings should not be overgen-
eralized. Second, reading the sentences also suffers from a degree
of artificiality and may not represent naturally occurring conversa-
tion. Further research on the topic should aim to collect more natu-
ral sounding data that would still be able to elicit the examples the
types of given information. One production task that is useful for
such purposes is the map task, where two speakers are presented
with a map that differs in only one key landmark. Finding out which
landmark is different requires them to communicate with each
other.
The other obvious limitation is that although the participants were
speakers of two different varieties of English, namely SE and BE, no
attempt was made to allow these speakers to communicate with each
other in order to examine whether the differences in the means and
extent to which the two varieties signal new and given information
actually lead to any breakdowns in communication (cf. Jenkins, 2000).
Such data would be useful in contributing toward a deeper under-
standing of the impact that phonetic differences between different
varieties may have on actual discourse. This data, in turn, would sug-
gest how much emphasis a pronunciation teacher should place on
the topic.
Finally, using SE to represent a nonnative variety and BE to repre-
sent a native variety also overgeneralizes from the broader classes of
native and nonnative varieties that BE and SE belong to. It should also
be noted that there exist different ways of establishing prominent dis-
tinctions apart from just pitch or durational variation. The next logical
758 TESOL QUARTERLY

step would be to extend the investigation of the link between deac-
centing and given information to many more varieties of English spo-
ken around the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper was partially funded by the research project RI 01/3 LEL: Theoretical
speech research and its practical implications, awarded by the Academic Research
Fund Committee of the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological
University, Singapore.
THE AUTHOR
Ee Ling Low (PhD, Cambridge, U.K.) is concurrently appointed the Sub-Dean of
Degree Programmes, Foundation Programmes Office, and an associate professor
of English language and literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang
Technological University, Singapore. Her articles on speech rhythm and stress have
appeared in such internationally refereed journals as Language & Speech.
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APPENDIX
Category 1 Sentences: Repeated Lexical Items
1 If you have a hundred dollars, then spend a hundred dollars.
2 I had a toothache but fortunately it wasn’t a bad toothache.
3 I won’t give it to John because I know John.
Category 2 Sentences: Anaphora

1 Jim likes green walls but his wife prefers them blue.
2 I adore penguins as they’re cute.
Category 3 Sentences: Inference

1 I went to the shop to buy Mars Bars but they’d totally run out of chocolate bars.

Speech Rhythm in World Englishes: The
Case of Hong Kong
JANE SETTER
University of Reading
Reading, England
This study investigated syllable duration as a measure of speech rhythm

in the English spoken by Hong Kong Cantonese speakers. A computer
dataset of Hong Kong English speech data amounting to 4,404 sylla-
bles was used. Measurements of syllable duration were taken, investi-
gated statistically, and then compared with measurements of 1,847
syllables from an existing corpus of British English speakers. It was
found that, although some similarities existed, the Hong Kong English
speakers showed smaller differences in the relative syllable duration of
tonic, stressed, unstressed, and weakened syllables than the British
English speakers. This result is discussed with regard to potential intel-
ligibility problems, features of possible language transfer from
Cantonese to English with respect to speech rhythm, and implications
for language teaching professionals.
I n considering nonnative patterns of English speech, two paths are

generally pursued: segmental and suprasegmental. This article focuses
on the suprasegmental features of language. Speech rhythm is a
suprasegmental aspect of pronunciation, those aspects which describe
and address features larger than individual speech sounds. English
speech rhythm in older native varieties like British and American
English is often described as stress timed, which, in basic terms, means
that the start of each stressed syllable is said to be equidistant in time
from the start of the next stressed syllable. This kind of rhythm is in
contrast to syllable-timed languages (e.g., French, Spanish, Cantonese),
in which the start of each syllable is said to be equidistant in time from
the start of the next. Instrumental studies have, in fact, shown that very
little difference can be found between languages thought of as typically
stress timed and typically syllable timed (Roach, 1982; Dauer, 1983),
and, in fact, Cauldwell (2002) describes English as irrhythmical.
Whether these descriptions stand up under instrumental scrutiny,
they do seem to have some psychological importance for speakers of
the languages so described. English spoken with a syllable-timed rhythm

can be difficult for speakers of stress-timed accents to understand
(Anderson-Hsieh & Venkatagiri, 1994). Tajima, Port, & Dalby (1997)
demonstrated that, when a Mandarin Chinese or Taiwanese speaker’s
speech was manipulated to match the syllable timing of a native
American English speaker, and vice versa, the Chinese speaker’s speech
improved in intelligibility by up to 25%, and the American English
speaker’s speech worsened in intelligibility by up to 25%, showing that
use of more native-like patterns considerably improves intelligibility
among native speakers of stress-timed varieties of English.
This result indicates that the acquisition of stress-timed English
speech rhythm by nonnative speakers is important in some contexts,
for example, in those where a nonnative speaker may be interacting
with a native speaker of an older, stress-timed variety such as British
or American English. Adams (1979) suggests that a learner’s failure to
use appropriate syllable timing when producing utterances in English,
instead producing “an anomalous rhythm which seriously impairs the
total intelligibility of their utterance” (p. 87), results in communicative
failure, and both parties to the act of communication will be at a loss
to explain what has happened and what was intended. This matter has
not eluded researchers, materials writers, and teachers (see, e.g.,
Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson, & Koehler, 1992; Anderson-Hsieh &
Venkatagiri, 1994; Chela-Flores, 1998; Gilbert, 1984; Taylor, 1981;
Wong, 1987), but it seems that speech rhythm and other suprasegmen-
tal features of speech are not the easiest for teachers or learners to
tackle. Indeed, rhythm is considered by some to be the single most
difficult feature of English for nonnative speakers to learn (Taylor,
1981).
It should be noted that this article assumes interactions between
native speakers of stress-timed varieties of English and nonnative speak-
ers of English. Jenkins (2000), for example, considering nonnative
speaker interactions, does not include speech rhythm in her lingua
franca core, although she does agree that, based on evidence from
her own research, it appears to be crucial to lengthen stressed and
tonic syllables to improve intelligibility in English.
This study was based largely on the suggestions arising from Dauer
(1983). Although Dauer shows by examination of interstress intervals
in several languages that there is no instrumental evidence for the
stress-timed/syllable-timed dichotomy in speech production, she admits
that a so-called syllable-timed language like Spanish and a stress-timed
language like English do sound different rhythmically. She looks to
other features for an explanation, considering syllable structure, vowel
reduction, and stress/accent.
Concerning syllable structure, Dauer (1983) finds that stress-timed
languages tend to have a greater variety of syllable types. In addition,
764 TESOL QUARTERLY

open syllables such as consonant-vowel or CV syllables are found to
predominate in Spanish and French, whereas English has much more
variation among different syllable types. Dauer also finds that “there
is a strong tendency for ‘heavy’ syllables … to be stressed and ‘light’
syllables … to be unstressed” in stress-timed languages (p. 55). Heavy
syllables are determined according to what happens at the end of a
syllable, and usually contain consonants in coda position, although
those containing a long vowel or diphthong may also be analysed as
heavy. English is certainly a language which allows heavy syllables, with
up to three consonants at the beginning of a syllable and four in
syllable-final position, whereas Cantonese, the first language (L1) of the
speakers in this article, maximally permits CVC, with the final conso-
nant being restricted to either an unreleased voiceless bilabial, alveolar
or velar stop [p t k], or a nasal consonant, one of [m n ŋ]. Based on
Dauer’s suggestions, it might be predicted that Cantonese is less likely
to be a stress-timed language than English. Dauer also notes that in
Arabic and Thai, considered to be stress-timed languages, stressed
syllables are more likely to be heavy.
It is not only the structure of the syllable, but also its composition
which has a bearing on stress. Dauer (1983) claims that 92% of the
unstressed CV syllables in the English text she analysed were made up
of a consonant plus a weak vowel, a type which tends to be inherently
short, whereas the stressed CV syllables contained strong vowels, which
tend to be longer.
Turning to vowel reduction, Dauer (1983) claims that stress-timed
languages often have a “separate and more restricted set of vowels to
choose from in unstressed syllables” (p. 57), whereas syllable-timed
languages tend not to have reduced vowel variants in unstressed sylla-
bles, but rather reduction results in the elimination of whole syllables.
For example, weak syllables in English contain /ə ʊ / or a syllabic
consonant, with the actual number of syllables in a word preserved
(unless in a contracted form, like I’m for I am); in Spanish “a sequence
of adjacent vowels often becomes reduced to a single vowel or is pro-
nounced as a single syllable” (p. 57). Cantonese has an extremely
restricted number of instances where syllable weakening is possible
(Bauer & Benedict, 1997).
Finally, Dauer (1983) examines stress, claiming that, whereas stress-
timed languages tend to have stress at the lexical or word level, syllable-
timed languages usually either have no lexical stress, or, where it does
exist, realise accent by pitch contour variation. Cantonese is a tone
language, in which each syllable has a specific pitch contour assigned
to it.
In conclusion, Dauer (1983) asks whether we are justified in using
the terms stress timed and syllable-timed at all, if it is the case that syllable
SPEECH RHYTHM IN WORLD ENGLISHES: THE CASE OF HONG KONG 765

structure, vowel reduction, and word stress, rather than aspects timing,
make a language nearer to one or the other category. Preferring the
term stress-based, as used by both Allen (1975) and O’Connor (1973),
she suggests, as did Roach (1982), a continuum on which languages
may be placed depending on how stress based their rhythm is, with
Japanese as the least stress based and English the most (Dauer, 1983,
p. 60).
So, although instrumental studies have proven either dismissive or,
at best, inconclusive about the physical existence of stress timing and
syllable timing, even those undertaking the instrumental studies men-
tioned earlier admit that the languages under discussion sound either
stress timed or syllable timed, enough so to be able to suggest a con-
tinuum on which these languages can be placed. Therefore, the labels
stress timed and syllable timed are used throughout this study. In addition,
Dauer (1983) makes a good case for there being factors other than
differences in interstress intervals, or the lack thereof, that make lan-
guages sound more or less stress based; these factors are syllable struc-
ture, vowel reduction, and word stress or accent.
The difficulty experienced by nonnative speakers of English from
language backgrounds which have different rhythmical types in acquir-
ing stress-timed English speech rhythm has implications for intelligibil-
ity, as demonstrated in investigations of Englishes similar to that spoken
in Hong Kong. Low, Grabe, and Nolan (2000) study the temporal
features of Singapore English, a Southeast Asian English which has
been recognised as having native speakers. Using the pairwise variabil-
ity index (PVI), which they developed, they compared vowel quality
and vowel duration with that of British English. They demonstrated
that Singapore English speakers do not reduce vowels in weak syllables
to the same extent that British English speakers do. This practice can
be expected to contribute to the rhythmic differences between
Singapore English and British English, the implication being that
Singapore English will be difficult for speakers of British English to
understand.
ENGLISH IN HONG KONG
English in Hong Kong is described by Li (1999) as a “value added”

language (p. 97), meaning that being able to communicate effectively
in English is perceived by the speaker as having socioeconomic advan-
tages. Because of the economic and business environment in Hong
Kong, speakers of Hong Kong English may be interacting with other
speakers whose English could be classified as having stress-timed
rhythm. This being the case, for Hong Kong English speakers, speech
rhythm is certainly a feature of English pronunciation worthy of study.
766 TESOL QUARTERLY

Simply by listening to Hong Kong English, it is clear that the speech
rhythm is very different from that of varieties with a stress-timed
rhythm.
AIMS OF THE STUDY
This study aims to investigate speech rhythm among speakers of

Hong Kong English. Syllable duration was selected for investigation
because, in combination with pitch, loudness, and vowel quality, it is
an important factor in determining syllable stress in English and must
therefore contribute to its perceived rhythmical properties. An addi-
tional reason to study syllable duration is that it is thought to be a
highly learnable and teachable feature of word and rhythmic stress
(see, e.g., Gilbert 1984; Chela-Flores, 1994, 1998; Halliday, 1989). This
study focuses on weakened, unstressed, stressed, and tonic syllables.
Because this is a study of English as a second language, transfer effects
from the learner’s first language, Cantonese, in the production of
English, in particular, fewer instances of weakened syllables in the
Hong Kong English data, may contribute to the perceived rhythm of
Hong Kong English. The hypothesis was that the rhythm of Hong
Kong English differs from that of British English because Hong Kong
English has smaller differences in the relative durations of weakened,
unstressed, stressed and tonic syllables.
The use of the term Hong Kong English does not attribute any special
status for this variety as an official new variety of English. As far as I
am aware, and certainly at the time of undertaking this study, there
are no native speakers of Hong Kong English, as there are of Singapore
or Indian English. Hong Kongers do not speak English with each
other outside of contrived situations, such as classes at tertiary-level
educational establishments and conversations, including business deal-
ings, where someone is present who is not a speaker of Cantonese but
is a speaker of English.
METHOD
The relative differences in duration between weakened, unstressed,

stressed, and tonic syllables were measured to test the hypothesis that
the rhythm of Hong Kong English differs from that of British English
because Hong Kong English has smaller differences in the relative
durations of each type of syllable.
The hierarchy of syllable stressing (weakened, unstressed, stressed,
and tonic) was derived and developed for this research from studies
such as Bolinger (1965) and Klatt (1975), which indicate that stressed

(including tonic) syllables are longer than unstressed (including weak-
ened) syllables in spoken discourse, and teaching materials such as
Gilbert (1984) and Chela-Flores (1998), which support such an
approach. In the sentence The book I bought had a blue front, assuming
no prior context and the main stress falling on the last word, with
rhythmic beats occurring on book, bought, blue and front, front is tonic,
with a falling tone, book, bought, and blue are stressed, I and had are
unstressed, and the and a are weakened. The item had is in fact the
main verb and therefore could be stressed, in which case blue would
probably be unstressed to maintain overall rhythm; had could certainly
not be weakened. It should be noted that any item could be stressed
depending on context. Applying the stress hierarchy, and according to
the first rhythmic pattern described, a British English speaker could
be expected to produce the single-syllable words book, bought, blue, and
front with a longer average duration than the single-syllable words the,
I, had, and a, with front being particularly long because it is tonic, and
the and a being particularly short because they are weakened.
The Hong Kong English Data
Data from 20 Hong Kong Cantonese speakers of English were used in

this study. Participants were all students in their third and final year of
study at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University at the time of data col-
lection. Recordings were made over a 3-year period, from 1996 to 1999.
The 10 female and 10 male students from whom the data were col-
lected fall roughly into two groups: those studying for language degrees,
and those studying nonlanguage subjects. The students following lan-
guage degrees at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University are assessed
in English language skills as part of their degree, whereas, at the time
of data collection, those following nonlanguage programmes had to
take classes in English but were not required to pass English to be
awarded a degree. The students whose speech was analysed for this
study were from three different departments of the university: Chinese
and Bilingual Studies, specifically from the Bachelor or Arts (Honors)
in Language and Communication, Building and Real Estate, the
Bachelor of Science (Honors) in Building Surveying, and Building
Services Engineering, and the Bachelor of Engineering (Honors) in
Building Services Engineering.
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University is an English medium insti-
tution, which means that, with the exception of students studying
another language, all classes should take place in English. In reality,
a good deal of tuition takes place in Cantonese. This is especially so
in the case of nonlanguage subjects.
768 TESOL QUARTERLY

Because the study focuses on the rhythm of Hong Kong English,
research based on word lists, which are possibly the most convenient
method for collecting large amounts of data, is inappropriate. Instead,
cassette tape recordings were made of students giving presentations in
class. This method has the advantage of providing a dataset that com-
prises a large amount of monologue from a number of different speakers.
It is for the latter reason that conversational data were not considered
for this study; although potentially the most natural kind of speech, it
was felt that it might not have yielded a suitably large quantity of con-
nected speech from one speaker and would certainly have involved
interruptions and overlap from other speakers. Also, the participants
would not normally speak English to each other, and so any spoken
English data collected at all is bound to be contrived to some extent.
One criticism of using data generated from class presentations is that
the delivery might be stilted, or less than natural, because of the
scripted nature of the task. However, being students in their third year
of study, the participants were all skilled in-class presenters and in the
main did not require strong adherence to a script.
Cue cards were used by students during their presentations as an
aide-mémoire, and students also used overhead transparencies. Because
it was an assessed task, students may well have rehearsed their presen-
tations. In addition, most students were either presenting on their
final year projects—material with which they are more than familiar—
or on a passion or hobby of theirs. Therefore, the data used in this
study can be considered to give a reasonably accurate representation
of the features of English connected speech of all participants.
The topics covered in the data are presented in Table 1; each par-
ticipant is labelled f for female or m for male. A purely subjective score
of how stress timed or syllable timed the speaker sounds based on my
expert opinion as a phonetician is given in the column marked Rhythm;
a rating of 1 means a speaker sounds stress timed and a rating of 5
that the speaker sounds syllable timed. I wish to emphasise that this
score is entirely subjective.
Participants were tape-recorded using a personal stereo cassette
recorder (Sony Walkman™ model WM-R707) with a lapel microphone
clipped on to either a lapel or the collar of their clothing. The partici-
pants were fully aware that they were being recorded and had given their
permission for the recordings to be used as data for study purposes.
Data Processing
The speech collected was analysed by converting the recordings to

a machine-readable sound signal and measuring the duration of syllables

TABLE 1
List of Participants’ Presentation Topics and Author's Impression of Rhythmic Type
Female Speaker Files Rhythm 1–5 Male Speaker Files Rhythm 1–5
f01: To be a good
manager 2 m01: Property & housing market 3
f02: Intercultural
communication 3 m02: Ceramic tiles 4
f03: Personal space 4 m03: Safety (demolition) 3
f04: Interview follow-up 5 m04: Site supervisor motivation 4
f05: Advertisements 3 m05: Interest risk 5
f06: Wording of
advertisements 4 m06: Pollution problems 5
f07 – nonverbal
behaviour 3 m07: Job satisfaction 4
f08: AIDS 3 m08: Bamboo scaffolding 3
f09: SCMP versus
People’s Daily 4 m09: Industrial accidents 5
f10: Goal setting 3 m10: Poling contractors 4
using specialist computer software on a PC platform. Speech from the

cassette recordings was sampled at a rate of 16,000 samples per second
(16 kHz, 16 bit mono PCM), and then labelled on computer by the
author. The computer software used to label data in this study is
Speech Filing System (SFS; for the latest edition, see Phonetics &
Linguistics, UCL, 2004), developed for research purposes at the
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London.
With the SFS software, speech data may be labelled in a number of
ways. For the purposes of this study, a broad phonetic segmental tran-
scription was used but included glottal stops, nasalisation, vocalised
/l/, and aspiration, where strong. The software then allows the user
to generate a file which contains information on the duration of each
of the sound segments in samples per second. This number was con-
verted into milliseconds (ms) by dividing it by 16 (thus 16,000 samples =
1,000 ms). Calculations of syllable duration were made from that infor-
mation; this is then analysed and compared with the SCRIBE data.
The British English Data
The British English data used for this study were drawn from the
SCRIBE corpus (see Spencer, 1990). SCRIBE is a corpus of British
English speakers from four main areas of the United Kingdom: the
Southeast (with received pronunciation or a southern standard British
770 TESOL QUARTERLY

English accent), Glasgow, Leeds, and Birmingham. The aim was to
record and annotate the speech of 30 speakers from each set perform-
ing a number of different spoken tasks, which include reading several
different sets of sentences, reading a passage, and undertaking a map
task to elicit free speech.
In selecting appropriate material for comparison, it was necessary
to decide which speech task performed by the British English speakers
is most closely comparable to the Hong Kong English data. In this
instance, it was decided to use the read passage for comparison. The
passage itself takes little more than 2 minutes to read aloud and is
about the advances in sailing technology since the time of the Vikings
to the present day. This passage, and not the free speech task, was
chosen for comparison because the Hong Kong English speakers, in
giving presentations with the aid of note cards that may have been
rehearsed, are performing a task which is in more ways similar to pas-
sage reading than to free speech.
Five speakers were taken from the SCRIBE material, one female and
four male speakers. All were from the Southeast set. The choice of
speakers was restricted by the availability of comparable transcription
passages because only one female and five male speakers from this
region were transcribed using a broad phonetic transcription. The pas-
sage is divided into four paragraphs of just over 30 seconds each. To
extract an amount of speech from each of the speakers for compari-
son, approximately one minute of each of the four male speakers was
used, two of the male speakers reading the first two paragraphs and
the other two reading the last two paragraphs. In the case of the
female speaker, as there was only one female for whom a broad pho-
netic transcription was available, the entire passage was used in this
study.
Speech from the SCRIBE corpus was sampled at a rate of 20,000
samples per second (20 kHz) and labelled using suitable speech analy-
sis software. This renders the label files into a slightly different format
from that of SFS, and so the data were manipulated on computer to
make them comparable. In addition, the segmental durations derived
from sampling at 20 kHz were divided by 20 in order to give a dura-
tion in milliseconds (20,000 samples ⫽ 1,000 ms).
Syllabification
In order to calculate the duration of the syllables in the data, it is
first necessary to syllabify the data. This was achieved using the maxi-
mal onsets approach adopted in Roach, Hartman, & Setter (2006) for
syllabifying the entries in the seventeenth edition of the English

Pronouncing Dictionary. In its most basic form, maximal onsets means
that, “where possible, syllables should be divided in such a way that as
many consonants as possible are assigned to the beginning of the syl-
lable to the right” (p. xiii), assuming a linear transcription in which
speech is transcribed from left to right.
The rules for syllabification were based on what is permissible in
the citation form of a monosyllabic word in English. In the case of
vowels, long vowels and diphthongs in English were permitted to be
syllable final, but short vowels were not; this is because no monosyl-
labic English word occurs in RP or southern standard British English,
which ends with one of the short vowels / e æ / or /ʊ/. There
are, however, exceptions among short vowels in the case of unstressed
syllables. Schwa is always weak and can therefore occur in syllable-final
position; unstressed // and /ʊ/ also occur in weakened syllables in
English and were therefore afforded the same structural status when
weakened. In this system, photography, for example, is syllabified /f.
tg.r.fi/, and educate /ed.jʊ.ket/.
The nonphonemic vowel symbols [i] and [u] were used either as
the counterparts to unstressed // and /ʊ/, respectively, when either
was followed by a vowel (e.g., react /ri'ækt/; influential /nflu'enʃəl/)
or appeared word finally in unstressed positions (e.g., happy /'hæpi/).
This practice is in line with current practice transcribing British
English, as demonstrated in Roach et al. (2006) and Wells (2000). It
should be noted, however, that using the symbols /i/ and /u/ is based
on native speaker intuitions of vowel quality in the positions men-
tioned earlier and that the symbols have no phonemic validity.
Concerning consonants, it is permissible to have up to three conso-
nants initially and four consonants finally in restricted combinations
in British English monosyllables (Roach, 2000). All consonants making
up the consonantal inventory of British English, with the exception of
/ŋ/, may occur in initial positions. In final positions in British English,
the approximant consonants /r w/ and /j/ and fricative /h/ are not
permitted. However, according to the maximal onsets rule, in con-
nected speech, consonants belonging to the end of words may be syl-
labified as initials when the speech is broken down into syllables. For
example, if the maximal onsets rule is applied, cats and dogs is likely
to become /kæt.sn.dgz/ and forced in two will be divided as /f፡.stn.
tu፡/ in connected speech.
It was found in the process of syllabifying the Hong Kong English
data that, in some cases, it was difficult to apply maximal onsets insofar
as many syllables that would usually be weakened in British English
connected speech were pronounced with a vowel that was not weak-
ened. For example, collapse of any part is produced by speaker m03 as
/klæpsvenipɑ፡t/, rather than /klæpsvenipɑ፡t/. If adhering strictly
772 TESOL QUARTERLY

to maximal onsets in this case, it would be necessary to divide collapse
of any part as /kl.æp.sv.en.i.pɑ፡t/; however, it was felt that for Hong
Kong English speakers, a short vowel in syllable final position is entirely
possible, as long as the syllable is unstressed. In other words, unstressed
short vowels in syllable final position in Hong Kong English are treated
as having a similar status to / / and /ʊ/ in British English. In fact,
Jenkins (2000) positively encourages this approach with regards to
English as an international language. This interpretation leads us to
the following division of syllables: /k.læp.s.ven.i.pɑ፡t/, which is com-
parable to the likely British English version, /k.læp.s.ven.i.pɑ፡t/. This
approach, together with others mentioned below, was adopted to cope
with the data in this study and is not intended to imply that Hong
Kong English speakers have overt rules about syllabification.
Other matters arose during syllabification. One was that Hong Kong
English has many phonetically nasalised vowels, where Cantonese
speakers of English lower the velum in anticipation of a nasal conso-
nant which is present in the target phonology but not necessarily real-
ised with a full oral closure (Walmsley, 1997). In syllabifying nasalised
vowels where there was nasalisation in anticipation of a final nasal
consonant, but no final nasal consonant was pronounced, the syllable
was treated as containing a final nasal consonant. For example, speaker
M06 produces construction industry as [knsrÙk ò̃indstri], where the
vowel in the third syllable [ò̃] is nasalised; this syllable is treated as
ending with a nasal consonant.
A second issue concerns final dark and syllabic /l/. As is noted in
Hung (2000), dark and syllabic /l/ are frequently realised as vowels
by Hong Kong English speakers. Where a dark /l/ was very clearly
realised as a vowel, it was transcribed as a vowel.
Finally, the Hong Kong English data contains a large amount of
glottal stopping. This feature can prevent the linking associated with
connected English speech. Where the glottal stop is clearly not a reali-
sation of another consonant and appears in prevocalic position (e.g.,
speaker m09’s the accident is realised with a glottal stop at the begin-
ning of accident), it is not included as part of the syllable measurement.
This rule was also applied to the British English data to make sure the
treatment was comparable.
The British English data are much more straightforward to syllabify,
and in no cases were maximal onsets violated to cope with a speaker’s
idiolect.
Assigning Syllables to Stress Type
I assigned the syllables to a category in the stress hierarchy by using

an auditory/perceptual analysis, that is, listening to the speech in its

continuous form and deciding which syllable belonged to which cate-
gory, based on my experience of both varieties of English and my
expertise as a phonetician. The categories were weakened (1),
unstressed (2), stressed (3), and tonic (4). A sample was checked by
another phonetician with less experience of Hong Kong English for
verification; no objective measure of interrater reliability was carried
out, however.
RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
Tables 2 and 3 give an overview of syllable duration across the two

language types, measured in milliseconds (ms). As previously stated,
the Hong Kong English data comprised 4,404 syllables and the British
English data comprised 1,847 syllables.
It becomes immediately apparent from a quick glance at Tables
2 and 3 that the overall duration of syllables in Hong Kong English
was longer than in British English. The mean syllable duration for the
Hong Kong English speakers was 244.39 ms and that of the British
English speakers was 109.99 ms (all data in this section is rounded to
two decimal points where appropriate, with some rounding resulting
in one decimal point only). The British English syllables were shorter
despite the fact that the British English speakers were performing a
reading task in which their speech tempo was reasonably slow and
precise. However, the standard deviation in both cases was relatively
similar: 104.6 for the Hong Kong English speakers and 109.21 for the
British English speakers. The distributions for both sets of data were
normal, and an alpha level of 0.01 was used for all statistical tests.
The syllables were divided into four categories: weakened, unstressed,
stressed and tonic, as outlined earlier, and these categories were used
in the data analysis. It was assumed that tonic syllables in the data
would be the longest in duration, followed by stressed, unstressed, and
then weakened syllables. The findings support this assumption.
Descriptive statistics can be seen for Hong Kong English and British
English in Tables 4 and 5, respectively (1 ⫽ weakened, 2 ⫽ unstressed,
3 ⫽ stressed, 4 ⫽ tonic).
TABLE 2
Descriptive Statistics for All Syllables: Hong Kong English
N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. deviation
Duration (ms) 4,404 22.38 759.38 244.39 104.60
ValidN (listwise) 4,404
774 TESOL QUARTERLY

TABLE 3
Descriptive Statistics for All Syllables: British English
N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. deviation
Duration (ms) 1,847 18.00 687.00 109.99 109.21

ValidN (listwise) 1,847
Figure 1 shows the difference between the two varieties. The Hong
Kong English data are represented by the upper solid line (L1 = 1 in
the key), and the British English data by the lower dashed line (L1 =
2). On the x (horizontal) axis, 1 = weakened syllables, 2 = unstressed
syllables, 3 = stressed syllables and 4 = tonic syllables. On the y (verti-
cal) axis, average duration in milliseconds is given.
From the fact that syllables in the Hong Kong English data were
considerably longer overall than those in the British English data, it
might be anticipated that syllables in all categories in the Hong Kong
English data would be significantly longer statistically than those in the
British English data, but in fact this is not the case. It is clearly shown
in Figure 1, in which a curvilinear relationship between stress and
duration emerges, that this group of Hong Kong English speakers
maintain differences in length across the four stress levels, but that
they do not maintain these differences to the same degree as the
British English speakers studied; the ratio is different. An independent
samples t-test of each category finds the data to be different at a sig-
nificance level of p ≤ 0.000 for weak, unstressed, and stressed syllables,
but it finds no significant difference between the duration of tonic
syllables across the two language groups, at p ⫽ 0.536 (equal variances
not assumed). This finding can be expected from looking at Figure 1.
The ratios of the syllables (Hong Kong English: British English) are
TABLE 4
Syllable Duration According to Stress Level: Hong Kong English Data
Stress level N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. deviation
Duration (ms) 849 33.19 637.75 195.34 100.09

ValidN (listwise) 1
Duration (ms)
ValidN (listwise) 2 1922 22.38 669.38 220.78 90.29
Duration (ms)
ValidN (listwise) 3 960 94.06 697.88 282.47 91.22
Duration (ms)
ValidN (listwise) 4 673 72.25 759.38 319.38 107.36

TABLE 5
Syllable Duration According to Stress Level: British English Data
Stress level N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. deviation
Duration (ms) 643 18 453 129.95 71.97

ValidN (listwise) 1
Duration (ms) 498 20 599 150.30 77.52
ValidN (listwise) 2
Duration (ms) 408 73 553 246.83 71.32
ValidN (listwise) 3
Duration (ms) 298 99 687 314.23 124.76
ValidN (listwise) 4
as follows: weak syllables ⫽ 1:1.5; unstressed syllables ⫽ 1:1.47; stressed ⫽

1:1.14; tonic ⫽ 1:1.02.
A feature revealed by the descriptive statistics that may have influ-
enced the perceived rhythm of Hong Kong English was the much
FIGURE 1
Line Plot of Syllable Duration According to Stress Level in Hong Kong English And British English
776 TESOL QUARTERLY

greater proportion of unstressed but not weakened syllables in the
Hong Kong English data, as demonstrated in Figure 2. Although the
Hong Kong English and British English data had similar percentages
of stressed and tonic syllables, the Hong Kong English data had far
more unstressed than weakened syllables: 43.64% of Hong Kong
English syllables were unstressed and 19.3% weakened, compared with
26.96% unstressed and 34.81% weakened in the British English data.
DISCUSSION
The line plot, Figure 1, is rather telling about the situation in Hong
Kong English rhythmic stress: Weak and unstressed syllables are not as
short as those in the British English speech data, but tonic syllables
are very similar in length. Thus, the degree to which these syllables
differ in Hong Kong English is in sharp contrast to that of British
English. For the pattern to reflect the British English speakers, and
taking into account the overall difference in syllable length, the lines
would have had to have been parallel, not convergent. The lines,
although similar in form, are certainly not parallel, and the only point
at which the two varieties show no statistically significant difference is
tonic syllables (4 on the x axis). At each of the other three points, the
amount of difference becomes progressively less, but is still significantly
FIGURE 2
Proportion of Syllables According to Stress Level for Hong Kong English and British English

different from the British English data. However, it would be overly
simplistic to conclude that the difference in rhythmic pattern between
Hong Kong English speakers and British English speakers is depend-
ent only on differences in relative syllable duration across categories
of stressing. Figure 2 clearly shows that the Hong Kong English speech
has a much greater proportion of unstressed syllables than does the
British English speech, which contains more weakened syllables, and
this fact will affect the perceived rhythm of Hong Kong English.
It was noted earlier that syllables in Hong Kong English were longer
on average than those of British English. This difference could be due
to speaking rate, and no attempt has been made in this study to nor-
malise the data for differences in participants’ speaking rate—unlike,
for example, Low et al. (2000). However, speaking rate should not
affect the relative durations of syllables, and will certainly have no
bearing on the ratio of each category. In addition, it is hoped that,
through choosing data from a fairly large number of Hong Kong
English speakers (20 in total), speaking rate would be reasonably con-
sistent, at least for this group of speakers, for the task they were doing
(i.e., giving a presentation).
Relative syllable duration in different levels of stressing may be a
key factor in determining the perceived rhythm of a language. This
belief arises directly from Dauer’s (1983) observations concerning dif-
ferences in vowel reduction in syllables across languages demonstrating
different rhythmic types, or being at one end or the other of a stress-
based continuum, and it was the basis of the hypothesis explored in
this study.
Support can certainly be found for this hypothesis. Figure 1 clearly
shows that, although this group of Hong Kong English speakers main-
tained the differences in length across the four stress levels weakened,
unstressed, stressed, and tonic, the group of British English speakers
did not maintain them to the same degree. Vowel reduction, or lack
thereof, is one of Dauer’s (1983) criteria for languages to differ in the
way they sound rhythmically; we can expect that these differences in
the patterns of vowel and syllable reduction shown in Figure 1 will,
therefore, serve to make Hong Kong English sound different rhythmi-
cally from British English. This situation could be seen as similar to
Low et al’s (2000) finding for syllable nuclei in Singapore English.
The descriptive statistics revealed a feature of equally high impor-
tance to the perceived rhythm of Hong Kong English, that of the
much greater number of unstressed but not weakened syllables in the
Hong Kong English data (Figure 2). This result is tied to Dauer’s
(1983) criterion of vowel reduction, and it could be seen as similar to
Low and Grabe’s (1999) “lack of ‘deprominencing’” (p. 49) in
Singapore English. Although the Hong Kong English and British
778 TESOL QUARTERLY

English data have similar proportions of stressed and tonic syllables,
the Hong Kong English data has far more unstressed than weakened
syllables: 43.64% of Hong Kong English syllables are unstressed and
19.3% weakened, compared with 26.96% unstressed and 34.81% weak-
ened in the British English data. Therefore, more syllables in Hong
Kong English appear with a full vowel rather than a schwa or syllabic
consonant—they are, in effect, less weak, and so lack deprominencing.
Dauer’s observation that syllable-based languages do not have the same
patterns of vowel reduction supports the fact that Hong Kong English
is likely to sound syllable rather than stress based if a language transfer
stance is adopted because such a stance reveals Hong Kong English
speakers’ preference for unstressed rather than weakened syllables.
Because the pattern of strong and weak syllables seems to be impor-
tant in native speakers’ perception of stress-based languages (see, e.g.,
Adams, 1979; Anderson-Hsieh et al., 1992; Cutler, 1993; Fear et al.,
1995), the lack of deprominencing in the Hong Kong English data
could suggest that these speakers are likely to be less intelligible to
native speakers of English when compared with their British English
counterparts. Native speakers of English may be less able to under-
stand these Hong Kong English speakers because the predictability of
English speech rhythm, which Buxton (1983) notes to be “relevant to
perceptual processing” (p. 120), is somewhat lacking in their speech.
So, is it possible to explain what is responsible for the differing pat-
tern of Hong Kong English from British English? One possible cause
is L1 transfer. Cantonese is described as a syllable-timed language, in
part because it has an extremely restricted number of instances where
syllable weakening is possible (Bauer & Benedict, 1997). This restricted
syllable weakening could mean that Cantonese speakers of English do
not demonstrate native-like patterns of English stress-timing because
they transfer their L1 patterns of syllable-timing, in which a full vowel
appears in each syllable, with syllables typically not subject to weaken-
ing, to the L2. This transfer of course would go hand in hand with
other features of the L1 syllable, all of which might contribute to the
perceived syllable-timed sound of the L2.
Another suggestion involves the difference in how English and
Chinese are represented graphically. The Chinese writing system is not
alphabetic, but pictographic or ideographic. Outside of alphabetic rep-
resentations of Chinese, like Pin Yin for Mandarin, no claim is made
that the form of the character in any systematic way depicts the pro-
nunciation of the syllable represented (although a phonetic element
may be present). English, on the other hand, is basically represented
in a phonetic manner, in that letters are used which correspond to
the sounds of the word and presented in a linear left-to-right format
giving the order in which these sounds are produced. However, English

is notorious for being difficult to spell because the grapheme-
phoneme correspondence is not static and is therefore often a poor
guide to pronunciation. Luke & Richards (1982) have commented on
the more frequent occurrence of full vowels in syllables that are nei-
ther stressed nor tonic in Hong Kong English, and they ascribed it to
the influence of English orthography. Additionally, Brown (1988) men-
tions the same phenomenon in Singapore English and suggests spell-
ing pronunciation—pronouncing each vowel with a full value as
represented in the spelling—as a possible culprit. It could be that the
phenomenon of preferring unstressed rather than weakened syllables
is, therefore, not so much a matter of L1 transfer, but of habits devel-
oped when learning to read in L2. It is also possible that a combina-
tion of L1 transfer and L2 reading habits is responsible.
To conclude, Hong Kong English speakers have smaller differences
in the duration of weakened, unstressed, stressed, and tonic syllables
than British English speakers as well as a much greater proportion of
unstressed to weakened syllables than found in the British English
data. These two factors combine to affect the perceived rhythm of
Hong Kong English speech.
PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
Having reported on a study of speech rhythm in speakers of Hong

Kong English, it should be clear that I value the importance of the
relative stressing of syllables in a stream of speech and believe that
work on teaching English speech rhythm of the kind thought to exist
in British English has obvious importance and rewards for learners.
Like Chela-Flores (1994, 1998) and Gilbert (1984), I advocate work on
syllable duration as a way of teaching and learning speech rhythm
because, as this study shows, the duration of syllables in Hong Kong
English does not differ from syllables in British English; this similarity
in duration contributes to the lack of deprominencing which can
make Hong Kong English difficult to follow. More native-like speech
rhythm will improve matters for those British, American, or Australian
visitors, for example, whether commercial or recreational, who are not
used to the syllable-timed patterns of Hong Kong English, resulting in
better transactions for all concerned.
The controversy over whether the terms stress timed and syllable timed
are useful as pedagogical terms, however, rumbles on. Cauldwell
(2002), based on his own research, concludes that the use of these
terms in fact obstructs our understanding of how spontaneous speech
works and that they should therefore be abandoned altogether
in teaching and learning theories and materials. But although the
780 TESOL QUARTERLY

influence of research into the reality of the production of stress- and
syllable-timed languages is growing in English language teaching circles,
sensible research will not fail to focus on the importance of and mech-
anisms behind appropriate stressing to make messages clear. For Marks
(1999), the use of rhythmical structures such as rhymes in the class-
room is valid in so far as it
provides a convenient framework for the perception and production of a
number of characteristic features of English pronunciation which are
often found to be problematic for learners: stress/unstress (and therefore
the basis for intonation), vowel length, vowel reduction, elision, compres-
sion, pause (between adjacent stresses). (p.198)
Although stress timing may itself fall out of favour as a description
of what is happening in the rhythm of English, skilful identification
of some key aspects of the theory and how they contribute to making
messages clear are useful for pedagogical purposes.
THE AUTHOR
Jane Setter is a lecturer in phonetics at the University of Reading, Reading, England.
She has also worked in Hong Kong and Japan. Jane is co-editor with Peter Roach
and James Hartman of the seventeenth edition of Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing
Dictionary and joint coordinator of IATEFL’s Pronunciation Special Interest Group.
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782 TESOL QUARTERLY

Transfer of Learning From a University
Content-Based EAP Course
MARK ANDREW JAMES
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, United States
This article describes an investigation into the learning outcomes that

transferred from a university content-based English for academic pur-
poses (EAP) course to other courses and the factors that influenced
that transfer. The study was a longitudinal qualitative case study in one
faculty at a large North American university. Data were collected over
one academic year through multipronged assessment measures from
five first-year students who were participating in a content-based EAP
course concurrently with other first-year university courses, as well as
from two instructors of the content-based EAP course, 16 instructors
of other courses, and one administrator. Data included interview tran-
scripts, participant journals, class observation notes, and samples of
course work. Evidence emerged to indicate that learning transfer did
occur from the content-based EAP course to the students’ other
courses. The learning transfer fell into six broad categories that
reflected a range of academic language skills (e.g., listening compre-
hension skills, writing skills) and other learning outcomes (e.g., study
skills). The transfer of these learning outcomes was influenced by eight
factors (e.g., requirements for learning transfer in activities in other
courses, similarity between the content-based EAP course and other
courses). Implications of these findings for theory, practice, and future
research are discussed.
T eaching and learning English for academic purposes (EAP), which

deals with students studying at or preparing to study at postsecond-
ary institutions, has drawn substantial interest (e.g., Dudley-Evans &
St. John, 1998; Jordan, 1997). One type of EAP is content-based instruc-
tion (CBI), which involves “the integration of particular content with
language-teaching aims” (Brinton, Snow, & Wesche, 2003, p. 2). Appli-
cations of CBI claim considerable potential for success: “There is a
growing body of research indicating that these models lead to high
levels of language development and academic achievement while pro-
viding students with worthwhile and interesting subject matter”
(Brinton et al., p.213). The body of supportive research has grown

783
(see Snow, 1998, for a review), and CBI is used as a way of providing
EAP instruction at colleges and universities around the world (Crandall
& Kaufman, 2002).
Despite the growing body of research on CBI, critics have argued
that the research base is limited (Snow, 1998; Zuengler & Brinton,
1997). One research focus worth considering is transfer of learning,
which occurs “when learning in one context or with one set of materi-
als impacts on performance in another context or with another set of
materials” (Perkins & Salomon, 1994, p. 6452).
Transfer of learning has been a concern in discussions of EAP
(e.g., Johns, 1988; Spack, 1988). Widdowson’s (1984) argument that
EAP instruction should be broad-based (i.e., education) rather than
narrow (i.e., training) reflects learning transfer:
A person educated in a certain language, as opposed to one who is
trained only in its use for a restricted set of predictable situations, is
someone who is able to relate what he or she knows to circumstances
other than those which attended the acquisition of that knowledge.
(p. 17)
In a university EAP setting where CBI is used, transfer of learning
is relevant for several reasons:
The instructional goals in an EAP setting are “transcendent” (Leki &
Carson, 1997, p. 39) because students have an immediate, concrete need
for language support.
Transfer of ESL learning outcomes to university studies cannot be
assumed (Spack, 1997).
Even if learning transfer does occur from a CBI course to other
courses, it is not clear what conditions promote this transfer (Snow,
1993).
The content used in a CBI course may be a disciplinary mismatch with
the content in students’ other courses, which can lead to student ques-
tions about the applicability of CBI course outcomes (Snow & Brinton,
1988; Currie, 1999).
This article describes an investigation1 that was carried out to answer
two research questions:
1. What, if anything, do students transfer from a university CBI course
to other university courses?
2. What factors influence transfer of learning from a university CBI
course to other university courses?
1
This investigation was conducted for my doctoral thesis (James, 2003).
784 TESOL QUARTERLY

SETTING
The investigation took place in an engineering faculty at a large Can-

adian research-intensive university. This faculty offered undergraduate
and graduate programmes in various branches of engineering. This
faculty also offered a CBI course to first-year students who exhibited
ESL-related difficulties on an English proficiency entry test. These stu-
dents took the CBI course concurrently with other first-year engineer-
ing courses. Approximately 100 students were enrolled in this course,
divided into four sections.
The CBI course was noncredit, but students placed in the course
were required to complete it to graduate. This course consisted of two
2-hour sessions per week over the 13-week semester. The course was
content-based first because the core of its instructional materials was
an instructor-generated package of readings on science and technol-
ogy. This was divided into sections on (a) inventions, (b) global warm-
ing and alternative fuel, (c) information technology, and (d) waste
management. Each section had at least four separate readings from
sources such as Popular Science, Time, and IEEE Technology and Science
Magazine. This feature of the course places it in the category of “theme-
based language instruction,” a model of CBI in which “the language
class is structured around topics or themes, with the topics forming
the backbone of the course curriculum” (Brinton et al., 2003, p. 14).
The course was content-based also because of the way students were
evaluated because in all assignments, both language and content
knowledge were assessed. For example, the course was built around
three writing assignments, drafted first in class and then revised. These
three assignments (and their revisions) were based on the topics cov-
ered in the reading package and were graded for content as well as
for language and organization. Additionally, students were evaluated
on in-class surprise quizzes based on homework assignments from the
course reading package. Again, students were graded on both their
language and content knowledge.
The first-year engineering courses taken concurrently with the CBI
had various formats. (Some of these courses were common across all
engineering students; some were only for students in specific engineer-
ing programs.) All courses had 3 hours per week of lectures. Each
lecture consisted primarily of the professor explaining and modeling
(i.e., on the blackboard or overhead projector) how to do a particular
problem (e.g., how to calculate stress on a concrete beam, or how to
write computer code to perform a particular function). These sessions
often involved student questions, both solicited and unsolicited by the
instructor. The size of lectures ranged from about 50 to more than
200 students.
A UNIVERSITY CONTENT-BASED EAP COURSE 785

Many courses also had tutorials and laboratories. Tutorials varied
from one to 3 hours, and had up to 50 students. They were generally
led by one or two teaching assistants (TAs, i.e., graduate students in
a relevant department). During tutorials, students either worked on
assignments to be handed in, prepared for upcoming quizzes, or dis-
cussed problems they were having in the lectures. The TAs either cir-
culated to help individual students or modeled problem solving on the
board. Laboratories were typically 3 hours long, and ranged in size
from about 10 to more than 50 students. The laboratories usually
began with a short explanation by the instructor of the task (e.g., test-
ing the chemical contents of a solution); students carried out the tasks
usually in pairs.
RESEARCH DESIGN
I used a qualitative case study design because of the research ques-

tions’ (a) open-ended nature and (b) built-in real-life context (i.e., CBI
for enrolled university students) (Yin, 1989). A more controlled design
(e.g., laboratory experiment) might have excluded potentially important
factors like student motivation. A qualitative design also allowed transfer
to be viewed as a process that can occur in different ways and at differ-
ent times, which has been argued for in the literature on learning trans-
fer (Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1996; Beech, 1999; Foxon, 1994).
To get multiple perspectives, I asked students, instructors, and
administrators to participate. I was one of the instructors of the CBI
course, and I did not want to include my own students in the study
for ethical reasons. So I began finding participants by inviting both of
the other instructors of the CBI course to participate; both agreed.
During the first week of classes, I visited the three sections of the CBI
course that were taught by these two instructors and invited all stu-
dents in those sections to participate (approximately 75 students). Five
agreed to participate (two from one instructor’s section and three
from the other instructor’s section). I then identified courses these
students were taking both semesters and invited all of their professors
and TAs (37 total) to participate in the study. Sixteen agreed. Finally,
toward the end of the data collection period, I invited the LAC admin-
istrator who had provided general consent for the study to participate.
I did not offer to pay participants for joining the study; however, I told
students that after data collection was completed, I would provide for
participants a free oral communication workshop focusing on job
interview skills.
Four of the participating students were 18 or 19 years old; the fifth
was 27. All had already spent 2 to 5 years in Canada. They reflected
786 TESOL QUARTERLY

a range of countries of origin (i.e., Iran, Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan,
Thailand), engineering programmes (i.e., civil, electrical/computer,
materials), and future plans (e.g., graduate school, work as an engi-
neer). One was female; four were male.
The CBI course instructors were both experienced teachers (i.e.,
both had taught this CBI course for a number of years, as well as CBI
and non-CBI EAP courses at other postsecondary institutions); both
had advanced degrees in second language (L2) education. The LAC
administrator was experienced in this setting, with substantial knowl-
edge of the CBI course and its broader context. The instructors of the
concurrent engineering courses (including laboratories and tutorials)
exhibited a range of experience: four full professors, five associate
professors, one assistant professor, one lecturer, one sessional instruc-
tor, and four TAs.
I gathered four types of data over one academic year, from
September 2000 to April 2001:
1. Interview transcripts. I carried out semistructured interviews with the
students (i.e., 10 interviews each), instructors (i.e., three with both of
the CBI course instructors and one with each of the instructors of the
other courses), and administrator (i.e., one interview). The inter-
views were 30 minutes to an hour long, focusing on general themes
related to the research questions as well as questions about the occur-
rence of learning transfer. (See Appendix for samples of interview
protocols.)
2. Journal entries. For 2 weeks in the middle of the fall semester and 2
weeks in the middle of the winter semester, the students made daily
entries (one entry for each school-related activity, e.g., lecture, labo-
ratory) in journals. For each entry, they described the activity, reported
whether they had applied anything from the CBI course during this
activity, then explained why or why not.
3. Classroom observation notes. During the fall semester, I observed four
classes in both sections of the CBI course. I sat at the back of the class-
room and made notes on the types of instructional activities and
interactions I observed. Similarly, I performed 21 classroom observa-
tions in the lectures, laboratories, and tutorials of the students’ other
courses.
4. Samples of instructional materials and students’ course work. For several of
the student interviews, I asked the students to bring samples of their
own work and instructional materials from their courses to talk
about.
I used these different types of data to explore learning transfer in
significant depth with the participants, from multiple angles and

over time. In this sense, the small number of student participants was
beneficial. With a larger number, resource constraints would have
made it impossible to gather the same amount and kind of data.
I performed the main data analysis on the interview transcripts. I
used the other three types of data primarily as prompts in interviews,
additional perspectives on issues that arose in interviews, and sources
of contextual information.
I carried out data analysis in several stages using the qualitative data
analysis software QSR N4 Classic (QSR International Pty, 2000). I iden-
tified sequences of turns that focused on the occurrence of learning
transfer as the units of analysis. I coded these units based on the
research questions. For example, for units that dealt with an example
of learning transfer, I assigned codes to identify the learning outcome(s)
that had transferred and the reason(s) it had transferred. For units in
which a student discussed a lack of transfer, I assigned codes to iden-
tify the reason(s) why transfer had not occurred.
In identifying the learning outcomes that had transferred, I used
two relevant frameworks in the EAP literature: (a) a skills-based
model of language use in an academic context (Chapelle, Grabe, &
Berns, 1997, pp. 55–58); (b) study skills and situations (Jordan, 1997,
pp. 7–8). These frameworks provided detailed, relatively comprehen-
sive lists of skills that students would likely have to use in a university
setting. I drew on the first framework to categorize learning outcomes
that appeared to be language skills; I drew on the second framework
to identify learning outcomes that appeared to be more general study
skills.
In coding the reasons students gave for why learning transfer did
or did not occur, I did not use any existing frameworks. Instead, I
used an inductive process similar to that described by Lincoln and
Guba (1985; i.e., reading each unit, comparing its content to previ-
ously read units, and either placing it in a category with previously
read units that had similar content or creating a new category).
To check the reliability of the coding, I asked another researcher
(a graduate student with qualitative research experience) to recode
approximately 10% of the units of analysis. The level of agreement
with my original coding decisions was 91.5%. Also, approximately 6
months after initial coding, I recoded 10% of the units of analysis.
The level of agreement with my original coding decisions was 96%.
One point to be discussed before moving to the findings is the
prominent role of interview data in this study. Although steps were
taken to minimize drawbacks (e.g., triangulation with other types of
data where possible), interviews, similar to other forms of self-report
data, raise concerns with regard to inaccurate memory and the provi-
sion of answers to meet an interviewer’s expectations. Therefore, I
788 TESOL QUARTERLY

have had to assume that these participants’ descriptions are an accu-
rate reflection of their experiences.
Another concern with self-reported data in this study is that it can
account only for learning transfer that participants are aware of. However,
I reasoned that if learning transfer from a course occurs in such a way
that students do not know it happens, they could perceive the course
as not being valuable, then disengage, missing out on any possibility of
subsequent learning or transfer. From this pedagogical perspective,
learning transfer that participants are aware of is a worthwhile focus.
FINDINGS
What, If Anything, Transferred From the University CBI Course

to Other University Courses?
The data indicated that learning transfer did occur. For four of the five
students, learning transfer was reported to each of his or her other courses
at one time or another; for the fifth student, learning transfer reportedly
occurred to some but not all of his other courses (see Table 1).
Although learning transfer appears to have occurred, there appear
to have been constraints on this process. Although the students
described various instances of learning transfer to their other courses,
TABLE 1
Transfer of Learning by Course and Student
Student
Course Bob Eddie Sasha Teresa Tom
Algebra Ö Ö Ö Ö
Calculus Ö Ö Ö Ö
Chemical engineering Ö Ö Ö Ö —
Civil engineering Ö Ö Ö Ö
Computer engineering Ö Ö — Ö
Electrical engineering Ö Ö Ö — Ö
Geology Ö Ö — — —
Materials engineering — — — — Ö
Mechanical engineering — — Ö — Ö
Technical writing Ö Ö Ö — Ö
Note. Students’ names are pseudonyms. Dashes indicate that the student did not take the course
(or, in Teresa’s case, that data were not available for a course due to missed interviews). Other-
wise, a Ö indicates that transfer of learning was reported, and a blank cell indicates that transfer
of learning was not reported.

TABLE 2
General Lack of Transfer by Course and Student
Student
Course Bob Eddie Sasha Teresa Tom
Algebra Ö Ö Ö
Calculus Ö Ö Ö Ö
Chemical engineering Ö Ö —
Civil engineering Ö Ö Ö Ö
Computer engineering Ö Ö — Ö
Electrical engineering Ö —
Geology — — —
Materials engineering — — — — Ö
Mechanical engineering — — Ö — Ö
Technical writing —
Note. A Ö indicates that a general lack of transfer was reported, and a blank cell indicates that
a general lack of transfer was not reported. Dashes indicate that the student did not take the
course.
these instances were in some cases isolated. When the students were
asked to explain for each of their courses whether the CBI course
helped in general, most of the students said “no” for most of their
courses (see Table 2). Also, when the students were asked to make daily
journal entries about transfer occurring during their school-related
activities, four of the students reported learning transfer in a relatively
small number of entries (see Table 3).
The specific learning outcomes that reportedly transferred from the
CBI course to other courses can be divided into the following six cat-
egories (four of which have subcategories).
1. Listening Comprehension Skills
This category was subdivided into (a) understanding vocabulary, (b)

understanding streams of speech, and (c) synthesizing the gist of dis-
course. The following extract from the student transcripts is an exam-
ple of synthesizing the gist of discourse. In this example, Bob discussed
an entry in his journal in which he reported that he had used skills
learned in the CBI course when he was listening to a lecture in his
civil engineering course. He confirmed that he used this skill, and
described it in detail:
Researcher: Tell me more. Like what exactly did you do? You said, the
instructor was talking about something, and it was a long explanation?
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TABLE 3
Transfer of Learning in Journal Entries
Entries reporting Entries reporting no

Student learning transfer learning transfer
Bob 4 51
Eddie 4 43
Sasha 16 63
Teresa 21 15
Tom 8 45
Note. The period during which entries were made daily in the journals was 4 weeks (except for
Teresa, who made entries for only 2 weeks).
Bob: It is not really a long explanation. Because, he draws some diagram

on the board, and then he explains it, right.
Researcher: That’s civil [engineering], right?
Bob: Yeah. He does some calculations, and I listened to it first, and then
after, maybe almost say at the end, I just summarize stuff.
Researcher: I see. You wait, you waited until almost the end of his
explanation?
Bob: Yeah.
2. Reading Comprehension Skills
The subcategories here were (a) synthesizing gist and distinguishing

units of discourse, (b) guessing meaning of unknown words, and (c)
recognizing coherence relationships. The following transcript extract
illustrates recognizing coherence relationships. Here, Teresa was talking
about her chemical engineering course and the way she thought the
CBI course had helped her do reading in that course. She described
the way she read articles in the CBI course, which involved identifying
shifts between ideas as they are marked by transition words (e.g., how-
ever); then she stated that she used the same process when reading
her chemistry textbook:
Researcher: I see. Okay. And the process of reading the articles in [the CBI
course], what process do you follow in reading those articles in [the
CBI course]?
Teresa: Summarize those things, like I have one paper, put the
sentence, use highlight in my manual. Yeah, and kind of those things, and,
circle.

Researcher: Like you highlight main ideas, what do you highlight?
Teresa: Main ideas, specific words. And when they use “but,” “however,”
transition thing, that is change the idea. Have to circle, change already,
important thing.
Researcher: So you do that when you read the articles in [the CBI course].
And do you do the same thing when you read the chemistry?
Teresa: Uh-huh. And more careful than [the CBI course].
3. Speaking Skills
Transfer of these learning outcomes was described in only general

terms, so there are no subcategories. For example, in this transcript
extract, Sasha said that in the CBI course he had learned how to use
clear oral communication which he used when working in groups with
other students in another course:
Researcher: Okay, interesting. I guess one more general question I have,

we will finish with just one more question. When you are showing me
all these examples, I think that there is a focus on reading and writing.
Maybe more writing, a little bit more writing but also reading. Is there
anything besides those kinds of skills and strategies that [the CBI course]
maybe is helping you with? Things that you can remember that you
are using?
Sasha: Yeah, in a first class we did a small presentation in [the CBI course],
in the first class.
Researcher: Yeah, your section did. Okay.
Sasha: And there I learned that I, I remember that I have to use clear
communication. I have to also use communication. So, yeah, sometimes
we, I study with other people, I explain, sometimes when they ask I have
to explain, usually in computer lessons.
4. Writing Skills
This was subdivided into (a) using appropriate syntactic patterns

and devices, (b) organizing ideas, (c) developing topics, (d) establish-
ing coherence, (e) using appropriate vocabulary, and (f) paraphrasing.
The following transcript extract illustrates the subcategory developing
topics. In this example, Tom was referring to his technical writing
course, pointing out that the writing skills he developed in the CBI
course were helpful when he was writing one of his in-class assignments.
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When I asked him to describe these skills, he said that they involved—
among other things (e.g., organizing)—providing support for his
ideas:
Researcher: Okay. So what exactly does it mean?

Tom: It’s like, requires the body be put into different categories. And then,
for like, you have to get supporting points, and supporting points is in,
like [the CBI course], you have to actually organize the data to get sup-
porting points. And since Technical Writing is based on [the CBI course]
to support it, so it is like the same, combined.
5. Study Skills
This category was divided into (a) using citations and bibliogra-
phies, (b) using test preparation techniques, and (c) participating in
collaborative problem-solving activities. The following transcript excerpt
illustrates participating in collaborative problem-solving activities. In this
example, Bob stated that the skills he had developed from doing
group work in the CBI course had helped him do group work in his
civil engineering course:
Researcher: Is there anything else similar? Like [in the CBI course], you do
lots of group work, or pair work, I mean the class is small, and you do lots
of work by yourself in class as well.
Bob: Yeah.
Researcher: Are any of those things the same as your other courses?
Bob: Yes. In civil [engineering], sometimes we do group work. That
helps. In [the CBI course], in the group, we share the ideas and we talk
about like one problem together, right? For the civil, same thing. As a
group, we talk about, we have one question and we talk about the prob-
lem. It is the same. Maybe the problem is different, but the way is the
same.
6. Affective Outcomes
There were no subcategories here. To illustrate this category, in this

transcript extract, Sasha was referring to the CBI course in general
and whether things he had learned there had helped in any way in
other courses. He said that one way the course helped was that he
now had confidence to talk with other students in his other courses.
He described in detail how this helped:

Researcher: How, tell me how [the CBI course] is helping you to be confi-
dent speaking with other students. You say that it is helping you in other
courses.
Sasha: Okay, for example, if I assume that we don’t have [the CBI course]
and we just go to other courses and we don’t have any contacts with stu-
dents, okay, we just go like, okay, and we just learn about things, I mean,
technical subjects. We don’t get time to speak with students. In [the CBI
course] we can talk to professors because we are in English class and we
don’t have to worry about our English.
These six categories of learning transfer are only descriptions of the

different kinds of learning transfer that occurred from the CBI course
to other courses. These different kinds of learning transfer did not
occur equally. As Table 4 illustrates, a simple count of the students who
reported the different kinds of learning transfer suggests that some
kinds of learning transfer were more prevalent than others. Most of the
skills associated with reading comprehension and writing were reported
by most of the students to have transferred. Transfer of various skills
associated with listening and studying, on the other hand, was reported
by some but not all of the students, and transfer of affective outcomes
and speaking skills were reported by only one or two students.
What Factors Influenced Transfer of Learning From This

University CBI Course to Other University Courses?
The data indicate that learning transfer from the CBI course to
other courses was influenced by eight factors (one of which has mul-
tiple subcategories).
1. Requirements for Learning Transfer in Activities in Other Courses
When learning transfer was reported, it was sometimes because an

activity that a student did in another course required the application
of something he or she had learned in the CBI course. This require-
ment was explicit in some cases (e.g., a laboratory instructor told the
students that the laboratory report must have correct grammar) and
implicit in others (e.g., the student reasoned that writing a good labo-
ratory report required clear organization). In either case, the student
appeared to feel that he or she was given no choice but was being
required to apply some learning outcome(s) from the CBI course. For
example, in the following transcript excerpt, Eddie was talking about
an entry in his journal in which he had written that he had used the
system of documentation that he had learned in the CBI course in his
794 TESOL QUARTERLY

TABLE 4
Categories of Learning Transfer by Student
Student
Category Bob Eddie Sasha Teresa Tom
LCS: Understanding vocabulary Ö

LCS: Synthesizing the gist of discourse Ö
LCS: Understanding streams of speech Ö
RCS: Synthesizing gist & distinguishing Ö Ö Ö Ö
units of discourse
RCS: Guessing meaning of unknown Ö Ö
words
RCS: Recognizing coherence Ö Ö
relationships
SS Ö
WS: Using appropriate syntactic Ö Ö Ö Ö Ö
patterns, devices
WS: Organizing ideas Ö Ö Ö Ö
WS: Developing topics Ö Ö Ö
WS: Establishing coherence Ö Ö
WS: Using appropriate vocabulary Ö Ö Ö Ö
WS: Paraphrasing Ö Ö
STS: Using citations and bibliographies Ö
STS: Using test preparation techniques Ö
STS: Participating in collab. problem Ö
solving activities
AFF Ö Ö
Note. LCS = Listening comprehension skills; RCS = Reading comprehension skills; SS = Speak-
ing skills; WS = Writing skills; STS= Study skills; AFF = Affective outcomes. A Ö indicates that a
student reported a particular kind of learning transfer at least once, and a blank cell indicates
that a particular kind of learning transfer was not reported.
electrical engineering course. He had used this system of documenta-

tion because it was required in the electrical engineering course:
Researcher: And the last [entry], tell me more about this.

Eddie: Well, the thing is, like doing the [electrical engineering course] final
report, we have to do it, we have to reference it in IEEE format, so that IEEE
helped me found to reference my final report. So it helped me.
2. Affordances for Learning Transfer in Activities in Other Courses
Some students said learning transfer had occurred because an activ-

ity that a student did in another course afforded the application of

something he or she had learned in the CBI course. In these cases,
the student was not required to apply learning outcomes from the CBI
course (i.e., as with the first factor). Rather, the activity in which he
or she was engaging in another course gave him or her an opportunity
to apply something that had been learned in the CBI course. Some
of these activities were broadly described (e.g., reading, writing) and
others were more narrowly defined (e.g., reading textbooks that were
text heavy, as opposed to calculation heavy). In this example from the
interview transcripts, Teresa was referring to her courses in general
and explained that learning transfer occurred with her chemical engi-
neering course because that course involved more reading and writing
than her other courses did:
Researcher: If I say, okay, please choose the course, you have four
courses, please choose one course that [the CBI course] helps you the
most with.
Teresa: Chemistry.
Researcher: Why?
Teresa: Because more reading, more writing.
Researcher: Okay. That is where you had the lab, the letter lab.
Teresa: Yeah. And I have to write a lot, more than other courses.
3. Existence of Challenging Situations That Learning Transfer

Can Support
Learning transfer occurred in some cases because a student encoun-
tered a challenging situation and applying something he or she had
learned in the CBI course was helpful in dealing with this challenge.
This challenge was related to some degree of pressure created by a
shortage of time, a large amount of work, or low grades. In this exam-
ple, Sasha was talking about an entry in his journal in which he
reported that reading comprehension skills he had developed in the
CBI course had helped him during an electrical engineering course
laboratory. During the interview, he pointed out that this transfer
occurred because he had had to read the laboratory manual under
time pressure during the laboratory period:
Researcher: [The journal entry says] “The strategies that we learned in

[the CBI course] helped to understand the material quickly.” What do
you mean?
796 TESOL QUARTERLY

Sasha: Even though I read the night before, the lab [manual], I had to go
through that, because when we read at home we don’t have instruments
in front of us and we can’t understand that. But we have to understand the
lab manual in three hours and we have to perform the experiment quickly.
So reading, reading in [the CBI course], effective reading in [the CBI
course] helped me to read that.
4. Existence of Personal Weaknesses That Learning Transfer

Can Support
Sometimes students reported learning transfer in a course that a
student was having difficulty in because of a personal weakness, and
applying something he or she had learned in the CBI course was help-
ful in dealing with this difficulty. The difficulty was generally related
to (a) not being able to understand what was being said during lec-
tures or (b) making mistakes (e.g., grammar) when writing assign-
ments. In this example, Tom referred to an entry he made in his
journal in which he reported that learning transferred to his technical
writing course. He explained that because he did not understand some
of the vocabulary on a handout, he applied the skill of guessing mean-
ing from context:
Researcher: So, can you tell me how, like [in your journal] you said “yes”
[i.e., learning transfer occurred].
Tom: The problem with the handout, like, the handout, there was some
vocabulary that I didn’t know. And I don’t have a dictionary with me all
the time. So I just guess the meaning, and wrote the planning form.
5. Availability of Alternative Support
Some students reported that learning transfer had occurred because

the CBI course was the only source of support available to draw on in
a particular situation. The possible kinds of support students indicated
they lacked included assistance in other courses (e.g., instructions for
how to do something were not provided) and the use of a dictionary
(e.g., dictionaries were not allowed during exams). In this example,
Bob was contrasting one of the laboratories in his chemical engineer-
ing course with the other laboratories in the course. He said that
learning transferred when he was writing this particular laboratory
report because instructions had not been provided in the chemical
engineering course for how to write the report:

Researcher: And you said that one of the labs you think [the CBI course]
maybe is helpful with because you had to write a letter.
Bob: Yes.
Researcher: What about the other labs?
Bob: No. Because the lab I should write a letter, that lab was like, we should
write all the procedure by myself, like read from other references and we
should write procedure and how to do the lab. And then we shouldn’t come
after we did the lab, we should write letter to the company and like we have
to summarize the lab. So that is why [the CBI course] is related to this lab.
But for the other labs, all the instructions are given.
6. Similarity Between the CBI Course and Other Courses
Learning transfer sometimes occurred because elements of the CBI

course and another course were similar. The elements were (a) con-
tent, (b) type of activity, (c) type of reading text, or (d) type of writing
text. In the following example, a similarity in course content was the
cited reason for learning transfer. Sasha was discussing an entry he
made in his journal in which he said that during an algebra lecture,
he had applied listening comprehension skills he had developed in the
CBI course. He explained that this had occurred because he noticed
a similarity between the topic the algebra instructor was talking about
and the topic he had read about in the CBI course reading package.
Researcher: I see. That is helpful. Just one more question. And this was on
Thursday November 9th, your algebra lecture. You said [the CBI course]
helped. “As I listened to the professor, I see, I remembered some termi-
nology, some vocabulary which I read in the articles.” Okay. Can you
remember, which articles, he is talking about jet propulsion and rocket
launching?
Sasha: Yeah. This is, this is, fuels.
Researcher: Alternative fuels, yeah, yeah.
Sasha: Alternative fuels. Suddenly I remembered these things because he
was explaining how Eigen vectors are used to reduce vibrations, reduce
frequency, and jet propulsion also. There were some words from the alter-
native fuels.
7. Relative Timing of Instruction
Learning transfer occurred in some cases because instruction in the

CBI course was chronologically close to an opportunity to apply what
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was learned. For example, Sasha was talking about an entry in his
journal in which he reported that he had applied writing skills from
the CBI course in his computer engineering course. When asked to
explain, he said that learning transfer occurred easily because he was
developing these skills in the CBI course at the same time he was using
them in computer engineering:
Sasha: For example, for every assignment [in the CBI course] we had
to write error analysis. And we write what were our errors and how
we can improve them. And this is like first we say that these are the
errors and how they came and then the analysis, what are the strate-
gies I want to follow to avoid these errors. So this is also the perform-
ance. It had one introduction and then the results and explanation.
It was in searching and sorting. So we had to write five programs, by
sorting and searching, and then we had to give the performance,
what is the efficient program, then so why this exception than the
other. So this strategy came from [the CBI course]. I was doing both,
right, and it was very easy to write because it was in touch. So I didn’t
spend much time to get all of this, because I was taking [the CBI
course].
8. Relative Demand of Instruction
Sometimes students said that learning transfer had occurred because

instruction in the CBI course was more challenging than instruction
in another course. In this example, Bob was referring to applying lis-
tening comprehension skills that he had learned from the CBI course
in his other courses. He stated that this transfer occurred because the
CBI course was more demanding with regard to using listening com-
prehension skills than his other courses were.
Researcher: In those lectures, I imagine you’re listening all the time, you’re
taking notes.
Bob: Yeah, listening. Because my instructor in [the CBI course], he is talk-
ing so fast, right? So that helps.
Researcher: How does it help?
Bob: Because in the beginning, when I went to [the CBI course] class, I
didn’t understand what he says, because he talks so fast. But now I under-
stand what he says. And for other courses, no other instructor talks faster
than him. He is the fastest. So that helps. Like I can understand the other
instructors easily, even though they are Spanish, Russian. Spanish and
Russian has accent, right? The first time I don’t understand what they say.
Maybe listening helps.

TABLE 5
Students Citing Factors That Influenced Learning Transfer
Student
Factor Bob Eddie Sasha Teresa Tom
Requirements for transfer in activities in Ö Ö Ö
other courses
Affordances for transfer in activities in ÖO ÖO ÖO ÖO ÖO
other courses
Existence of challenging situations that Ö Ö Ö
transfer can support
Existence of personal weaknesses that ÖO ÖO ÖO ÖO ÖO
Availability of alternative support Ö O ÖO Ö Ö
Similarity between courses—content ÖO ÖO Ö O ÖO
Similarity between courses—type of activity ÖO O ÖO ÖO
Similarity between courses—type of O Ö O O
reading text
Similarity between courses—type of ÖO Ö
writing text
Relative timing of instruction Ö Ö
Relative demand of instruction Ö
Note. Ö indicates the factor was cited at least once by a student as a reason for the occurrence of
learning transfer. O indicates the factor was cited at least once by a student as a reason for learn-
ing not transferring. A blank cell indicates that a student did not cite a particular factor.
The factors which influenced learning transfer appeared in varying

frequencies in the data. Table 5 indicates the number of students who
referred to these factors in relation to both (a) transfer occurring and
(b) transfer not occurring. These data suggest that some factors influ-
enced learning transfer more than others. For example, Affordances for
learning transfer in activities in other courses and Existence of personal weak-
nesses that learning transfer can support appear to have had the broadest
influence because all the students cited them. Comparatively, Similarity
between courses—type of writing text, Relative timing of instruction, and
Relative demand of instruction appear to have been less influential
because only one or two students cited them. The other factors fall
somewhere in between.
These factors can also be viewed in relation to the learning outcomes
they reportedly influenced (see Table 6). Looking from left to right
across Table 6 indicates that some of the factors were related to a wider
variety of transferred learning outcomes than others were. For example,
Affordances for learning transfer in activities in other courses was related to
five out of the six categories of learning transfer that were reported.
Requirements for learning transfer in activities in other courses, Availability of
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TABLE 6
Categories of Learning Transfer and the Factors That Influenced Them
Category of learning transfer

Factor LCS RCS SS WS STS AFF
Requirements for transfer in activities in Ö Ö Ö
other courses
Affordances for transfer in activities in Ö Ö Ö Ö Ö
other courses
Existence of challenging situations that Ö Ö
Existence of personal weaknesses that Ö Ö
Availability of alternative support Ö Ö Ö
Similarity between courses—content Ö Ö Ö
Similarity between courses—type Ö Ö Ö
of activity
Similarity between courses—type Ö
of reading text
Similarity between courses—type Ö
of writing text
Relative timing of instruction Ö
Relative demand of instruction Ö
Note. LCS = Listening comprehension skills; RCS = Reading comprehension skills; SS = Speak-
ing skills; WS = Writing skills; STS = Study skills; AFF = Affective outcomes. A Ö indicates that
the occurrence of a particular category of learning transfer was reported at least once as having
been influenced by a particular factor. A blank cell indicates that the occurrence of a particular
category of learning transfer was not reported as having been influenced by a particular factor.
alternative support, Similarity of courses—content, and Similarity of courses—

type of activity were each related to three out of the six categories of
learning transfer. The remaining factors were related to only one or
two categories of learning transfer. Examining Table 6 from top to bot-
tom, on the other hand, indicates that some of the categories of learn-
ing transfer were related to more factors than others were. Writing skills
were related to nine different factors, and listening comprehension skills
were related to eight different factors. The other categories of learning
transfer were all related to only one or two factors.
SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION
The findings of this study suggest the following:

Learning transfer occurred from the CBI course to other courses, but
had constraints.

This transfer involved various learning outcomes relevant to aca-
demic studies, spanning academic language skills, study skills, and
affective factors.
Transfer of these learning outcomes was influenced by various factors
linked to different elements of learning transfer situations, including
the learner, the instructional tasks, and the broader instructional
context.
These findings are valuable for several reasons. First, they highlight
the relevance of concern for learning transfer in EAP instruction. Past
research indicated that the transfer of learning outcomes should not
be assumed. The findings in this study support that argument because
they suggest that the occurrence of learning transfer is influenced by
various factors.
These findings also add in an important way to the literature that
supports CBI being used in an EAP setting. Not only does it appear
that CBI can stimulate academically relevant learning outcomes, but
also that these learning outcomes can have an impact noticeable to
students on their participation in other university courses. In this way,
this study suggests that CBI has potential to meet the varied needs of
postsecondary ESL students and to address instructional goals that
transcend the EAP setting.
In addition, these findings shed light on debate over the relative
merits of broad-based compared with narrow EAP. This CBI course was
a foundation from which students reportedly transferred various learn-
ing outcomes across a wide range of courses; this result reflects
Widdowson’s (1984) notion of EAP as education (i.e., broad based).
However, transfer of learning sometimes occurred because of similari-
ties between courses; such contextual similarity is more a feature of
Widdowson’s notion of EAP as training (i.e., narrow).
This finding raises an interesting question about different models
of CBI. Some CBI models (e.g., adjunct language instruction) are
more closely linked than others (e.g., theme-based language instruc-
tion) to specific content courses. If a language course is closely linked
to a content course, we might expect transfer to occur between the
courses because of contextual similarities. However, this does not mean
transfer will occur from the language course to other content courses
(i.e., courses to which the language course is not linked). The chal-
lenge with CBI in an EAP setting then may be to establish transfer-
stimulating links between the language course and not just one, but
as many of a student’s other courses as possible.
Understanding the way CBI can support learning transfer has practi-
cal implications. Educators should be aware first that content—a cen-
tral consideration in CBI—can impact learning transfer. So, although
802 TESOL QUARTERLY

some researchers have suggested that content in CBI be considered in
terms of interest (Brinton et al. 2003), disciplinary nature (Kasper,
2000), and potential for stimulating motivation (Valentine & Repath-
Martos, 1997), content can also be considered in terms of how well it
will support learning transfer. The following question provides a start-
ing point: Is there similarity in content between the CBI course and
other courses?
Educators can also benefit from keeping in mind that, besides
content, instructional tasks and text types can influence learning
transfer. Tasks have already been described as important considera-
tions in CBI (Carson, Taylor, & Fredella, 1997); text types have been
viewed as important in CBI (Stoller & Grabe, 1997) and more broadly
in EAP (Johns, 1997). This study adds learning transfer to the list of
reasons for paying careful attention to tasks and text types in instruc-
tional design, pointing to the following practical question: Is there
similarity in tasks and text types between the CBI course and other
courses?
Beyond content, tasks, and text types, however, educators who are
interested in stimulating learning transfer need to attend to the
broader context of instruction. Learning transfer was influenced in
this study by, for example, (a) the timing and demand of instruction,
(b) the relevance of instruction to other courses in terms of require-
ments and affordances for transfer, and (c) the relevance of instruc-
tion to students’ strengths and weaknesses in other courses. Therefore,
to address learning transfer, course design should take into considera-
tion the following questions:
Do activities in other courses require or afford learning transfer from
the CBI course?
Will learning transfer from the CBI course support challenging situa-
tions or students’ personal weaknesses in other courses?
Does the CBI course fill a gap in terms of providing support?
Is instruction in the CBI course more challenging than other
courses?
Is instruction in the CBI course well-timed with regard to other
courses?
Future research might build on these findings in different ways,
perhaps by looking to see if similar patterns of learning transfer occur
in other settings in which CBI is used as a form of language support
(e.g., disciplines other than engineering; secondary or elementary
school settings; workplace settings). More controlled approaches such
as design experiments might be used to see whether manipulation of
instructional variables has any impact on learning transfer. Also, this

research need not be limited to CBI settings: This study highlighted
the importance of avoiding assumptions about the occurrence of learn-
ing transfer, perhaps underscoring the need for attention to this phe-
nomenon and its role in English language teaching and learning in
general.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article describes my doctoral thesis work, so I must thank my thesis com-
mittee members and the participants in my thesis defense for their important
input: Dr. Antoinette Gagné, Dr. Margaret Procter, Dr. Merrill Swain, Dr. Marjorie
Wesche, and my supervisor, Dr. Alister Cumming. Thank you very much also to
the anonymous students, instructors, and administrator who participated in the
study. I would also like to acknowledge funding I received to support this work
from the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities (an Ontario
Graduate Scholarship) and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Puerto
Rico, Mayagüez.
THE AUTHOR
Mark Andrew James is an assistant professor in the English Department at Arizona
State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA. He has also taught applied linguistics, teacher
education and development, and ESL in Puerto Rico, Canada, and Japan. His research
interests include content-based language instruction and the role of learning transfer
in second language teaching and learning.
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instruction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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Essex, England: Longman.

APPENDIX
Samples of Interview Protocols
1. Student interviews (total of ten interviews per student)
(These questions are from the third interview, which focused on connections students per-
ceived between the CBI course and other courses.)
Have you noticed any connections between the English course and your other courses?
What are the similarities/differences in work/assignments between these courses?
Does the CBI course help you with your other courses? (which is the most? least?)
If yes, what helps? Why does it help you like this?
Does using content in the CBI course help you with your other courses?
If yes, what helps? Why does it help you like this?
2. CBI course instructor interviews (total of three interviews per instructor)
(These questions are from the third interview.)
What does transfer of learning mean to you in the context of this course?
Does it occur? (evidence?)
What (do you hope) transfers, generally and in terms of language?
Is there anything about the course that fosters/inhibits transfer?
Is there anything about the broader context that fosters/inhibits transfer? (e.g., students,
other courses, programme)
What role does the content we used play in transfer here?
3. Engineering course instructor interview (one interview per instructor)
What are the goals for this course?
Does it connect with other courses? (concurrently or sequentially) Do the courses in general
help each other?
Was the lecture that I saw typical?
What do you expect from students before lectures? (e.g., do reading before they come)
Are you familiar with the CBI course? What role do you see it playing in this programme?
Do you think students do anything or learn anything in the CBI course that helps them with
your course? (If so, specific examples/ if not, why not?)
One thing students do in the CBI course is read, analyze, and discuss articles on engineering-
related topics (e.g., inventions, information technology, global warming, alternative fuels,
waste management). Do you think this material or the process of dealing with it helps stu-
dents in your course?
806 TESOL QUARTERLY

THE FORUM
TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL
profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarks
published here in the Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.
Classrooms as Communities of Practice: A

Reevaluation
MARI HANEDA
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio, United States
The notion of community of practice (CoP), first enunciated by Lave

and Wenger (1991), has become a generative theoretical framework that
has been applied across a wide range of disciplines. In this article, I
examine how this framework has been taken up in second language (L2)
research, discuss its strengths and limitations in understanding L2
learning—particularly in classroom settings—and consider some directions
for future research. However, before turning to the use that has been
made of this notion in the field of L2 research, it may be helpful to discuss
its evolution.
THE COMMUNITY-OF-PRACTICE PERSPECTIVE
Lave and Wenger put forward their situated learning theory in opposi-
tion to the mainstream cognitive psychologists’ conceptualization of
learning as an individual achievement, concerned only with cognition.
Their theory emerged in the context of a growing awareness of the
fundamentally social nature of learning and cognition in the fields of
educational and cultural psychology (e.g., Brown, Collins, & Duguid,
1989; Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989; Rogoff, 1990; Scribner & Cole,
1981; Wertsch, 1985) and critical anthropology (Lave, 1988, 1991). For
Lave and Wenger, knowledge is not something that is incrementally

stored in an individual’s mind; it is to be understood relationally, that is
to say, as located in the evolving relationships between people and the
settings in which they conduct their activities. Individuals do not simply
receive, internalize, and construct knowledge in their minds but enact it
as persons-in-the world participating in the practices of a sociocultural
community. Accordingly, learning is an intrinsic and inseparable aspect
of any social practice, not the goal to be achieved, and it occurs when
people engage in joint activity in a CoP, with or without teaching.
Lave and Wenger tried to capture this new view of learning with the
concept of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), which appears to
have evolved from Lave’s (1988) earlier work. There, Lave cautions
against a simplistic shift from individual to community as the analytical
unit. She points out that despite their different theoretical perspectives,
psychology, which traditionally focuses on individuals, and anthropology,
which traditionally focuses on community and on culture, may be col-
laborators in maintaining the dualism. Lave attempts to synthesize this
dualism by framing the individual and the context as coconstitutive. This
argument is extended in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) monograph. Instead
of focusing solely either on individuals’ cognitive processes (and thus
learning) or on social practice (and thus activity), Lave and Wenger
contend that these two emphases are irreducible, because “agent, activ-
ity, and the world mutually constitute each other” (p. 33). To translate
this view into a specific analytic approach to learning, LPP is proposed
as “a descriptor of engagement in social practice that entails learning
as an integral constituent” (p. 35). LPP describes a process in which
newcomers acquire the skill to perform by actually engaging in the
practice in attenuated ways and move toward full participation by mas-
tering the knowledge and skills critical for that particular CoP (p. 29).
Thus, the concept of LPP characterizes the particular mode of engage-
ment of a novice learner who participates in the actual practices of an
expert, but only to a limited degree and with limited responsibility for
the product as a whole (p. 14).
Treating learning as legitimate peripheral participation means that
learning is seen as “itself an evolving form of membership” (Lave &
Wenger, 1991, p. 53). Individuals develop identities of mastery as they
change in how they participate in a CoP through the multiple social
relations and roles they experience. Defining identities as “long-term,
living relations between persons and their place and participation in
communities of practice,” Lave and Wenger argue that “identity, know-
ing, and social membership entail one another” (p. 53). Lave (1996)
further elaborates the connection among learning, identity, and the
social world by asserting that learning entails “becoming kinds of per-
sons,” and that “crafting identities in practice becomes the fundamen-
tal project subjects engage in” (p. 157).
808 TESOL QUARTERLY

To illustrate their argument, Lave and Wenger (1991) give examples
of CoPs that range widely: Vai and Gola tailors, Yucatec midwives, meat
cutters, naval quartermasters, and nondrinking alcoholics. With the
exception of the butchers, all involve (a) apprenticeship learning in
nonschool settings, (b) little explicit teaching, and (c) newcomers’
assuming increasingly responsible roles over time. Action and cognition
are seamlessly merged when the learner engages in community prac-
tices. Thus, when adopting this theoretical framework, important ques-
tions to ask include the following: What kind of opportunities for
participation are afforded to community members? What kinds of struc-
tures are in place to make participants’ access to community resources
possible? What kind of identities do participants develop as a result of
participation in a particular community?
More recently, scholars, such as Eckert and McConell-Ginet (1999)
and Wenger (1998), have extended Lave and Wenger’s work. Eckert and
McConell-Ginet bring a new analytical dimension to the CoP perspective
through their careful attention to language practices in a given CoP,
focusing on the construction of gendered identities in adolescent peer-
groups (e.g., Asian girls), focusing on their shared “ways of doing things,
ways of talking, beliefs, and values” (p. 186). In addition, these scholars
highlight individuals’ multiple memberships in a variety of CoPs, both
face-to-face and more diffuse. Similarly, in his 1998 monograph, Wenger,
perhaps responding to the criticism of the predominant focus on indi-
viduals’ movements within a singular CoP leveled against the original
formulation of CoP, draws attention to the notion of multimembership and
also points out that individuals’ modes of participation in different CoPs
may vary considerably. Drawing on his fieldwork with insurance claims
processors, Wenger also proposes three defining characteristics of a
CoP: mutual engagement, joint activity involving a collective process of
negotiation, and shared repertoires. Of note is that although Wenger’s
definition of CoP fits his example of the face-to-face CoP of claims
processors, it does not necessarily apply to the more diffuse CoPs that
he discusses. Like Lave and Wenger’s examples of CoPs, the studies by
the aforementioned scholars take place in nonschool settings and do
not involve explicit teaching. In the next section, I turn to the applica-
tion of this perspective to classroom settings.
THE USE OF THE CoP PERSPECTIVE IN L2 RESEARCH
The CoP perspective has been increasingly adopted in L2 classroom

research since it was introduced by Toohey (1996) (e.g., Canagarajah,
2003; Casanave, 1998, 2002; Flowerdew, 2000; Kanno, 2003; Leki, 2001;
Morita, 2004; Toohey, 1998, 2000). In this section, I discuss the
THE FORUM 809

strengths and limitations of the CoP theory when it is applied to L2
classroom research. I first consider how adopting the CoP perspective
may illuminate aspects of L2 learning and then how applying the CoP
perspective to L2 classroom research suggests ways in which the theory
needs to be modified or extended. In addressing these two issues, I
focus on just two illustrative articles: Toohey (1998) and Morita (2004),
both published in TESOL Quarterly.
Aspects of L2 Learning Illuminated by the Use

of the CoP Perspective
Toohey, in her longitudinal ethnographic research conducted in
Canada, studied a group of children for whom English was an addi-
tional language, following them from kindergarten through Grade 2.
In her 1998 article, she focuses on their Grade 1 classroom community.
By treating the class as a CoP, Toohey shifts the analytical focus from
individual children’s mental activities to their participatory opportuni-
ties (hence learning) in prevalent classroom practices. She also shows
the ways in which her case-study children’s learning trajectories unfolded
and how their identities were constructed through these practices. For
instance, the physical space was arranged in such a way that her target
ESL children were prevented from interacting with English-proficient
peers (old-timers in English), thereby limiting their access to symbolic
resources (spoken English) to mediate their L2 learning. Toohey reveals
that, nevertheless, learning was taking place all the time in the Grade
1 class because the children were appropriating the local practices of
doing school. Put differently, Toohey uses the CoP perspective, origi-
nally derived from nonschool learning, to show how L2 learning is part
of socialization as a student in a particular sociocultural setting.
Morita, in her year-long study of academic socialization in graduate
studies, examined Japanese female students’ modes of participation in
multiple classrooms at a Canadian university and the kinds of identities-
in-practice that they developed as a consequence. She treated each of
the classes attended by her participants as a distinct CoP—a locally
enacted academic discourse community. Her account of the target stu-
dents’ experiences of participation in different classroom CoPs was pri-
marily reconstructed from the information they provided in interviews
and weekly reports. Morita shows that (a) within the apparently homo-
geneous group of Japanese female graduate students, individual stu-
dents negotiated their sense of self in significantly different ways; (b)
these students also showed considerable intraindividual differences in
how they participated in different classes and developed their academic
identities; and (c) the construction of identity was “of necessity a mixture
810 TESOL QUARTERLY

of being in and being out,” that is, participating actively in one com-
munity and participating marginally in another (Wenger, 1998, p. 165).
Thus, Morita highlighted individuals’ membership in multiple communi-
ties and its ramifications in the process of identity construction.
It can be argued that, of the two, Toohey makes greater use of the
CoP perspective, as originally proposed by Lave and Wenger, through
her close analysis of community practices. By contrast, Morita builds
more on the notion of membership in multiple CoPs, as put forward
by Wenger (1998). Both studies draw on the CoP perspective to build
a case for the intricate relationship among L2 learners, language learn-
ing (academic socialization in Morita’s case), and classroom practices.
Limitations of the CoP Perspective
Although much can be gained from bringing the CoP perspective

to bear on L2 learning, this perspective also has limitations that the
two L2 studies bring to the fore. The original presentation of CoP
theory, Lave and Wenger (1991), has limitations in at least two areas:
It does not (a) critically examine the concept of community or (b)
distinguish among different types of learning. First, with the exception
of butcher apprentices, the examples of communities that Lave and
Wenger described appear to be relatively problem-free; there is little
mention of the kinds of struggles and tensions that community mem-
bers frequently experience. For example, no distinction is made
between different types of participants except that between newcomers
and old-timers, and the picture of apprenticeship offered is limited to
that of newcomers’ centripetal movement toward becoming expert
participants. Although Lave and Wenger do acknowledge that hegem-
ony “over resources for learning and alienation from full participation
are inherent” in a community (p. 42), they also state that the concept
of community of practice “is left largely as an intuitive notion” that
requires “a more rigorous treatment” and that “unequal relations of
power must be included more systematically in our analysis” (p. 42).
However, Wenger (1998) recognizes that community members con-
stantly negotiate norms, such as what matters and what does not and
what to talk about and what to leave unsaid, in order to achieve mutual
accountability. This inevitably involves negotiation of disagreement.
Nevertheless, he does not offer any critical analysis of unequal partici-
patory opportunities.
By focusing on how L2 students, who bring with them diverse lin-
guistic and cultural resources, participate in classroom practices, the
Toohey and the Morita studies highlight diverse entry points to class-
room CoPs. These points of entry challenge the notion of static,
THE FORUM 811

homogeneous newcomers striving to achieve one convergent end point
of development (becoming expert participants) and thus problematize
the concept of LPP, which Lave and Wenger tend to treat as noncon-
troversial. Further, Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of multiple levels
of participation entailed in membership in a CoP (p. 98) bypasses
the issue of power with respect to who can assign certain roles and
identities and thus control trajectories that lead (or not) to full partici-
pation. In similar vein, in her discussion of the application of the CoP
perspective to research on language minority students, Kanno (1999)
cautions against labeling marginalized positions occupied by these stu-
dents as LPP because of the danger of legitimizing their marginality.
In this respect, particularly poignant is Toohey’s description of the
subtle ways in which particular classroom practices become normalized,
with differential LPP statuses being assigned to different children as a
result. She also makes clear the limited extent to which her target
bilingual children were able to exercise agency. Although some of
them attempted to resist the classroom’s norms and rules, the teacher’s
authority always prevailed. As a result, the norm of individualization of
learning (i.e., not sharing ideas and materials with peers) that was
enforced in the classroom contributed to a process of community strati-
fication that increasingly led to the exclusion of some students from
certain practices and identities (p. 80). Thus, as McDermott (1993) has
pointed out, ranking is a central practice of school, and other practices
of school are congruent with this practice, such that some children are
constructed as deficient, regardless of their actual competence.1
Second, though viewing learning as an inseparable aspect of partici-
pation in social practice has clear advantages, this concept creates
problems when it is applied to all classroom practices. In attempting
to understand what is learned, it seems critical to articulate the kinds
of practices that are taking place: academic learning, negotiation of
peer relations, and so on (see Hawkins, 2005). Unless these different
types of practices are analytically teased out, it is difficult to tell what
types of learning are occurring in relation to specific activities, events,
or interactions. In this sense, the term participation risks becoming a
black box, in which all types of learning are subsumed without critical
analysis. Further, Lave and Wenger’s lack of analytical clarity concern-
ing the relationship between learning and participation also leads
them to make sweeping criticisms of discipline-based classrooms while
ignoring the potential benefits of schooled learning. For example,
although high school students learning physics are not engaged in
authentic practices tied to the real social world, it is not possible for
them to participate in the practices of the community of physicists
1
I thank Kellen Toohey for helping me understand this point.
812 TESOL QUARTERLY

without first developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions neces-
sary to enter that community as newcomers (Lemke, 2002). Some
forms of knowledge and skill are best learned through explicit instruc-
tion but, once mastered, they enable participation in CoPs that would
otherwise not be possible.
Furthermore, participation needs to be differentiated, as the two L2
studies show by revealing aspects of participation that have significant
impacts on learning. Toohey’s study makes salient the organizational
aspect of participation (i.e., the physically partitioned space), and
Morita’s study highlights the affective aspect of participation (i.e., the
emotional struggle that each of her case-study students experienced in
constructing a viable sense of self). The undifferentiated use of the term
learning similarly sidesteps thorny issues concerning what counts as learn-
ing in a particular classroom and in what ways learning is mediated by
interpersonal dynamics as well as by material and symbolic artifacts.
DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Before considering possible directions for further research, I suggest

that it is important to problematize the appropriateness of the concept
of community of practice with respect to classroom L2 research. The first
question to be addressed is the ontological status of a CoP. Is it possible
to establish strict criteria by which a CoP can be recognized, as Wenger
(1998) has attempted? Or is it more appropriate to consider it as a way
of drawing attention to family resemblances among certain modes of
coparticipation in joint activity, as Lave and Wenger (1991) seem to
propose? In SLA and related literature, a variety of different groupings
have been characterized as CoPs, but many of them do not share all of
the attributes assumed by Lave and Wenger (1991). The CoPs they dis-
cuss tend to be local, grass-roots communities, such as West African tai-
lors or Yucatec midwives; newcomers do move from the periphery of
participation to become old-timers by taking on increasingly responsible
roles that require increased knowledge and skills, but these CoPs are
nonhierarchical in the sense that anyone who participates in the rele-
vant practices is considered to be legitimately peripheral. In other words,
legitimate peripheral participation is a single, undifferentiated construct. By
contrast, the institutional CoPs investigated in L2 classroom research
tend to be both centered and hierarchical, such that not all peripheral
participants may be judged to be legitimate and, conversely, some (legiti-
mate) participants are more central and powerful than others. In such
institutional communities, therefore, it seems more appropriate to con-
sider the concept of LPP as the conjunction of two distinct attributes:
legitimate and peripheral (Canagarajah, 2003; Kanno, 1999).
THE FORUM 813

The implication of separating these two attributes is that it opens a
way to think about participants’ agency in adopting alternative strate-
gies to achieve competent participation. For example, Canagarajah
(2003), in his article titled “A somewhat legitimate and very peripheral
participation,” tells a story of himself and other Sri Lankan scholars
who, despite the lack of material and symbolic resources on the
geographical periphery, developed unique coping strategies to compe-
tently participate in disciplinary discourse communities. Further, in
thinking about L2 learners’ agentive actions, of use is the notion of
imagined communities (Anderson, 1991; Wenger, 1998), which refers to
“groups of people, not immediately tangible and accessible with whom
we connect through the power of the imagination (Kanno & Norton,
2003, p. 241). Drawing on this notion, Norton (2001) links two of her
adult participants’ nonparticipation in their ESL classes with their
respective imagined communities. For Katrina, a former teacher in
Poland prior to her immigration to Canada, the imagined community
to which she aspired to belong was that of professionals, which was
“as much a reconstruction of her past as it was an imaginative con-
struction of the future” (p. 164). Hence, her alignment with her imag-
ined community prompted her to reject her ESL teacher’s positioning
of her as a limited-English-proficient speaker who was not ready to
take a computer course. Thus, an implication for research is the
importance of addressing both participants’ past life histories and their
envisioned futures in developing an understanding of their current
mode of engagement in a particular CoP (see the special issue of the
Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 2(4) for the application of
the notion of imagined communities to L2 research).
Another fruitful line of inquiry may be to create a program of research
that involves designing a new CoP that challenges the norms and prac-
tices of an existing community. A prominent example of such research
is Gutiérrez’s (2005; see also Gutiérrez, Banquedano-Lopez, & Tejeda,
1999; Gutiérrez, Banquedano-Lopez, & Turner, 1997) design experi-
ments, one of which involved a 4-week intensive summer program at
the University of California at Los Angeles for Latino high school sen-
iors from migrant farm worker backgrounds. She and her colleagues
designed “a social environment of development in which these students
begin to re-conceive of who they are and what they might be able to
accomplish academically and beyond” (Gutiérrez, 2005, p. 2). This pro-
gram included critical readings of texts that described various forms of
oppression (e.g., Freire 2000/1970; Anzaldúa, 1999) and writing of their
autobiographies, which were designed to develop “an historicized view
of the educational and sociopolitical reality of migrant and immigrant
communities [that] helps to incite a reframing of education, of the self,
and one’s future actions” (Gutiérrez, 2005, p. 16).
814 TESOL QUARTERLY

However, change does not have to be the result of an external
intervention. Teachers and students can also be change agents. For
example, teacher researchers can create communities of inquiry in
their classrooms in which all students are encouraged to construct
knowledge together by voicing their opinions and experiences (e.g.,
Brutt-Griffler & Samimy, 1999; Wells, 2001) and collaborative research
between university-based researchers and teachers can be another
means to improve classroom practices (Hawkins, 2005). Students, even
marginalized ones, can also be change agents by introducing new dis-
course genres into classroom practices, which the teacher supports
andendorses (Gallas, 1994; Hankins, 2003).
CODA
Lave and Wenger’s social practice theory has much to offer because
of its emphasis on the integral relationship among agent, activity, and
the world, in which each is conceptualized as constitutive of the others.
The link they suggest between learning and the formation of identity
also helps to broaden our perspective on learning. However, in the light
of the preceding discussion, I would argue that, for the CoP perspective
to be useful in addressing L2 classroom learning, it requires some analyti-
cal unpacking. First, the notion of community needs to be enriched by
consideration of who its members are as individuals, with particular dis-
positions shaped by their life trajectories—past, present, and envisioned
future. Second, by critically examining the power relations that are inher-
ent in any community, one can begin to address how different individu-
als come to inhabit particular LPP statuses and to be assigned particular
identities as learners. Third, in examining institutional CoPs, it is also
important to analytically distinguish the terms legitimate and peripheral. In
this regard, it may be profitable for future research to consider ways in
which newcomers may resist community norms and conventions without
compromising full participation. Finally, the conflation of the two terms,
participation and learning, needs to be unpacked. Participation has many
aspects, and it is necessary to articulate the kinds of practice in which
students are engaged in order to discuss the kinds of learning that result.
What is needed then is the development of a more sophisticated view of
learning through participation in community practices that takes account
of the different types of learning associated with different types of prac-
tice, as these occur in the real world of schooling. Interdisciplinary design
experiments and teacher research, which aim to create an equitable CoP
both outside and inside schools and classrooms, may also be a profitable
line of inquiry to interrogate the relationship among learning, cognition,
identity, power relations, and schooling.
THE FORUM 815

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the following people for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this
paper: TQ editor Suresh Canagarajah, Mollie Blackburn, David Bloome, Caroline
Clark, George Newell, Bonny Norton, Kelleen Toohey, and Ian Wilkinson.
THE AUTHOR
Mari Haneda is an assistant professor of foreign/second language education in the
School of Teaching and Learning, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United
States. Her research interests include L2 literacy development and practices, language
and identity, and the analysis of interaction in educational settings.
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THE FORUM 817

Comments on J. Zuengler and
E. R. Miller’s “Cognitive and Sociocultural
Perspectives: Two Parallel SLA Worlds?”
A Reader Responds
A Sociocognitive Perspective: The Best of Both Worlds
KENT HILL
Seigakuin University
Saitama, Japan
In the TESOL Quarterly’s 40th anniversary issue, Zuengler and Miller

(2006) referred to cognitive and sociocultural (SCT) perspectives as
“parallel worlds,” a split that goes back to at least Descartes (1641/1986),
the false mind/body distinction, and reductionism in science. Though
I agree that they remain separate ontologies that have continued to
commiserate in incommensurability, by correcting this false construct,
incommensurability no longer holds.
In this response to Zuengler and Miller, I argue that, rather than
separately, the two theories developed antithetically (e.g., langue and
parole) and suggest that in SLA, incommensurability actually led to the
cognitive perspective being dominant over SCT. Then I point out
assimilative developments in both theories as they enter their third
generation and briefly explain the advantages of a sociocognitive
approach to reveal how it offers the best of both worlds.
THE GREAT DIVIDE
In contrast to Zuengler and Miller, my interpretation of the litera-

ture is that the theories are not separate concepts: the SCT conception
developed antithetically to the cognitive one. Within SLA, the cause of
the split is often attributed to Chomsky (1957) and his mathematically
elegant but psychologically implausible transformational-generative
grammar. Certainly, Chomsky’s influence has had profound repercus-
sions on SLA research (Block, 1996; Watson-Gegeo, 2004). That said,
perhaps the Chomsky school (i.e., Krashen, 1985; Pienemann, 1999;
Pinker, 1982) would not have found as much influence if it had not

819
been for the posthumous publication of Saussure’s (1916/1972) Course
in General Linguistics.
Pre-Chomsky, much of the blame for incommensurability has been
aimed at Saussure, in particular, his langue/parole distinction (Mitchell
& Myles, 2002; Thorne & Lantolf, 2006). Because he separated langue
(i.e., cognition acting directly on language to create an abstract system
or grammar) from the more fluid and social parole (i.e., language in
use)—although without ever excluding social interaction from the
system—many writers, for example, Bakhtin (Holquist, 1981) or
Volosinov (1973), even if greatly influenced by Saussure, responded
with antithetical works stressing the social as opposed to abstract nature
of language development. Hence, prior to the SLA incommensurabil-
ity, there was the Saussure and Bakhtin form and, prior to that (unless
you follow Chomsky’s interpretation), Humboldt’s (1836/1988)
energeia (i.e., language as free activity) as antithetical to Descartes’
regulated activity (i.e., language as rule governed). In contrast, Vygotsky
(1978, 1986; Robbins, 2001) and his bidirectional intrapsychological
(i.e., cognitive) and interpsychological (i.e., sociocultural) planes
might best be described as being between the two poles (i.e.,
sociocognitive).
Saussure, like SLA, can and should be blamed for trying to con-
strain langue or linguistics to the rigors of science. This illusion of
scientific validation based on the creation of false constructs has most
likely led to the domination of the cognitive perspective, although
perhaps more to blame than Saussure are the political-historical cir-
cumstances leading up to and including the 20th century (i.e., the zeal
for science). Furthermore, it was Bloomfield (1933) who further
ingrained the false Cartesian separation within the cognitive perspec-
tive by excluding any unobservable psychological processes from lin-
guistic analysis.
In short, antithetical lines can be drawn, on the one hand, from
Descartes, Saussure, Bloomfield, and Chomsky to Long and, on the
other, from Humboldt, Bakhtin—with a vacant slot due to Marxist
censorship possibly filled by Wittgenstein (1953)—to Wertsch (1998)
and Lantolf. The present domination of the rule-based, grammar-
instruction, first-generation cognitive perspective in SLA derives from
its ability to develop a formal system of language built on the false
underpinnings of positivist science. SCT, though presenting an unhyp-
ocritical approach to language, has suffered from having no formal
description of its focus (i.e., parole). Without receiving as much of the
attention, sociocognitively oriented linguists were also working toward,
and beyond, a synthesis of both theories. Vygotsky has already been
mentioned (see also Volosinov, 1973) and Jakobson (Waugh, 1990), of
820 TESOL QUARTERLY

the Prague School, successfully managed to apply Saussure’s theory to
a functional or social context (Markova, 1992).
Zuengler and Miller rehash the well-trod 1990s debate in SLA
between the cognitivists (Gass, 1998; Gregg, 1993; Kasper, 1997; Long,
1997) and the socioculturalists (Block, 1996; Firth & Wagner, 1997;
Hall, 1995; Lantolf, 1996). Though debate often results in positive
exchange of ideas and many of the pro-SCT articles argued for assimi-
lation of cognitive and SCT perspectives, unfortunately, the positivist/
relativist or acquisition/use debates that Zuengler and Miller brought
up are Cartesian based, and rather than unify, they maintain
incommensurability.
A commensurable position is postpositivist (Laudan, 1996), socially
coconstructivist, and aware that unobservable cognitive processes alter
our understanding of science, rather than allowing science to dictate
whether cognition is observable or not. The language acquisition/use
distinction, along with most other misconceptions about language,
belongs to the first-generation cognitive revolution. No language
or rules, in the sense of morphological difficulty, have ever been
acquired or located within the brain. Rather, the transition from the
first to the second language involves cognitive processes of reconcep-
tualization through social interaction (i.e., second language develop-
ment, SLD).
RESOLVING INCOMMENSURABILITY
According to Zuengler and Miller, the first-generation cognitivists

are incommensurable with SCT because they exclude social interaction
as a necessary condition for language development. Second-generation
cognitive grammars, in contradistinction, readily acknowledge that
they need a firm sociocultural basis. Usage-based approaches to lan-
guage also provide an opportunity for cognitive linguists to engage
with the social-interaction nature of language (Croft & Cruse, 2004).
Therefore, within a second-generation cognitive grammar framework,
exclusion of social interaction no longer holds as a standard for
incommensurability.
For the SCT group, incommensurability relates back to the langue
(i.e., an abstract system) and parole division (Mitchell & Myles, 2002).
However, following Block (1996), either commensurability or incom-
mensurability can be developed simply by whether a theorist is aware
of, ignores, rejects, or assimilates the previous literature. If we choose
to interpret abstraction as a means to develop a rule-based system of
language then incommensurability sustains; if, on the other hand,
we choose to use the term in the sense that abstract morphological
THE FORUM 821

changes occur as a result of intersubjective convergence on spatiotem-
porally bounded events and metonymical grammaticalization processes
then commensurability is possible. Then abstraction occurs in both
langue and parole.
GENERATION GAPS
Both theories have evolved as they enter their third generation. The
first generation of the cognitive revolution belonged to Chomsky and
remained faithful to Cartesian incommensurability by proposing ideal-
ized states of learning. The second generation, by contrast, eradicated
incommensurability by shifting its focus to actual psychological analysis
of language and thought (Langacker, 1987). Thus, we see a fundamen-
tal paradigm shift from incommensurable, innate, rule-governed,
unobservable cognitive processes to commensurable, observable devel-
opmental processes based not on rules but on underlying cognitive
schemata or concepts (Tomasello, 2003), usage (Barlow & Kemmer,
2000), and grammaticalization processes (Heine, 1997; Hopper &
Traugott, 1993). Though these second-generation cognitive grammars
have often been referred to in the work of SLA researchers (see Ellis,
2003; Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999), neither they nor
Zuengler and Miller explicitly call for a shift in SLA from a first- to
second-generation cognitive paradigm. Until this shift occurs, rule-
governed Chomskian cognitive grammars set parallel to SCT perspectives
to language learning will meet with minimal success.
SCT introduced activity theory as it grew into its second generation
(Thorne & Lantolf, 2006), but as it enters its third, it is faced with
the challenge of presenting a formal description of language (Mitchell
& Myles, 2002). In other words, SCT has yet to present an analysis of
parole that is suitable for language instruction. Lantolf & Thorne
(2006) responded to this criticism by allying SCT with emergent gram-
mar (Hopper, 1998). Emergent grammar is related to parole in that it is
in a constant contextual process of emergence. Nonetheless, within
second-generation cognitive or construction grammars (Croft, 2001),
figurative language and idiomatization processes produce construc-
tions of analogical meaning-making, and thus they may offer a better
formal description of language use. Moreover, grammar is intersubjec-
tive: Production is continuously listener oriented in that encoding a
message anticipates decoding; conversely, comprehension is speaker
oriented, aiming at the reconstruction of what the speaker intends to
make known (Rommetveit, 1979). In fact, analysis of both (i.e., langue
and parole) in the form of the utterance is necessary to create a socio-
cognitive dialogic grammar, in which inner speech, ventriloquation,
822 TESOL QUARTERLY

social identities, and sociohistorical influences are taken into
account.
THE SOCIOCOGNITIVE ADVANTAGE
Adequate explanation of the advantages of a sociocognitive or com-

mensurable approach is beyond the scope of this brief response. It
can simply be pointed out that efforts toward one have been made in
SLA (Atkinson, 2002) and sociocognitively oriented SLA research has
been conducted (Anton & DiCamilla, 1998; De Guerrero & Villamil,
1994; Hill, 2006; Ohta, 2001). First language development theories
have also developed a sociocognitive perspective (see MacWhinney,
1999; Rommetveit, 1992; Tomasello, 2003).
Along with a first- to second-generation paradigm shift and a dia-
logic grammar, the sociocognitive advantage to SLA is that it focuses
on how so-called unobservable cognitive processes reveal themselves in
social interaction (Harre & Gillett, 1994; Swain & Lapkin, 1998). The
object of study then becomes the concept, which develops through
social interaction to arrive at language. In this way, correct develop-
mental processes are initiated (e.g., meaning-to-form constructions not
form-to-meaning). Within SLA, this entails a shift away from morpho-
logical difficulty as the measure for sequences and rates of acquisition
toward conceptualization difficulty (i.e., development).
CONCLUSION
Zuengler and Miller might argue that the cognitive perspective will
continue to dominate its parallel SCT world, though it nevertheless
assimilates factors from SCT and its first generation now conflicts with
its second-generation offspring. Nevertheless, this has not deterred the
efforts of dialectic-synthesis-minded theorists seeking to develop a bet-
ter world over and beyond both. To illustrate, the University of
Auckland is hosting a conference next year titled “Sociocognitive
Aspects to Second Language Learning.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Suresh Canagarajah for including a sociocognitive perspective in the pages of
TESOL Quarterly, and Clifford Gibson and Roberto Rabbini for providing suggestions
on previous drafts.
THE FORUM 823

THE AUTHOR
Kent Hill recently completed his doctoral thesis titled Sociocognitive Metaphorm. He
currently teaches English at Seigakuin University in Saitama, Japan.
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Volosinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language. New York: Seminar
Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Watson-Gegeo, K. A. (2004). Mind, language, and epistemology: Toward a language
socialization paradigm for SLA. The Modern Language Journal, 88, 331–350.
THE FORUM 825

Waugh, L. R. (Ed.). (1990). On language: Roman Jakobson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Wertsch, J. (1998). Mind as action. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford, England: Blackwell
Publishers.
Zuengler, J., & Miller, E. R. (2006). Cognitive and sociocultural perspectives: Two
parallel SLA worlds? TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 35–58.
826 TESOL QUARTERLY

The Authors Reply
JANE ZUENGLER
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
ELIZABETH R. MILLER
University of North Carolina–Charlotte
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
In his reply to our article, Kent Hill argues for developing a socio-
cognitive theory in SLA by “correcting” the “false mind/body distinc-
tion” that began, he writes, as far back as Descartes and which he says
has been responsible for separate conceptions of the cognitive and the
sociocultural. In discussing the need for commensurability between
sociocultural and cognitive, and explaining how the two might be
brought together conceptually, Hill’s is not (contrary to what he
claims) “a response to Zuengler and Miller.” The primary purpose of
our article was to identify and discuss what we considered several
major developments in SLA in the past 15 years. We were not setting
out to address what might or should be happening in SLA in the
future. It therefore seems misguided to criticize us for not “explicitly
call[ing] for a shift in SLA from a first- to second-generation cognitive
paradigm” (p. 822), or to assert that we “might argue that the cogni-
tive perspective will continue to dominate its parallel SCT world”
(p. 823; in our article, we do not predict the future with regard to socio-
cultural versus cognitive paradigms). Hill’s article is more accurately
read—and judged—as a stand-alone piece rather than a response to
our article. In light of this, we add a point below that the reader
should interpret as a response to Hill, but not as a critique of his
article as a direct response to our article’s argument.
826 TESOL QUARTERLY

Hill argues that commensurability between sociocultural and cogni-
tive perspectives can be found within a “sociocognitive approach.” It
seems that Hill is arguing for one particular kind of approach (which
he labels SCT), which is primarily a Vygotskian approach to SLA. As
we noted in our article, we recognize that Vygotskian research is com-
monly referred to as sociocultural theory; however, our use of sociocultural
perspectives was meant to reference a broader and more interdiscipli-
nary range of approaches to learning that “foreground the social and
cultural contexts of learning” (Zuengler & Miller, 2006, p. 37). Even
with this emphasis, we recognize that sociocultural perspectives do not
dismiss cognitive processes as irrelevant to language learning. In addi-
tion to Vygotskian research in SLA, like the sociocognitive perspective
advocated by Hill, which has emphasized the socially constructed
nature of cognitive development and the inseparability of cognitive
and social processes (see, e.g., Lantolf, 2000), other perspectives such
as language socialization (LS) have been recognized as inclusive of the
cognitive. In promoting LS research for SLA, Watson-Gegeo (2004)
argues that LS is “embracive of and consistent with the new research”
which positions cultural and sociopolitical processes as fundamental to
cognitive development (p. 332). This integrative approach in some of
the sociocultural research in SLA supports our contention that the
ongoing divide in SLA should not be seen as primarily between the
cognitivists and the socioculturalists, but more accurately as a deeper
divide in ontological positions, that is, of relativism versus positivism.
(Or postpositivism. Unlike Hill, we follow Guba & Lincoln, 1998,
in considering positivism and postpositivism as not fundamentally
different.)
THE AUTHORS
Jane Zuengler is a professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin–
Madison, United States. Her research and teaching interests include second language
acquisition and use, microanalytical discourse analysis, and critical and poststructural
perspectives on language, pedagogy, and ideology.
Elizabeth R. Miller is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University
of North Carolina–Charlotte, United States. She uses ethnographic and discourse
analytic methods in her reserach and focuses on critical approaches to second lan-
guage learning, pedagogy, and language ideologies.
REFERENCES
Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1998). Competing paradigms in qualitative research. In
N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.). The landscape of qualitative research: Theories
and issues (pp. 195–220). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
THE FORUM 827

Lantolf, J. P. (Ed.). (2000). Sociocultural theory and second language learning. Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press.
Watson-Gegeo, K. A. (2004). Mind, language, and epistemology: Toward a language
socialization paradigm for SLA. The Modern Language Journal, 88, 331–350.
Zuengler, J., & Miller, E. R. (2006). Cognitive and sociocultural perspectives: Two
parallel SLA worlds? TESOL Quarterly, 40, 35–58.
828 TESOL QUARTERLY

Comments on R. Ellis’s “Current Issues
in the Teaching of Grammar:
An SLA Perspective”
A Reader Responds
RON SHEEN
University of Quebec in Trois Rivieres
Trois Rivieres, Quebec, Canada
In the following response to Ellis (2006), I provide a summary of cru-

cial features of his arguments followed by critiques.
1. Evidence from immersion programmes demonstrates that learners can

acquire a substantial amount of grammar incidentally without instruc-
tion, though what is acquired is agrammatical. Consequently, learners
need no grammar instruction during their first years of learning.
Critique
First, findings on immersion programmes entailing students’ total

school time exposure to the second language (L2), cannot legitimately
be extrapolated to ordinary classrooms with but 2 or 3 hours of expo-
sure a week. Further, even were such extrapolation justified, Ellis would
have to account for the endemic fossilization evident in the findings
on immersion programmes (Hammerley, 1989; Spilka, 1976) which he
fails to address.
828 TESOL QUARTERLY

Second, had Ellis appealed to relevant research on incidental learn-
ing in ordinary classrooms, he would have to account for the precious
little incidental learning acquired during 6 years of incidental learning
in the New Brunswick Project (Lightbown et al., 2002) and the chronic
fossilization illustrated in Sheen’s (2005a) study of Quebec students
who begin producing at elementary level third-person questions with-
out auxiliaries (e.g., Where your wife live?) and are still doing so 8 years
later. These data were obtained in three ways: (a) Students were pro-
vided with a list of pieces of information about their interlocutor that
they were to obtain by asking questions such as “Where do your chil-
dren live?”; (b) and (c) instructing students in both English and
French to ask specific questions such as “Ask me why my wife plays
golf.” Since all three methods produced basically the same largely aux-
iliary-free questions, the results may be considered to accurately reflect
the students’ competence. As such, they cast serious doubt on the
validity of developmental sequences, at the very least in the domain
of interrogatives.
Third is the circularity in the assumption that all initial interlan-
guage is agrammatical. It is circular because it is based only on research
on incidental learning which, according to Ellis, is by nature agram-
matical. In order to justify the assumption, Ellis would have to com-
pare what is acquired by early instructed learners, which he singularly
fails to do. Had he done so, he would have discovered, for example,
that thanks to explicit instruction, 10-year old beginners in Quebec
were able to produce accurately complex questions in communicative
situations and were still able to do so in posttests 3 months later
(Sheen 2005b). Early interlanguage is, therefore, not necessarily agram-
matical (see also Naiman et al., 1978; Obler, 1989).
2. Both because of this agrammaticality and the fact that a substantial

amount of grammar cannot be acquired incidentally, learners later need
explicit grammar instruction that must necessarily exploit a wide range
of teaching strategies involving both inductive and deductive approaches
compatible with acquisitional processes.
Critique
This conclusion creates a serious problem because of the endemic

fossilization discussed earlier. As a result, Ellis’s proposal implies the fol-
lowing undesirable learning programme. After the first period of learn-
ing (unspecified by Ellis), during which learners engage in task-based
interaction (for discussion of the impoverished quality of such inte-
raction, see Seedhouse, 1999) the learners speak only agrammatically.
THE FORUM 829

Subsequently, teachers are supposed to teach grammar with a concern
for accuracy. So what are teachers then supposed to do about the agram-
maticality? Are they supposed to ignore it? Surely not. But if they are
supposed to correct it, this surely raises the following question. Is it fair
to both students and teachers to advocate a period of agrammatical
learning only to advocate a later period when teachers must correct what
students have learned incorrectly, and which has become fossilized?
No one fully aware of the practicalities of the classroom and the prob-
lems of fossilization would advocate such an unrealistic teaching
programme.
A secondary issue is related to the so-called acquisitional pro-
cesses, which are defined in the context of a theoretical perception
of SLA that excludes traditional grammar teaching (TGT). However,
because there is overwhelming evidence in the literature to demon-
strate that countless numbers of successful learners owe their success
in part to TGT, no legitimate theory of SLA can exclude it from
consideration in spite of the contemporary SLA mind-set’s desire to
do so.
3. TGT is not one of the acceptable teaching options because, being

limited to presentation and practice and therefore too narrow in scope, it
does not enable learners to acquire an implicit command of grammar.
Critique
One of the problems here derives from Ellis’s inaccurate charac-

terization of TGT. Ellis (2006) argues that it essentially entails “pre-
sentation” and “practice” with Ur (1996) being cited as an example
(p. 84). However, just as Swan and Walter (this issue, 2006) reveal
Ellis’s gross misrepresentation of their work, the fact that only two of
the twenty or so chapters in Ur (1996) are specifically devoted to
these presentation and practice provokes serious reservations concern-
ing Ellis’s awareness of the content of these two volumes. More impor-
tant, however, is Ellis’s fundamental misunderstanding of the nature
of TGT. Being nondoctrinaire in nature, it proscribes nothing and as
such is the ultimate in enlightened eclecticism. Thus, though presen-
tation and practice are essential components, it also embraces any
teaching and learning techniques which the cumulative experience of
thousands of teachers using TGT have contributed to its repertoire—
so well exemplified in Ur (1996). Thus, for example, there is no rea-
son why one might not integrate therein techniques such as
problem-solving, appealing to inductive processes, and processing
instruction (VanPatten, 2004) which has been demonstrated (along
830 TESOL QUARTERLY

with output practice) to be a fundamental part of the process of
transforming explicit knowledge into the ability to use that knowledge
communicatively.
A further issue is related to Ellis’s claim that implicit knowledge of
grammar is needed for fluent and accurate communication. There is,
however, simply no empirical evidence to support this claim, possibly
indicated by Ellis’s failure to cite supportive research. Furthermore, as
his excellent article on the issue (Ellis, 2005) demonstrates, classifying
some knowledge or other as implicit does not imply an assumption
concerning how that knowledge was acquired. It only implies that the
knowledge is available for spontaneous use. Thousands of teachers of
foreign languages (myself included) have become fluent, accurate, and
spontaneous speakers of foreign languages thanks in part to TGT.
How, one wonders, does Ellis account for both this and the many
European applied linguists who speak English fluently, accurately, and
spontaneously—once again thanks to different forms of TGT still
offered in most European schools.
What is ironic in Ellis’s arguments is that in spite of his claim that
his arguments are informed by SLA findings, he provides no citation
of findings which support the proscription of TGT. More important,
he completely ignores substantial research which demonstrates that in
comparative studies some exponent of TGT has consistently proven to
be the most effective. (See Von Elek & Oskarsson, 1973 and Sheen,
2005b for a review of more recent studies, and Norris & Ortega, 2000,
for crucial omissions of such research.)
In this, Ellis is far from alone for since Long (1980) wrongly con-
cluded that the comparative studies of the 70s demonstrated no sig-
nificant advantage for TGT options, it has become received wisdom
in SLA to consider TGT as being beyond the pale, Doughty (2004)
being a particularly egregious example. However, such a position
can only be legitimately maintained if one ignores the arguments set
out in this brief article and the evidence available in the literature
and thus implicitly refuses to be accountable for the realities of the
classroom. This, indeed, is what has happened. The arguments
explored herein have been extant in the literature for decades (see,
e.g., Swan, 2005). Nevertheless, Ellis and others of the SLA mind-set
have simply ignored them. Why, one wonders, have they been allowed
to do so?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks Penny Ur, Alan Waters, and Michael Swan for providing invalu-
able feedback on previous drafts of this article.
THE FORUM 831

THE AUTHOR
Ron Sheen has been involved in language teaching and research for the past 50 years.
His interests include searching for empirically supported teaching options and
critiquing advocacies that are not supported by empirical demonstration of their
efficacy.
REFERENCES
Doughty, C. J. (2004). Effects of instruction on second language learning: A critique
of instructed SLA research. In B. VanPatten, J. Williams, S. Rott, & M. Overstreet
(Eds.), Form-meaning connections in second language acquisition (pp. 181–202).
London: Erlbaum.
Ellis, R. (2005). Measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of a second language: A
psychometric study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27, 141–172.
Ellis, R. (2006). Current issues in the teaching of grammar: An SLA perspective.
Hammerley, H. (1989). French immersion: Myths and reality. Calgary, Alberta, Canada:
Detselig.
Lightbown, M. P., Halter, H. R., White, J. L., & Horst, M. (2002). Comprehension-
based learning: The limits of “do it yourself.” Canadian Modern Language Review,
58, 427–464.
Long, M. H. (1980). “Inside the black box”: Methodological issues in classroom
research on language learning. Language Learning, 1, 1–42.
Naiman, N., Frohlich, M., Stern, H., & Todesco, A. (1978). The good language learner
(Research in Education Series No. 7). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education.
Norris, J. M., & Ortega, L. (2000). Effectiveness of L2 instruction: A research synthesis
and quantitative meta-analysis. Language Learning, 50, 417–528.
Obler, L. (1989, February). Talented and untalented L2 acquisition. Paper presented at
the Second Language Research Forum, Los Angeles, CA.
Seedhouse, P. (1999). Task-based interaction. English Language Teaching Journal,
53(3), 149–156.
Sheen, R. (2005a). Developmental sequences under the microscope. In A. Pulverness
(Ed.), IATEFL 2004: Liverpool Conference Selections (pp. 14–17). Canterbury, England:
International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language.
Sheen, R. (2005b). Focus on FormS as a means of improving accurate oral produc-
tion. In A. Housen & M. Picard (Eds.), Investigations in instructed second language
learning (pp. 271–310). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Spilka, I. (1976). Assessment of second language performance in immersion pro-
grams. Canadian Modern Language Review, 32, 543–561.
Swan, M. (2005). Legislating by hypothesis: The case of task-based instruction. Applied
Swan, M., & Walter, C. (2006). Readers respond. Teach the whole of the grammar.
Ur, P. (1996). A course in language teaching. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
VanPatten, B. (2004). Processing instruction: An update. Language Learning, 54,
755–803.
Von Elek, T., & Oskarsson, M. (1973). Teaching foreign language grammar to adults:
A comparative study. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell.
832 TESOL QUARTERLY

The Author Replies
A Balanced Perspective: Replying to Sheen
ROD ELLIS
University of Auckland
New Zealand
My article was intended to provide a balanced account of a number of

key issues relating to the teaching of grammar that have been and still are
controversial. Indeed, the original title of this article was “Controversies
in Grammar Teaching.” In the opening paragraph of the article, I specifi-
cally stated that my aim was to problematize issues and thereby provide a
counterweight to the advocacy of proposals originating from some quar-
ters of SLA that I saw as quite limited. In addressing each issue, I endeav-
oured to provide alternative positions, often admitting that no definitive
answer was yet available. I must admit, then, to some disappointment
when confronted with yet another response from Ron Sheen, which
extracts from my article those statements that he, from his rather narrow
perspective, objects to, without any acknowledgement of the point-coun-
terpoint of my own presentation of the issues.
In his response Sheen summarises what he considers the “crucial
features” of my arguments (although exactly why they are deemed “cru-
cial” remains unstated). But the points he summarises do not corre-
spond neatly to the issues I discuss. His points relate to (1) immersion
programmes, (2) explicit grammar teaching, and (3) traditional gram-
mar teaching. Only one of these—his point (2)—corresponds to one
of my stated issues (“Is there any value in teaching explicit knowledge?”;
see Ellis, 2006, pp. 95–98). Thus, there is only a very weak correspon-
dence between his summaries and my article. Am I being overly opti-
mistic in thinking that he finds nothing to object to in my treatment
of the issues he does not address in his response? Probably.
Sheen’s first point concerns when we should teach grammar, spe-
cifically whether the teaching of grammar should start at the begin-
ning stage or later on, after learners have acquired some grammar
naturalistically (e.g., through some form of meaning-centred instruction
such as immersion education). Sheen claims that I argue that “learners
need no grammar instruction during the first years of learning.” But
this is not, in fact, how I addressed this issue. I took care to present
the arguments for both starting grammar teaching early and later, citing
a number of arguments in support of both positions. I do then admit
that in my previous publications (e.g., Ellis, 2002) I have favoured a
THE FORUM 833

later start but conclude: “However, it is possible that such an approach
can be usefully complemented by one that draws beginners’ attention
to come useful grammatical features.” (p. 91). In short, Sheen’s sum-
mary is hardly an accurate account of what I said in the article.
In his critique of my preferred position, Sheen also seems to miss
that I do acknowledge that meaning-centred programmes (such as
immersion) fail to achieve complete accuracy and that consequently,
I do see a clear need for teaching grammar. The real issue here is
whether a programme that focuses on fluency first and accuracy later
(as I tend to think is desirable in many teaching contexts, including
those involving teaching the L2 as a foreign language) will have more
to recommend it (if the goal is the students’ ability to communicate)
than a programme that starts with accuracy and caters to fluency later,
or, even perhaps, one that attempts both. There is nothing in Sheen’s
arguments or in the studies he cites that speaks to this crucial issue.1
What we do know, however, is that immersion programmes can achieve
high levels of fluency and confidence in the use of the L2 while also
enabling students to acquire a considerable amount of grammar
(Genesee, 1987)—points that Sheen chooses to ignore.
Sheen’s second criticism addresses the arguments relating to the
teaching of explicit L2 knowledge. Again, I find that his summary does
not correspond to my treatment of this issue. In the section dealing
with this issue I address three central questions. The first is “Is explicit
knowledge of any value in itself?” I present research that suggests that
it is. Sheen does not comment on this. The second question is “Is
explicit knowledge of value in facilitating the development of implicit
knowledge?” I then present three different “interface” positions and
recognize that it is difficult to decide between them at this point. But
Sheen does not comment on these, either. The final question I con-
sider is “Is explicit knowledge best taught deductively or inductively?”
I then summarise research suggesting that the answer may depend on
the nature of the target structure being taught (i.e., simple structures
are best taught deductively but complex structures may fare better with
inductive teaching). Again, Sheen makes no comment on this issue.
Instead, Sheen raises an issue that I do not mention at all in this sec-
tion—whether explicit instruction should be delayed to a later stage
of acquisition. This is an inference from his reading of the earlier
1
One of these studies that Sheen cites (Sheen, 2005) consists of a two page summary of a
study that to the best of my knowledge has not been published elsewhere. Such a study, as
reported, cannot be taken as evidence of anything as it is impossible to judge its reliability
and validity.
834 TESOL QUARTERLY

section where I addressed whether grammar should be introduced at
the beginning or later in a course—the point I addressed in the previ-
ous paragraph.
Sheen’s own position (if I have summarized him correctly) seems
to be that we need to teach grammar from the start because otherwise
learners will fossilize. This is not an issue I considered at all. In fact,
the words fossilize or fossilization do not appear anywhere in my article.
Presumably Sheen feels I should have addressed this issue. But there
is a good reason why I did not. The construct of fossilization is a very
difficult one to operationalize (Long 2003) and in the eyes of some
SLA researchers has never been adequately demonstrated and may
not in fact exist. If by “fossilization” Sheen really means stabilization
(a construct that can be operationalized and that Long does recog-
nize), then, in fact, Sheen’s fears may be unfounded because a stabi-
lized grammar (i.e., a grammar that is lacking in grammatical accuracy
and has temporarily ceased to develop) can always be destabilized.
Personally, I doubt very much if grammar teaching starting early can
prevent stabilization occurring at some point in the future (and Sheen
offers no evidence to show that it can). However, it seems not unrea-
sonable to assume that grammar teaching provided during a period
of stabilization may prompt destabilization and thus assist further
learning.
Sheen’s final critique relates to his claim that I argue that tradi-
tional grammar teaching is not an acceptable option because it does
not enable learners to acquire implicit knowledge. I fail to find where
in the article I have made this assertion, nor, in fact, does it corre-
spond to my belief.
Sheen takes exception to how I characterize traditional grammar
teaching as presentation and practice and my citing of Ur (1996) as
an example.2 He then goes on to suggest that the term traditional lan-
guage teaching should encompass a range of techniques such as prob-
lem-solving and input processing. But if the meaning of the term is
to be extended in this way, it will become so all embracing as to
become vacuous. VanPatten (2004), whom he cites in support of his
own view of what traditional language teaching consists of, has quite
explicitly contrasted traditional instruction with input processing, view-
ing them as distinct in terms of both the theory that informs them
and their practice.
2
He accuses me of misrepresenting Ur (1996) on the ground that only two of Ur’s twenty or
so chapters refer to presentation and practice, demonstrating that I misrepresent her work
and that I may not be familiar with her book. But in the case of my article the relevant chap-
ters in Ur were her chapters on grammar and these are precisely the chapters that refer to
presentation and practice. Why would I need to refer to her other chapters, which deal with
various other aspects of language pedagogy, when my topic is grammar?
THE FORUM 835

Sheen appears to believe that I rejected traditional grammar instruc-
tion in my article. But this is simply not the case. Nor do I argue that
it is incapable of developing implicit knowledge. In line with the whole
purpose of my article, I pointed out that there is considerable theoreti-
cal disagreement regarding whether focus on forms (i.e., traditional
grammar instruction) or focus on form (i.e., directing learners attention
to form in the context of meaning-focussed activity) is more effective
in developing implicit knowledge. I referenced DeKeyser’s (1998)
work, which stakes out a strong case for a focus on forms approach
on the grounds of skill-building theory. Sheen talks about my proscrip-
tion of traditional grammar teaching, but I do not proscribe it. I sim-
ply point to some theoretical arguments that speak against it alongside
those that speak for it.
Finally, I note that Sheen appears to have identified an “SLA mind-
set,” which he finds objectionable. But if he had read this article care-
fully (and he clearly has not) he would have seen that there is no such
single SLA mind-set. SLA is replete with different theories and differ-
ent positions regarding all the issues relating to the teaching of gram-
mar I examined in my article. My purpose was to air these differences.
Only in the conclusion do I advance my own personal views, making
it clear they are personal and that they are all open to challenge.
Sheen has made something of a profession “responding” to articles
by SLA researchers. It would help, though, if he could recognize that
these researchers do not belong to a single tribe. It would help even
more if he could read the articles he critiques with more care.
THE AUTHOR
Rod Ellis is a professor in the Department of Applied Language Studies and
Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has published widely in
the field of SLA. His latest books are Analyzing Language Learning and Planning and
Task Performance in a Second Language.
REFERENCES
Ellis, R. (2002). The place of grammar instruction in the second/foreign language
curriculum. In E. Hinkel & S. Fotos (Eds.) New perspectives on grammar teaching in
second language classrooms (pp. 17–34). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
DeKeyser, R. (1998). Beyond focus on form: Cognitive perspectives on learning and
practicing second language grammar. In C. Doughty & J. Williams (Eds.) pp.
42–63. Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. Cambridge, England:
Genesee, F. (1987). Learning through two languages. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
836 TESOL QUARTERLY

Long, M. (2003). Stabilization and fossilization in interlanguage development. In C.
Doughty & M. Long (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 487–535).
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Sheen, R. (2005) Developmental sequences under the microscope. In A. Pulverness
(Ed.), IATEFL 2004: Liverpool Conference Selections (pp. 14–17). Canterbury, England:
International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language.
Ur, P. (1996). A course in language teaching. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
VanPatten, B. (2004). Processing instruction: An update. Language Learning, 54,
755–803.
THE FORUM 837

Readers Respond
“Teach the Whole of the Grammar”
MICHAEL SWAN
University of Surrey
Surrey, England
CATHERINE WALTER
University of London
London, England
In his recent TESOL Quarterly article on the teaching of grammar

(Ellis, 2006), Rod Ellis identifies two polar positions with regard to the
teaching of grammar: a “minimalist” position (p. 87), exemplified by
Krashen, and a “comprehensive” position, “teach the whole of the
grammar of the target language” (pp. 87–88). After stating that many
course book authors and writers of grammar practice materials adopt
the comprehensive position—he cites us (Swan & Walter, 1990) and
Murphy (1994)—Ellis helpfully points out that such a position is
“unwarranted” because time is limited and “some selection is needed”
(p. 88).
The grammar component in our New Cambridge English Course (Swan
& Walter, 1990) is one of eight interwoven syllabus strands. Explanations
of new grammar points take up at a rough estimate 5 percent of the
material—perhaps 50 pages over the four-level course. Ambitious we
may be, but it had not occurred to us that it might be possible to cover
the whole grammar of English in this amount of space. In fact, we deal
necessarily with no more than a small, carefully chosen subgroup of
THE FORUM 837

the grammatical topics discussed in a major reference grammar such
as Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik (1985) or Huddleston and
Pullum (2002), and these in turn, of course, only provide a partial
survey of the whole grammar of English. Had Ellis found the time to
look in any detail at our course, to read the Teacher’s Book introduc-
tions, or to skim our other published writings on pedagogic grammar,
he would have seen that, like most professional course writers, we are
centrally concerned to select and prioritise in this and all other syllabus
areas. Furthermore, The New Cambridge English Course, in contrast with
many language courses, is well known for its refusal to give a dominant
role to the grammar component.
Ellis’s “comprehensive” characterisation is even more bizarre in the
case of Murphy (1994). This well-known grammar practice book covers
only those topics generally considered most relevant to elementary and
intermediate learners—a tiny sample of the whole of English grammar.
Furthermore, as a resource book, it is intended to be drawn on selec-
tively in accordance with the specific needs of individual learners, not
to be studied from cover to cover. The author no more sets out to
teach all of the topics he deals with than lexicographers set out to
teach all of the words in a dictionary or cartographers expect travellers
to visit all the places on their maps.
There is still, all too often, an unfortunate divide in our profession
between academics and practitioners. Our best chance of bridging it
is for those on each side to study, respect, and learn from the work
of their colleagues across the gulf. Ellis’s dismissive and inaccurate
portrayal of the principles and practice of pedagogic grammarians is
scarcely supportive of this enterprise.
THE AUTHORS
Michael Swan is a writer specializing in English language teaching and reference
materials. His latest book, Grammar, is published in the Oxford Introductions to
Language Study series. He is a visiting professor at St. Mary’s College, University of
Surrey, England.
Catherine Walter lectures in TESOL and carries out research into second language
learning and teaching at the Institute of Education, University of London, England.
She also writes English language teaching materials, most recently The Good Grammar
Book with Michael Swan.
REFERENCES
838 TESOL QUARTERLY

Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language.
Cambridge, England: University of Cambridge Press.
Murphy, R. (1994). English grammar in use (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of
the English language. Harlow, England: Longman.
Swan, M., & Walter, C. (1990). The new Cambridge English course. Cambridge, England:
THE FORUM 839

The Author Replies
ROD ELLIS
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
I consider both Swan and Walter’s (1990) New Cambridge English Course
and Murphy’s grammar practice book comprehensive treatments of gram-
mar in the sense that both cover the standard range of grammar points
that figure in the canon of English structures found in texts such as these
(see Ellis, 2006, p. 88, note 2). My reference to “comprehensive” stood in
contrast to “selective” which I defined carefully in terms of (1) forms that
differ from the learners’ first language, (2) marked as opposed to
unmarked forms, and (3) forms that research has shown to cause learning
difficulty (pp. 87–89). Did Swan and Walter or Murphy “select” in these
ways? I think not.
Swan and Walter also appear to position me as an “academic” while
they presumably wish to position themselves as “practitioners.” I would
point out that I function as a practitioner (at least in the sense that
I write textbooks like Swan and Walter) as well as an academic, and,
also, that Swan functions as an academic (as evidenced by his publish-
ing in academic journals like Applied Linguistics) as well as a practitio-
ner (textbook writer). Would it not be better to see both of us as
examples of professionals who actually try (but admittedly do not
always succeed) in crossing the “unfortunate divide” that Swan and
Walter refer to?
Finally, I am accused of a “dismissive and inaccurate portrayal of
the principles and practice of pedagogic grammarians.” But where in
my article did I ever do this? In fact, I do the opposite; I acknowledge
the strengths of one well-known pedagogic grammar—Celce-Murcia
and Larsen-Freeman’s (1999) Grammar Book.
THE FORUM 839

THE AUTHOR
Rod Ellis is a professor in the Department of Applied Language Studies and
Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has published widely in
the field of SLA. His latest books are Analyzing Language Learning and Planning and
Task Performance in a Second Language.
REFERENCES
Celce-Murcia, M., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (1999). The grammar book (2nd ed.). Boston:
Heinle & Heinle.
Swan, M., & Walter, C. (1990). The new Cambridge English course. Cambridge, England:
840 TESOL QUARTERLY

BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES
TESOL Quarterly invites readers to submit short reports and updates on their work.
These summaries may address any areas of interest to Quarterly readers.
Edited by JOHN FLOWERDEW

City University of Hong Kong
JOHN LEVIS
Iowa State University
Paralinguistic Focus on Form

MATTHEW DAVIES
British Council
Milan, Italy
䊏 Focus on form (FonF) is the result of attempts to find a middle-way

between form-focussed and meaning-focussed instruction, both of
which have been deemed by many to be insufficient at promoting
acceptable language acquisition. Krashen (1981) accepted that purely
form-focussed instruction could help learning a language, but main-
tained that it could have no effect on acquiring it and therefore advo-
cated purely meaning-focussed instruction. However, after researching
immersion classrooms in Canada (seemingly the ideal meaning-
focussed environment), Lyster (1987) noted that “students attain high
levels of functional competence in their L2, yet continue to experience
persistent morphological and syntactic difficulties” (cited in Spada,
1997, p. 76); as most EFL teachers would say, students have a high
level of fluency but little accuracy.
In an attempt to combine the best of both worlds, Long (1991) pro-
posed a FonF, which “overtly draws students’ attention to linguistic ele-
ments as they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on
meaning or communication” (pp. 45–46). He maintained that this type
of FonF would be completely student centred because “which forms are
targeted and when, is determined by the learner’s developing language
system, not by a predetermined external linguistic description” (Long,
1997). FonF in this sense has two purposes, then: to promote noticing
on the part of the learner and to encourage pushed output as in the
following example taken from the data collected for this study.

841
S8: … but now he like watching documentary.
T3: Ah, ok. He like watching?
S8: He like watching/
T3: /He like?
S8: He like … he likes/
T3: Ok, fine.
In this example, Student 8 (S8) has produced a common error by

omitting the s from the third-person singular verb. Teacher 3 (T3)
simply repeats the erroneous utterance with a rising intonation and
although it has to be done twice, it results in S8 noticing the error
and then producing an acceptable utterance. It is interesting that S8
clearly knew this semantic rule of the language but was only able to
produce it after T3’s FonF.
It is precisely this type of error, often overlooked in a purely mean-
ing-focussed approach, that is the focus of the current study. It is
also the type of error that, as Lyster pointed out, epitomises the
language of learners taught in a purely meaning-focussed environ-
ment. It is important to point out that noticing and pushed output
are still only hypothesised to aid acquisition, although there are a
number of studies currently underway working on this particular
question.
OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS
There are a number of definitions of FonF in common use and

some differ considerably. This study uses the definition provided by
Ellis, Basturkmen, & Loewen (2001b), which is a more specific version
of Long’s (1991) original definition. According to Ellis, Baskturkmen,
& Loewen, focus on form occurs in
discourse that is predominantly meaning centred

is observable (i.e., occurs interactionally)
is incidental (i.e., is not preplanned)
is transitory (i.e., occasional so as not to interfere too much with meaning)
is extensive (i.e., several different forms may be attended to in the con-
text of a single lesson)
(Ellis et al., 2001b, pp. 411–412).
It is important to note that some previous researchers have used the

term focus on form to describe planned focus on form. This usage differs
842 TESOL QUARTERLY

from the definition used in this research in that it is not incidental
and is intensive rather than extensive because it focusses on the same
form repeatedly instead of many different forms as they arise during
the course of a single lesson.
The result of a FonF episode can be classified as either uptake or
topic continuation, that is, when a learner notices an error and pro-
duces pushed output of an acceptable form or when a learner fails to
notice and continues with the topic (Lyster & Ranta, 1997). Two other
terms used in this study refer to a teacher’s intentions at the time they
use a FonF technique: an intention to focus on form and an intention
to focus on meaning. The intention to focus on form refers to when
teachers want learners to notice and push their output (i.e., when
teachers intend the episode to result in uptake), and the intention to
focus on meaning refers to when teachers want to continue the flow
of communication (i.e., when teachers intend the episode to result in
topic continuation). The reasons why teachers may sometimes want to
focus on meaning are the same as when they use noncorrective feed-
back or reformulations in class. Therefore, a teacher intending to
focus on meaning could still use what appeared to be a FonF tech-
nique but their desired result of the episode would be topic
continuation.
TYPES OF FonF TECHNIQUES
Lyster and Ranta (1997) identified six different FonF techniques

used by teachers participating in their study. These were divided into
two groups, implicit and explicit. These techniques form a central part
of this study and so they are outlined below with a possible example
of each following the learner error I go to the cinema yesterday.
Implicit
Recast: The teacher reformulates part or all of the student’s errone-

ous utterance but maintains the original meaning.
Oh, you went to the cinema yesterday.
Clarification request: The teacher indicates that he or she does not
understand part or all of the student’s utterance, which may be a
result of genuine incomprehension or simply an act on the part of
the teacher intended to push the learner’s output.
Do you mean yesterday or everyday?
BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES 843

Explicit
Explicit correction: The teacher provides the correct form along with
a discourse marker explicitly indicating the presence of an error in
the student’s previous utterance.
No, you should say, “I went to the cinema yesterday.”
Metalinguistic feedback (FB): The teacher tries to elicit the correct form
from the student by giving a clue in the form of either grammatical
metalanguage or a word definition in the case of a lexical error.
In the past
Elicitation: The teacher asks the learner to reformulate his or her utter-
ance, uses a question to elicit the correct form or repeats the learner’s
utterance pausing strategically at the point where the error was origi-
nally made.
Yesterday, I …
Repetition: The teacher repeats the student’s erroneous utterance but
normally highlights the error with changes in intonation and extra
stress.
I go to the cinema yesterday?
The differing characteristics of implicit and explicit FonF have been
well established. The advantage of explicit FonF is the higher level of
noticing (Lyster & Ranta, 1997), but it has a low level of occurrence
in EFL classes because of teachers’ concern for breaking the flow of
communication (Seedhouse, 1997). The reverse can be said for implicit
FonF, which is unobtrusive, contextualised, and contingent (Long,
2002) and therefore results in a high frequency of use but has a lower
level of noticing (Carroll & Swain, 1993).
The lower level of noticing of implicit FonF techniques (Lyster and
Ranta reported that only 31% of recasts in their data resulted in
uptake) has been attributed to its ambiguity. Lyster (1998) observed
that teachers use recasts
following ill-formed learner utterances in the same ways that they use non-
corrective repetition following well-formed learner utterances: ways that
kept learners’ attention focused on content primarily by providing confir-
mation or additional information related to the student’s message and, to a
lesser degree, by seeking confirmation or additional information. (p. 187)
In other words, although implicit FonF techniques like recasts can some-
times focus on form, they are also able, at times, to focus on meaning,
just as noncorrective feedback can. It may be possible that the teachers
844 TESOL QUARTERLY

in Lyster and Ranta’s study actually intended the other 69% of recasts
that resulted in topic continuation to do exactly that but because the
study did not investigate teacher intentions we cannot be sure.
If teachers are able to manipulate implicit FonF in this way (i.e.,
make it result in uptake or topic continuation, whichever they intend)
it may be because they are able to use it in conjunction with a more
explicit technique, one which Lyster and Ranta (1997), along with
many others, failed to identify—paralinguistic FonF.
Paralinguistic FonF
This term refers to times when a teacher uses body language to

draw learner’s attention to an error. For example, when facing the
erroneous utterance I go to the cinema yesterday, a teacher may simply
point over his or her shoulder to indicate the past without giving any
verbal feedback at all. This technique can be used in two ways: first,
by itself, referred to in this study as purely paralinguistic, and second,
in conjunction with other FonF techniques.
The relative absence of paralinguistic FonF in previous research is
almost certainly due to the near exclusive use of audio, not visual,
recording and analysis of data. Under these conditions, of course, a
purely paralinguistic FonF episode (when teachers use body language
without any additional verbal FonF) resulting in successful uptake
would sound exactly the same as a student self-correction with no
teacher initiated FonF occurring. In addition, other FonF techniques
used in conjunction with some kind of paralinguistic FonF would be
indistinguishable from those that were simply used alone. It is possible
that the 31% of recasts identified by Lyster and Ranta (1997) as result-
ing in uptake were accompanied by some nonverbal signal made
explicit by the teacher’s body language and that the other 69% of
recasts were used without such signals, perhaps because the teachers
were more interested in focusing on meaning and not form at those
points of the lesson but because of the lack of visual data, we cannot
be sure.
The research questions for this study, then, are as follows:
What is the distribution of purely paralinguistic FonF, other types of FonF,
and combinations of paralinguistic FonF with more implicit FonF in com-
municatively orientated classrooms?
What is the distribution of uptake following these techniques?
Do teachers use paralinguistic FonF in conjunction with implicit FonF
techniques to increase the chance of uptake by making them more
explicit?

METHOD
Description of Research Environment
The research was carried out over the second half of a 10-week term
in four different classes of Japanese adult learners in the British
Council teaching centre in Tokyo. The groups had a maximum class
size of 12 students and ranged in level from preintermediate to
advanced. These classes were chosen because they were aimed at
improving students’ speaking skills through predominantly fluency-
based activities, and unlike the general English classes available, they
did not have a predetermined grammatical syllabus.
All four teachers participating in the study had the Cambridge
Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults with at
least 4 years of postqualification experience. Two of the teachers were
also in the process of studying for a master’s degree in TEFL-related
subjects. All of the teachers were British and had undergone initial
teacher training programmes in the United Kingdom.
Research Process
The research process was in two main parts. To answer Research

Questions 1 and 2, communicatively orientated classroom data were
recorded and analysed. To answer Research Question 3, stimulated
recall was used with the participating teachers to elicit their intentions
when they used a FonF technique.
Part 1: Classroom Data
The data comprised 24 hours of classroom data equally divided

among four teachers were recorded both visually using a video camera
and audibly using a pin microphone attached to the teachers clothing.
After the data had been collected, it was analysed, and all FonF epi-
sodes were identified, transcribed, and categorised by using the dia-
gram in Figure 1.
Part 2: Stimulated Recall
Two of the teachers participated during this stage. Each was shown
the video recording of all the implicit FonF episodes they used in
the data and were then asked to indicate whether they had been
intending to focus on meaning or form at the point when they used
846 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 1
How Classroom Data Were Identified, Transcribed, and Categorized
a FonF technique. For each time the teachers reported to have been
focussing on meaning, they were asked to give a short qualitative
answer to the question “What would you have done if you had been
intending to focus on form instead?” These responses were then cat-
egorised in the same way as the FonF episodes from the classroom
data in Part 1. It was hoped that this more qualitative data would
triangulate the quantitative data obtained from the other stages of
the research process.

FIGURE 2
Research Hypotheses
Research Hypotheses
To establish whether any relationships concerning the use of para-

linguistic FonF in conjunction with other implicit FonF episodes found
in the data were significant, 2 statistical analysis was carried out using
the hypotheses shown in Figure 2. This shows the relationship between
the teacher’s intentions, their use or otherwise of paralinguistic FonF
in conjunction with implicit FonF, and the result of the episode.
FIGURE 3
Proportion of FonF Types Used by Each Teacher
848 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 4
Distribution of FonF Techniques Used by the Teachers
RESULTS
In total, 134 FonF episodes were identified in the data, approxi-

mately 1 every 10.75 minutes. This figure was far lower than Lyster
and Ranta (1997), who reported 1 every 1.6 minutes, and Ellis,
Basturkmen, and Loewen (2001a), who reported 1 every 3.23 minutes.
Although the total number of FonF episodes varied between teachers
(from 15–69 with the mean average being 36), the proportion of FonF
types used was fairly similar, as can be seen in Figure 3.
Though recast was by far the most commonly used technique, it
varied from 54% for T4 to 92% for T1, with the mean average being
64.2%. T4 was the only teacher to use all seven categories of FonF
techniques described, and T1 and T2 each used only three of the
different techniques.
Only T3 and T4 used purely paralinguistic FonF, resulting in only
four paralinguistic episodes not used in conjunction with any other
FonF technique. Figure 4 shows the total distribution of all FonF tech-
niques used by the teachers. The domination of recasts is clearly seen
and is similar to the results of Ellis et al. (2001a).
Figure 5 shows the percentage of each type of episode that resulted
in uptake. As expected, the two implicit FonF techniques, recasts and
clarification requests, resulted in the lowest level of uptake, only 50%
in the case of clarification requests. It is interesting that although

FIGURE 5
Percentage of Episodes Resulting in Uptake
purely paralinguistic FonF is relatively uncommon, it resulted in uptake

100% of the time, which makes it, along with metalingual FB, the
technique most likely to result in uptake.
We turn now to the implicit episodes. Figure 6 compares the number
of episodes used with and without paralinguistic FonF and the result
of the episodes, that is, uptake or topic continuation. As the figure
shows, when the episode was not used with any paralinguistic FonF, it
FIGURE 6
Use of Paralinguistic FonF Versus Episode Result
850 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 7
Results of Data Analysis Comparing Use of Paralinguistic FonF Versus Episode Result
was more likely to result in topic continuation than uptake, and the
reverse was true when the episode was used with paralinguistic FonF.
The indication of a strong relationship between these variables was
subjected to 2 analysis to establish significance. To reject the null
hypotheses, 2 needed to be greater than 3.84 at an level of 5% with
df = 1 for a two-tailed test. The analysis was carried out in accordance
with Yate’s correction for a 2 × 2 table and the results are shown in
Figure 7. As Figure 7 shows, the null hypothesis was rejected, meaning
that there was a significant relationship between the use of paralin-
guistic FonF and the result of implicit FonF episodes.
Figure 8 compares the teachers’ use of paralinguistic FonF with
their intentions at the time of the episode, that is, their intention to
focus on form or meaning. The figure shows that when the teachers
reported they had been focussing on form, they overwhelmingly
used paralinguistic FonF in conjunction with implicit techniques. In
contrast, when they reported they had been focussing on meaning,
they were more likely to have used no paralinguistic FonF, although
only marginally. 2 was again used to establish if this relationship was

FIGURE 8
Reported Teacher Intentions Versus Use of Paralinguistic FonF
significant with the same parameters as were used for the previous
analysis. These results can be seen in Figure 9. Again, the null
hypothesis was rejected, meaning that a significant relationship
existed between what the teachers were intending and their use or
otherwise of paralinguistic FonF in conjunction with implicit
techniques.
RESULTS FROM STIMULATED RECALL PHASE
This phase of the study involved the participating teachers watching

recordings of themselves using implicit FonF techniques, and for all
the times they reported to have been focussing on meaning they were
asked what they would have done if they had been focussing on form
instead. In 6 of the 12 responses, the teachers used the word gesture,
for example “[I would have] gestured the missing part” and “[I would
have] gestured where the stress was.” Four of the other responses
would be classified as explicit FonF techniques, for example, “[I would
have] asked for repetition,” and the remaining 2 would be classified
as clarification requests.
DISCUSSION
The most unexpected results from this study were the low occur-
rence of purely paralinguistic FonF episodes and the total number of
FonF episodes identified in the data. This result was far lower than
previous research has reported and may be explained by the different
852 TESOL QUARTERLY

FIGURE 9
Results of Data Analysis Comparing Teacher Intentions Versus Use of Paralinguistic FonF
research environments—the study by Ellis et al. (2001b) was carried

out in a multilingual class in Australia, but this study was carried out
in monolingual classes in Japan. However, similar results were found
with regard to the proportion of FonF episodes used by teachers, with
recasts being the most common and followed by the more explicit
techniques.
Similar results for uptake following each of these FonF techniques
was also found, but this study went further by analysing implicit tech-
niques used with and without paralinguistic FonF. It was found that
using or not using paralinguistic FonF had a significant affect on whether
the episode resulted in uptake or topic continuation. It was also found
that the intentions of the teacher significantly governed the using or
not using paralinguistic FonF and therefore, the episode result.
These results affect existing knowledge in this area in a number of
ways. They have provided a greater insight into recasts and would sug-
gest that the term recast is a misleading one because it covers two very
different FonF techniques. One is used with paralinguistic FonF, pre-
dominantly results in uptake, and is used when teachers intend to

focus on form, and the other is used without paralinguistic FonF, pre-
dominately results in topic continuation, and is used when teachers
intend to focus on meaning.
These results also suggest that recasts should not be viewed as a
relatively unsuccessful FonF technique because they result in uptake
less often than explicit techniques. Rather, they are very successful at
resulting in exactly what teachers intend them to. In other words,
although there are times when teachers intend recasts to result in
uptake, there are also times when they intend them to result in topic
continuation. Topic continuation should not necessarily be seen as an
unsuccessful result of a FonF episode for the same reason.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
This study highlights a number of issues that would be valuable

areas for future enquiry. The first addresses one of the weaknesses of
this research, namely the limitation of sample. A comparison between
and across cultures would provide valuable data with regard to how
the use of FonF varies under these different conditions and may shed
light on the difference between the frequency of FonF reported in this
study and in previous ones.
This study also suggests that teachers should play a more active role
in this type of research. Teachers’ intentions were a significant factor
in this investigation and the inclusion of teachers as stakeholders in
future research of this sort is desirable because they can provide a much
greater insight into how and why FonF is used. This insight would also
help bridge the gap between research and classroom practice as pointed
out by Borg (2003) and validate the role of the teacher as a knowing
agent making decisions in the classroom (Nunan, 1992).
Finally, experienced professional teachers like the ones who partici-
pated in this study, are often unaware of the skills they possess with
regard to this aspect of their teaching. By reflecting on their own use
of paralinguistic FonF, perhaps leading to action research, experienced
teachers can obtain a greater insight into their own teaching and class-
room behaviour. This result in itself is something that many teachers
may find interesting and useful, but it can also improve their teaching
by giving them a greater awareness of when they use paralinguistic
FonF in the classroom, how they achieve it, and why they do it.
THE AUTHOR
Matthew Davies has worked as a teacher of English and teacher trainer in the United
Kingdom, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.
854 TESOL QUARTERLY

REFERENCES
Borg, S. (2003). Research in the lives of TESOL professionals. TESOL Matters, 13(1),
1–5.
Carroll, S., & Swain, M. (1993). Explicit and implicit negative feedback. An empiri-
cal study of the learning of linguistic generalisations. Studies in Second Language
Acquisition, 15(3), 357–386.
Ellis, R., Basturkmen, H., & Loewen, S. (2001a). Learner uptake in communicative
ESL lessons. Language Learning, 51(2), 281–318.
Ellis, R., Basturkmen, H., & Loewen, S. (2001b). Pre-emptive focus on form in the
ESL classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 35, 407–432.
Krashen, S. (1981). Second language acquisition and second language learning. Oxford,
England: Pergamon.
Long, M. (1991). Focus on form: A design feature in language teaching methodology.
In K. de Bot, R. Ginsberg & C. Kramsch (Eds.), Foreign language research in cross-
cultural perspective (pp. 39–52). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Long, M. (1997). Focus on form in task-based language teaching. Retrieved February
14, 2001, from http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/foreignlang/conf/option3.
htm.
Long, M. (2002). Recasts in SLA: The story so far. In M. Long (Ed.), Problems in SLA.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Lyster, R. (1987). Speaking immersion. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 43,
701–717.
Lyster, R. (1998). Negotiation of form, recasts, and explicit correction in relation
to error types and learner repair in immersion classrooms. Language Learning,
48(suppl. 1), 183–218.
Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation
of form in communicative classrooms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19,
37–66.
Nunan, D. (1992). The teacher as decision maker. In J. Flowerdew, M. Brook &
S. Hsia (Eds.), Perspectives in second language teacher education. (pp. 135–165). Hong
Kong: City Polytechnic of Hong Kong.
Seedhouse, P. (1997). The case of the missing “no”: The relationship between peda-
gogy and interaction. Language Learning, 47(3), 547–583.
Spada, N. (1997). Form-focused instruction and second language acquisition:
A review of classroom and laboratory research. Language Teaching, 30(2), 73–87.

TEACHING ISSUES
TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language
teaching. For this issue, the editor focused on the theme of challenging times in
teacher education. She asked the authors to consider the following question: How
would you characterize English language teacher education under your challenging
circumstances?
Edited by BONNY NORTON

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Teacher Training and the English Language in Uganda
JULIET TEMBE
Islamic University in Uganda, Mbale, Uganda
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
䊏 Uganda, a landlocked republic in East Africa, achieved independ-

ence in 1962. Like its other sister states, Kenya and Tanzania, Uganda
was formerly colonised by the British. English, the official language, is
currently used in administration, courts of law, commerce and industry
and commands considerable respect and prestige. To be educated in
Uganda means being able to speak English.
The language education policy has been greatly influenced by early
missionary work. In an effort to spread Christianity, the missionaries
were compelled to establish literacy in a language in which the bible
and prayer books were translated, hence their interest in using the
local language for instruction. On the other hand, the colonial govern-
ment was anxious to train men and women who would work as clerks
in the colonial administration, hence the need to teach them English.
Apparently this trend occurred in many of the former colonial states
such as Nigeria, Ghana, and India (Iyamu & Aduwa, 2005).
The current language education policy states that relevant local lan-
guages will be the medium of instruction from Primary 1 (P1) to Primary
4 (P4), and English language will be used as a medium of instruction
from Primary 5 (P5) to Primary 8 (P8). In contrast, the policy empha-
sizes that in urban areas, due to the multiplicity of languages, the
medium of instruction will be English throughout the primary cycle. It
further states that the relevant local language will be taught as a subject
in primary schools, that is, in both rural and urban areas (Government

857
White Paper, 1992, p. 19). However, students may or may not offer this
local language for primary leaving examinations (PLE). The Uganda
National Examination Board (UNEB) is, nevertheless, to provide for
examination in all the five main Ugandan languages (Luo, Runyakitara,
Luganda, Ateso/Akarimojong, and Lugbara) in PLE for those who study
any of these languages as a subject for examination.
TEACHER TRAINING IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
It is important to note that, like most other sectors, Uganda’s educa-

tion system suffered substantially during the political upheaval between
1971 and 1985. Budgetary allocations to the education sector declined
from 3.4% to 1.4%. Textbooks, teachers’ guides, and other essential
instructional materials were virtually nonexistent in most schools. Teachers
were underpaid, undertrained or untrained, and demoralised; above all,
the management and planning of the education system was lacking at
all levels and the curriculum and the related assessment instruments
were obsolete. Thus teaching as a career, in many cases, did not attract
the best high school graduates, who preferred to go for more lucrative
careers such as law, medicine, or business. There was thus a severe short-
age of teachers during the 1980s, made acute by the departure of both
Ugandan and expatriate teachers during the 1970s and early 1980s
(Ssekamwa, 2000). Uganda has yet to recover from this shortfall, and
increasingly so in English language teaching. Inadequate reading materi-
als are often cited as a major cause of poor performance in English.
The newly launched Integrated English Syllabus was designed with
a view to addressing the deficiencies, which had become so apparent
in the teaching of the subject. However, adopting a communicative
approach places a greater demand on the teacher in terms of finding
resources and being innovative. In the ESL situation in which English
is taught in Uganda, the teacher is the only model, albeit, in some
cases, a poor one. Very few teachers have degrees in English. This situ-
ation has led to the few qualified ones having to teach in two or three
schools, which in itself causes inefficiency. Such teachers cannot have
adequate preparation as well as time to attend to the learners’ needs.
ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHER TRAINING IN

UGANDA TODAY
Uganda has basically two types of training institutions for English
language teachers, depending on the level at which one joins the
training (Odaet, 1990). Until about 10 years ago, those who completed
858 TESOL QUARTERLY

the 7 years of primary school were able to join teacher-training col-
leges to train as primary school teachers. Today, however, all those who
train as primary teachers are expected to have completed 4 years of
secondary school. As an admission requirement, they must have passed
English language and mathematics.
At the secondary level, whoever trains as a teacher must have com-
pleted 6 years of secondary education. They must have the Uganda
Certificate of Education (UCE) and Uganda Advanced Certificate of
Education (UACE), with passes in English and mathematics at UCE
and two principal passes at UACE. Secondary school teachers are
expected to have two teaching subjects.
For a long time, when only Makerere University and Kyambogo
National Teachers College trained secondary school teachers, those who
opted to teach English had to combine it with literature in English. The
situation today is somewhat different. Several government and private
institutions are now training teachers. They continue to train at diploma
and degree level, which are 2 and 3 years respectively. Although the
admission requirements remain the same, because of the competition for
students by the different institutions, quality is sometimes compromised.
CHALLENGES FOR LANGUAGE TEACHERS
English Language teachers in Uganda face a number of challenges

in teaching. Literature, which helps learners improve their proficiency,
is shunned by many. First, it is an optional subject, one of the many
that learners select from when they prepare for the UCE. Second,
many Ugandan learners believe it to be a difficult subject in compari-
son with commerce or religious education. This negative attitude
toward the learning of literature is further compounded by inadequate
reading materials. Most schools lack libraries, and the libraries that do
exist are poorly stocked with irrelevant materials, some of which may
be outdated. Besides being considered difficult, literature is also con-
sidered to be one of the expensive subjects to manage in terms of
frequently having to buy new books.
Another challenge, typical in many second language situations, is
the students’ poor exposure to English language usage (Muthwii,
2001). The majority of students come from backgrounds where they
do not have opportunities to practice using the language outside of
the classroom. Coupled with this lack of exposure to usage is the
generally poor access to appropriate reading materials (Kyeyune, 2003;
Parry, 2000; Ssebunga, 1999).
These challenges notwithstanding, good teacher training programs
would help to address the problems. But to a great extent, graduates
TEACHING ISSUES 859

from the different training colleges vary because of the different curricula
that each college or university follows. The National Council for Higher
Education is, however, currently trying to address the issue of standards
in these institutions.
CONCLUSION
English Language learning in Uganda continues to take center stage

because it is used as medium of instruction from Grade 5 through to
University. In everyday life, it is used for official purposes in most
transactions. It is often used as a lingua franca among the educated
Ugandans who speak different languages, especially in the urban areas.
Needless to say, it is Uganda’s gateway to the international arena. It is,
therefore, important that a lot of effort is placed on teacher training
to equip the teachers with the requisite knowledge and skills for teach-
ing students who are expected to be proficient in the use of English.
THE AUTHOR
Juliet Tembe is a lecturer in the Islamic University in Uganda, Mbale, Uganda, where
she is active in English language teacher education. She is also a PhD candidate in
the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British
Columbia in Canada.
REFERENCES
Government white paper on education: Policy Review Commission report. (1992). Kampala:
Uganda Government Printers.
Iyamu, O. S., & Aduwa, S. E. (2005). On the mother tongue medium of instruction
policy: Curriculum innovation and the challenges of implementation in Nigeria.
Language in India, 5, 1–16.
Kyeyune, R. (2003). Challenges of using English as a medium of instruction in
multilingual contexts: A view from Ugandan classrooms. Language, Culture and
Curriculum, 16(2), 173–184.
Muthwii, M. (2001). Language policy and practices in education in Kenya and Uganda: Per-
ceptions of parents, pupils and teachers on the use of mother tongue, Kiswahili and English
in primary schools. Nairobi, Kenya: Phoenix Publishers.
Odaet, C. F. (1990). Implementing education policies in Uganda. Washington, DC:
World Bank.
Parry, K. (Ed.) (2000). Language and literacy in Uganda: Towards a sustainable reading
culture. Kampala, Uganda: Fountain Publishers.
Ssebunga, C. M. (1999). Potential sources of comprehension difficulties in school
science texts. The Uganda Education Journal, 2, 71–84.
Ssekamwa, J. C. (2000). History and development of education in Uganda. Kampala,
Uganda: Fountain Publishers.
860 TESOL QUARTERLY

English Teaching and Training Issues in Palestine
NASIMA YAMCHI
Arab American University
Jenin, Palestine
OFFICIAL EDUCATIONAL POLICY
䊏 Teaching English in Palestinian high schools began only in the middle

of the last century. After the 1967 war and the occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza strip, the existing curricula, which were Jordanian in the
West Bank and Egyptian in Gaza, were maintained by the Israeli govern-
ment. Teacher training, however, was not on the agenda of the occupy-
ing forces, and it has only been in the past 20 years that teacher training
is receiving some attention (Samir, 1995, p. 7).
Teachers in governmental schools are hired by the Palestinian
Ministry of Education. They tend to have bachelor of arts rather than
master of arts degrees, and in the field of English teaching, most are
graduates of English literature rather than teaching English as a for-
eign language (TEFL). The candidates have to pass an interview in
English after being shortlisted on the basis of their résumés and appli-
cation forms. The new teachers, however, do not participate in preser-
vice training prior to beginning their jobs. The in-service training is
made available during their first year of work. This training usually
consists of teaching methods and is conducted in English. After this
initial training, teachers have to attend workshops and seminars during
their summer holidays and during the academic year. These workshops
and seminars are mostly for teachers of all subjects and cover educa-
tional issues in general. English teachers, additionally, attend some
phonology workshops to improve pronunciation. Most of the training
is prepared and presented by supervisors or exemplary teachers cho-
sen by the supervisors.
New Palestinian Curriculum
The development of the new English curriculum, called English for

Palestine, started in 1999. However, it was not until 2004 that new
books were introduced in Grades 1–5 and in Grade 10. The curricu-
lum committee hopes to replace the old Jordanian curriculum by
2008. The rationale for creating a Palestinian curriculum is to have a
TEACHING ISSUES 861

model that “is appropriate for Palestinian students and prepares stu-
dents for the challenges of contemporary education; i.e., for life in
this new world” (Ministry of Education and Higher Education, 1999
[MEHE], p. 1). According to the developers of the curriculum, new
books are needed to “improve employment opportunities, to teach
students to value cultural diversity, to enhance mental capacity, and to
address the demands of internationalization”(p. 2).
Contrary to the Jordanian textbooks that have been used thus far,
which are mainly reading and structure-based textbooks written by the
British and edited by Arab scholars, the new curriculum is based on
the belief that “language is functional, that language learning is culture
learning, and that acquisition occurs through meaningful use”(MEHE,
1999, p. 2). Moreover, the development of communicative competence
is the expressed goal of the new curriculum: “The core objectives of
teaching English in Palestine falls under the rubric pragmatic compe-
tence” (p. 8). To achieve these goals and overcome inefficiency in
learning English, especially in the oral skills of students, the curricu-
lum has placed more emphasis on aural/oral and integrated skills
alongside the more traditional grammar-and-reading-based books.
TEACHING CHALLENGES
Palestinian teachers of English face many challenges in their work.

First, institutional constraints, particularly with regard to textbooks, are
a major challenge. The new English for Palestine curriculum, though
a breakthrough, is still the sole source of teaching material. According
to the teachers, supervisors are very concerned that all the pages and
all the exercises in the book are covered. However, as Tollefson (1995)
indicates, “reliance on a single text (or a group of texts) diminishes
the possibility of a student-driven curriculum” (p. 21). Teachers, there-
fore, tend to fall back on traditional ways of treating the textbooks,
namely, using them as sources of exercises and not materials to promote
more communication in the classroom. Teachers in Palestine are fur-
ther constrained in using a variety of texts because they have limited
access to other resources, such as the Internet, books, articles, and
photocopying facilities.
The second contributing factor is the unified exam for Grade 12
students (and as of 2005, Grade 10). All high school students have to
pass a unified final exam called Tawjihi, the grades of which are decide
their choice of university and major. This exam is prepared by the
Ministry of Education. An examination of previous Tawjihi tests for
English suggests that they mainly test students’ knowledge of grammar,
writing, and structure. Students are not tested on their aural/oral or
862 TESOL QUARTERLY

critical thinking abilities. Teachers, therefore, face pressure from stu-
dents, parents, and schools to emphasize curricular dimensions that are
useful for the final exams, namely grammar, rather than communicative
abilities. Furthermore, school principals encourage teachers to prepare
students for the exam to improve the statistics of their schools.
The attitude of the students toward the English language constitutes
a third challenge for teachers. Palestine is a postcolonial country that has
been engaged in wars since the end of the Second World War and under
permanent occupation since 1967. The most important allies of the occu-
pying forces are the United States and the United Kingdom, both English-
speaking countries. The one-sidedness of the dominant English-speaking
media in favour of the occupying forces, and the negative image of
Moslems in general and Arabs in particular, have helped create a resis-
tance culture toward the English language. Added to this resistance is
the limited opportunity to use English in real life, for example, through
contact with foreigners. The number of tourists visiting Palestine has
drastically decreased since the start of the second Intifada, and those who
do want to travel to religious sites are very often prevented (by the Israeli
forces) from entering Palestinian territories. Furthermore, most of the
students are not able to travel inside the country, let alone traveling to
other countries.1 Likewise, virtual contact, that is, access to computers,
which could be a good source of outside contact, is still extremely lim-
ited. Palestine relies on Israel for power, and frequent power outages
sometimes lasting for hours (almost daily) add to the difficulties of using
computers as a means of contact with the outside world.
The fourth factor is the mixed ability classes. It is common practice
that teachers can fail weak students only twice during the 12 years of
education. This decision, in effect since the beginning of the second
Intifada in 1995, allows students to attend higher classes even if, under
regular circumstances, they would have to repeat the same grade. The
aim of this policy is to prevent youngsters from dropping out of their
education without any training and entering a job market that has
little to offer.2 However, this policy has resulted in extremely mixed
1
The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) currently operates 48 permanent, staffed checkpoints
in the West Bank. (In some cases these checkpoints lie several kilometers within the
West Bank.) The IDF has also placed hundreds of physical roadblocks in the form of piles
of dirt, boulders, concrete blocks, or trenches, which prevent access to and from Palestinian
towns and villages. Palestinian travel is restricted or entirely prohibited on 41 roads and sec-
tions of roads throughout the West Bank, including many of the main traffic arteries, for a
total of more than 700 kilometers of roadway. Israelis can travel freely on these roads
(B’Tselem, 2005).
2
On the occasion of Labour Day, 2005, the Palestinian broadcasting company, Wafa (2005),
announced that in the first quarter of 2005, the unemployment figures in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip were about 22.6% and 34%, respectively.
TEACHING ISSUES 863

ability classes in higher levels. This disparity confronts the teachers
with a difficult task. Planning each lesson in a way that includes and
benefits most of the students, considering the time limitations among
other issues, is a great challenge. In addition, teachers’ low salary
(about $350 per month), plays a role in reducing their motivation to
spend more time on lesson preparation or in helping their students
after school hours.
CONCLUSION
Teacher training programs that tend to focus solely on methods of

teaching fail to empower teachers to rethink and reevaluate their
belief systems. “Teachers, like other learners, interpret new content
through their existing understandings and modify and reinterpret new
ideas on the basis of what they already know or believe” (Kennedy,
1991, p. 2). Any teacher training program in the Palestinian context
should take into account the sociopolitical effects of occupation, lim-
ited resources, and unequal institutional structures, along with cul-
tural, religious, and ethnic issues. The future training of English
teachers remains as uncertain as the future of Palestine.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to my colleagues Tariq Yousuf and Hege Hermanson for their helpful
comments on the first draft of this article. I especially thank Zaher Atweh, the direc-
tor of the Department of Teacher Training in the Ministry of Education and Higher
Education in Palestine, for taking his time to provide me with information on current
changes in the situation of teachers in Palestine.
THE AUTHOR
Nasima Yamchi has been working in the field of TEFL in Iran, Germany, and Palestine for
the past 18 years. Her first MA is in TEFL and the second in Intercultural Communication.
Since 2004 she has been a lecturer at the Arab American University in Jenin, Palestine.
REFERENCES
B’Tselem. (2005). Siege: Statistics on checkpoints and roadblocks. Jerusalem, Israel:
Author. Retrieved October 4, 2006, from B’Tselem: The Israeli Center for
Human Rights in the Occupied Territories Web site www.btselem.org/english/
Freedom_of_Movement/checkpoints.asp.
Kennedy, M. (1991). An agenda for research on teacher learning (Special Report, National
Center for Research on Teacher Learning on Teacher Learning). East Lansing:
Michigan State University.
864 TESOL QUARTERLY

Ministry of Education and Higher Education. (1999). English language curriculum
for public schools, Grade 1–12. Ramallah: Palestinian National Authority, Author.
Samir, M. (1995). Investigating the English writing skills curriculum at Hebron University.
Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA.
Tollefson, J. W.(Ed.). (1995). Power and inequality in language education. Cambridge,
Wafa, Palestinian News Agency. (2005). PCBS: Unemployment rate in OPT consid-
ered very high. Retrieved October 4, 2006, from http://english.wafa.ps/body.
asp?field=enews&id=2551.
TEACHING ISSUES 865

REVIEWS
TESOL Quarterly welcomes evaluative reviews of publications relevant to TESOL
professionals.
Edited by MARGARET HAWKINS

Simon Fraser University
Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice.

Patrick R. Moran. Boston: Heinle & Heinle/Thomson Learning, 2001.
Pp. ix + 175.
䊏 Cultural learning, says Moran, “is best seen as a lived experience, as

a personal encounter with another way of life” (p. 3). This book pro-
poses a theoretical framework for bringing the experience of culture
into the language classroom.
The first four chapters provide the foundation for Moran’s approach.
Moran gives an overview of the book (chapter 1), explains his philoso-
phy of teaching (chapter 2), provides an extended definition of cul-
ture (chapter 3), and explores the relationship between culture and
language (chapter 4). Chapter 2 is especially important for under-
standing Moran’s perspective, based on three interacting frameworks:
the cultural experience, the cultural knowings framework, and the
experiential learning cycle.
The cultural experience is “the encounter with another way of life”
(p. 13) that Moran wants to provide for his students. This cultural
experience, or encounter, has five parts: cultural content, activities
through which the students work with this content, outcomes that the
teacher intends and the students attain through these activities, learn-
ing context, and teacher-student relationship. The cultural knowings
framework relates closely to the cultural experience and distinguishes
four progressively deeper ways of knowing culture: knowing about, or
possessing cultural information; knowing how, or engaging in appropri-
ate cultural practices; knowing why, or understanding beliefs, values,
and attitudes that make up cultural perspectives; and knowing oneself,
or growing in self-awareness.
The experiential learning cycle provides a model for acquiring the four
cultural knowings through the cultural experience. It consists of four
consecutive stages: concrete experience, which involves participation in
activities of engagement with the content of the cultural experience
and which emphasizes knowing about; reflective observation, which

867
involves description of what happened in the cultural experience,
based on thinking deeply about that experience, and which emphasizes
knowing how; abstract conceptualization, which involves interpretation, or
formulating explanations to assign meaning to the cultural experience
and which emphasizes knowing why; and active experimentation, which
involves response, or deciding how to return to cultural experience in
accord with one’s own goals, and which emphasizes knowing oneself.
Chapters 5 through 9 examine the teaching of five dimensions of
culture, using Moran’s three frameworks. The five dimensions are cul-
tural products, or artifacts, places, institutions, and art forms (chapter
5); cultural practices, or appropriate cultural behaviors (chapter 6); cul-
tural perspectives, or beliefs, values, attitudes, and perceptions (chapter
7); cultural communities, or ways of relating to others, from interper-
sonal relationships to national bonds (Chapter 8); and cultural persons,
or the individual members of a culture with their various identities
and life histories (chapter 9).
The final three chapters take a broader view of the culture learning
process. Chapter 10 considers six outcomes of learning culture: culture-
specific understanding, culture-general understanding, cultural com-
petence, cultural adaptation, social action based on one’s deeply held
beliefs, and development of one’s own identity. Chapter 11 looks at the
culture learning process as a series of repeated experiential learning
cycles and emphasizes the need for the teacher to be aware of individual
students’ emotional responses. Chapter 12 presents some final guide-
lines for using the experiential learning cycle in teaching culture.
The book has two appendices. Appendix A contains 10 continuum lines
that show the range of perceptions held by members of different cultures
for 10 aspects of reality. These include the good-evil continuum of percep-
tions of humankind, the being-doing continuum of perceptions of activity,
and the individualism-collectivism continuum. Appendix B outlines seven
models of cultural learning. There are also six pages of references.
Moran’s book has three drawbacks. First, the title suggests that the book
will satisfy the needs of teachers for specific classroom activities, whereas
Moran presents an overall teaching framework, minimally illustrated with
examples and experiences. Second, Moran suggests that the target lan-
guage be learned first and then used to learn about the target culture.
However, when teachers talk about the culture in the target language,
learners often do not have sufficient language mastery to understand the
cultural information fully. Learning about the target culture need not be
in the target language and need not wait for sufficient language mastery.
Third, although Moran addresses his book to both ESL and EFL teachers,
he does not take into account the fact that, in many countries, the English
language and culture are seen as part of a package that includes coloniza-
tion, imperialism, and oppression. EFL students in these countries feel
868 TESOL QUARTERLY

constrained to learn English because of its worldwide importance, but they
do so reluctantly, and they resist experiences of U.S. American culture.
Despite these drawbacks, the experiential learning cycle and the
four cultural knowings offer a very helpful framework to guide lan-
guage teachers in planning curricula and lessons that go beyond the
imparting of cultural information. Moran’s framework provides cul-
tural encounters with other ways of living and leads students through
the stages of experiencing, reflecting on, theorizing about, and inter-
nalizing these cultural encounters.
In addition, Moran uses anecdote to great effect throughout the
book. He begins many chapters with personal reminiscences about his
experiences adjusting to living in the Ivory Coast or learning to under-
stand his place in the culture of his wife’s French family. Other chap-
ters begin with accounts of classroom activities he has used for teacher
training classes. Incorporated into each chapter are sections titled
“Teacher’s Voices,” which present accounts of experiences by native
and nonnative teachers of several different languages. These stories
and personal experiences make the material interesting and engaging
and clearly illustrate Moran’s points. From these first-person accounts,
the language teacher gains a better understanding of how cultural
information applies to real-life situations.
Suggested readings at the end of each chapter is another valuable
aspect of the book. In these sections, Moran provides a lightly annotated
bibliography of additional readings for each chapter topic. These readings
include manuscripts from many fields of study, from anthropology to
sociolinguistics, and embrace a wide range of genres including personal
memoirs, workbooks, international business texts, and classroom activity
books. These readings provide a valuable resource for further study.
Editor’s note: This review was submitted to fufill the requirements for a
student project.
MUBARAK ALKHATNAI SUSAN SALMINEN

Ministry of Foreign Affairs Raritan Valley Community College
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Somerville, New Jersey, United States
ADEL AL-OMRANI QISI ZHANG

Institute of Diplomatic Studies Foreign Languages Department
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Shenyang Normal University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Shenyang, People’s Republic of China
KAREN ASHLEY GREENSTONE

Loyola University New Orleans
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
REVIEWS 869
Converging Worlds: Play, Literacy, and Culture in Early Childhood.
Maureen Kendrick. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. xi + 203.
䊏 This qualitative case study explores the interrelations between play,

literacy, and culture by closely examining the home play activities of
Letitia, a 5-year-old Chinese Canadian girl. Letitia is growing up in a
multilingual, multiliterate family of three children. She speaks Chao
Chiu, her first language, and English at home, is learning Mandarin
in kindergarten, and took Cantonese lessons when younger. Her par-
ents, who immigrated to Canada from Vietnam, are literate in five
languages, provide a rich home literacy learning environment, and
have high expectations for their child’s language and literacy learning
in both the short and long term.
Letitia, described as “outgoing, articulate, … and very interested in
books and stories” (p. 5), was just starting kindergarten when the study
began. Thus, the author could observe her during her transition from
home to school literacy, a critical research area given the widely rec-
ognized need for bridging the two literacy environments, particularly
for multilingual children. The author visited Letitia in her home
weekly for more than a year, playing the dual role of researcher and
participant in the child’s play and allowing her to direct and control
the play to help overcome the obvious imbalance in power relations.
Letitia welcomed the researcher’s visits, and over time, the two devel-
oped a close and trusting relationship, placing the researcher in an
especially favorable position for conducting her research and coming
to understand how the child used play to express her understandings
of self, literacy, and the world around her.
The author draws on a variety of theoretical perspectives to frame
the research, including emergent literacy and social constructivism and
positioning theory on the situated and culturally specific nature of lit-
eracy learning and its embeddedness in power relations and identity
construction. The author joins these perspectives with observations on
the relations between play and literacy, which view play as an arena
for identity construction and as a form of narrative or oral storytelling.
Storytelling provides a particularly rich and unique analytical lens,
allowing the author to examine the play episodes as literary and social
texts and to explore play, literacy, and culture as an integrated whole
rather than separately, as is commonly the case.
Two introductory chapters (chapters 1 and 2) discuss the theoretical
and methodological perspectives that frame the work and provide in-
depth information on Letitia’s family and home context, gleaned from
observations, conversations, and the close relationships established
with family members. A selection of 10 of Letitia’s play narratives,
reflecting the two predominant play themes, home and school, are
870 TESOL QUARTERLY

presented in chapters 3 and 4, respectively. The narratives are skillfully
organized and presented, enabling the reader to appreciate the play
episodes in all their rich, vivid (and at times overexacting) detail and
to understand the researcher’s interpretations of their meaning and
relation to sociocultural context, provided in commentary sections at
the end of each narrative.
In the home-related narratives (chapter 3), which revolve around
such activities as falling in love, marrying, and having babies, we learn
about Letitia’s understandings of gender roles and relationships, mar-
riage and family, and Chinese cultural practices, as well as how she
perceives the future and the more intimate realm of her feelings and
desires. We also learn about her developing literacy, her sense of self
in relation to it, and her understandings of its forms and functions.
In the school narratives (chapter 4), where she plays school and takes
on the role of teacher, Letitia reveals how she sees the culture of
school, with its rituals and routines, and how she understands herself
in relation to literacy and deals with the various expectations she
encounters. Some of the narratives are particularly interesting in show-
ing how she experiments with power and status relationships in the
context of play and the conditions under which she takes risks with
reading and writing English and especially Chinese, which she found
particularly difficult.
A wide range of relevant research and the study’s implications for
research and education are discussed in chapter 5. The author first
brings together research on children’s personal storytelling from vari-
ous areas, for example, children and narrative, literacy, identity, and
childhood socialization, and discusses how her study, which looks at a
child’s play as a form of personal storytelling, connects with and
enriches this research. The study, all the more important because done
in the home, clearly shows how the child used play for a variety of
personal purposes to make sense of and experiment with her present
and future worlds. As such, this research adds a valuable new lens for
understanding children’s early literacy development and identity
construction.
Letitia often uses reading and writing and assumes literate roles in
her play narratives, and thus the author was also able to glean valuable
insights into the child’s understandings of and attitudes and feelings
toward literacy, that is, her literacy stance. For example, Kendrick’s
analyses reveal how the child used play to deal with the different
meanings and expectations for literacy she encountered at home and
school and to begin to construct her own orientation to literacy. They
also reveal the child’s awareness of the different forms and functions
of literacy in the two contexts, her understandings of school culture,
and her awareness and use of status and power relations in the play
REVIEWS 871
context. The analyses are very rich and suggestive of the importance
of play as an arena for integrating home and school cultures, adapting
to school culture, and learning and practicing literacy skills. The cul-
tural content of the play narratives is also discussed, and play is high-
lighted as a composing process. The child’s development as an author
over the course of the study is traced as well.
The book closes with the author’s reflections on lessons learned
from the study both on a personal level and more broadly with respect
to schools and classrooms (chapter 6). Although this was not a class-
room study per se, the study carries many interesting implications wor-
thy of attention by researchers, students, and educators interested in
bridging the gap between home and school and improving literacy
instruction for children of diverse cultures. This highly readable and
fascinating analysis of how play connects to literacy, culture, and the
construction of self should be of interest to researchers, students, and
educators involved with multilingual children in a variety of fields,
including but not limited to, early childhood literacy, family literacy,
narrative and identity, children’s play in cross-cultural contexts, and
second language learning and multilingualism.
ELAINE M. DAY
British Columbia, Canada
872 TESOL QUARTERLY

Values in English Language Teaching.
Bill Johnston. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003. Pp. viii + 163.
䊏 A book on values in English language teaching (ELT) is welcome at

a time when values have emerged so prominently in political, religious,
and even entertainment discourse. Johnston’s treatment of values in
ELT is intended primarily for ELT teachers and, secondarily, for per-
sons engaged in teacher preparation. The author maintains that
upholding a positive teacher-student relationship is of supreme impor-
tance in ELT and that value-oriented decisions are to be made so as to
safeguard and enhance that relationship. The value issues he sees are
numerous and often pose dilemmas, paradoxes, and conflicts. His
chapters successively focus on the teacher, classroom interaction, polit-
ical concerns, testing, teacher identity, and teacher development.
Chapters are followed by questions for class discussion and personal
reflection.
872 TESOL QUARTERLY

Johnston cites various sources on culture, values, and morality,
repeatedly referring to Edge (1996) on values and paradoxes and to
Noddings (1984) on caring in human relations. Analyzing values from
an acknowledged atheistic stance, Johnston sees values as inherently
subjective, highly personal, essentially ambiguous, and context depen-
dent. His are not the ideals or dictates of any favored philosophical
or religious system. The author admittedly uses the terms “morality”
and “values” interchangeably (p. 10). He maintains that “all aspects of
language teaching are imbued with values” (p. x) and, thereby, all
aspects have moral meaning, that is, qualities of good and bad, right
and wrong (p. 6). His discussion of values and morality accordingly
covers teaching methodology, course deadlines, assessment procedures,
choice of dialect, textbook content, and even decisions on such mat-
ters as form versus meaning and product versus process. Although he
believes that value concepts such as equality, justice, and respect are
in some sense moral absolutes, the complexity of the classroom pre-
vents his formulating explicit rules or guidelines for teachers to
follow.
The author illustrates from past experience what he contends to be
the personal and subjective nature of morality. In the opening pages
the reader is confronted with an illustration, perhaps unsettling, of
how one ELT instructor worked through a moral dilemma. Johnston
approvingly tells how the instructor decided, after subtle pressure from
a superior, to change the final grade of a half-hearted failing student
to a passing grade in order to preserve the student’s projected career
aspirations. The author explains that in this case the principle of jus-
tice clashed with Noddings’s notion of “caring.” In this situation the
instructor’s siding with caring justifies the passing grade.
Johnston also gives glimpses into his own story of value choices. These
include his abandonment of all traditional testing in favor of portfolio
assignment because tests are “inherently disposed to unfairness” (p. 72).
He shares his preference for flexible course deadlines, his caution in
exercising teacher authority, his reservations toward the use of critical
pedagogy, and the moral significance of moving self and family to another
continent for his own further academic study. He also reports his obser-
vations on value judgments placed on the ELT profession as a whole by
others and the frequent resulting marginalization of the discipline. He
also examines values in the phenomena of globalization in which he and
all ELT instructors, knowingly or unknowingly, participate.
There are two notable assumptions throughout this work that may
perplex readers. First, Johnston’s definition of values is exceedingly
inclusive, incorporating numerous aspects of classroom content, man-
agement, methodology, and assessment. He sees moral significance in
endeavors many ELT professionals would consider morally neutral,
REVIEWS 873
that is, matters simply of best judgment or, in Edge’s (1996) terminol-
ogy, matters of experimentation toward “emergent methodology”
(p.19). Because conscientious teachers regularly aim to maximize
learning for the greatest number of their students, inevitably some will
benefit more than others from a teacher’s decisions. As for the teacher-
student relationship, typically some students rate their teachers far
more favorably than do others. Indeed, few teachers with full classes
can accommodate each student’s needs, as the author advises and illus-
trates (p. 150). What most teachers must do is follow a given syllabus
or establish what is to be learned in well-stated course objectives and
implement the plan through sensible informed methodology, making
adaptations along the way to accommodate prevailing learning styles
as well as relevant cultural norms. To view the myriad planned and
spontaneous decisions as moral undertakings, that is, as matters of
right-doing and wrong-doing, or good and bad, seems to exaggerate
the moral role and culpability of the teacher.
Second, the author merely assumes without justification the exis-
tence in this universe of moral right and wrong no matter how these
terms may be defined. Readers are not given grounds for hoping and
believing that autonomous individuals will move toward convergence
of values in the face of their many different cultures, traditions, and
personalities. Here more discussion, even speculation, of just how
teachers’ values emerge and take shape over time on critical issues
would be an interesting addition. Johnston sees a positive movement
within the TESOL community as a whole and applauds recent discus-
sion of values, as in the 2001 TESOL convention panel “Faith, Values,
and Language Teaching,” chaired by Thomas Scovel, to which he
alludes (p. 114). It might be noted that the panelists in that session
spoke as representatives of four long-established religious traditions,
not as speculating autonomous individuals. Further discussion of moral
values in ELT would benefit from forthright acknowledgment of ethical
standards found in different major belief systems, standards such as
beneficence, justice, and fidelity. These standards emerge in the work
of Kitchener (1984, 2000) in biomedicine and are further applied by
Welfel (1990) in counseling and educational settings. They offer defen-
sible principles for ELT educators to use in resolving the ethical dilem-
mas they face.
Because many readers will disagree with the writer’s definitions,
assumptions, and applications, this volume encourages serious reflec-
tion on one’s own identity, values, and priorities in teaching. Readers
will benefit from the discussion on the ways that ELT endeavor is
indeed social and political as well as psycholinguistic. The volume will
also awaken many to challenges facing our profession and the global
effects of the work we do.
874 TESOL QUARTERLY

REFERENCES
Edge, J. (1996). Cross-cultural paradoxes in a profession of values. TESOL Quarterly,
30, 9–30.
Kitchener, K. S. (1984). Intuition, critical evaluation and ethical principles: The foun-
dation for ethical decisions in counseling psychology. The Counseling Psychologist,
12(3), 43–56.
Kitchener, K. S. (2000). Foundations of ethical practice, research, and teaching in psychology.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Welfel, E. R. (1990). Ethical practice in college student affairs. In D. G. Creamer &
Associates (Eds.), College student development: Theory and practice for the 1990s (pp.
195–216). Alexandria, VA: American College Personnel Association.
GLENN DECKERT
Eastern Michigan University, retired
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
REVIEWS 875
Language Minority Students in American Schools:
An Education in English.
H. D. Adamson. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xviii + 249.
䊏 In this book Adamson tackles the theoretical, pedagogical, and prac-
tical issues that arise in effectively educating the nearly 3.5 million
English language learners (ELLs) in the United States. In a readily
accessible and direct style, Adamson draws from equal parts of the
educational and linguistic research, as well as from his own experi-
ences as a teacher of English in the United States and in other coun-
tries. Though he indicates he intended to write the book primarily for
students preparing to become teachers of English as a second lan-
guage (ESL), his broad approach to bilingual education as a whole
and his inclusion of a wide range of applicable topics, including lan-
guage acquisition theory, instructional strategies, educational policy,
and scholarship, make his text a worthy read for educators, research-
ers, linguists, and policy makers.
In chapter 1, Adamson describes his own background and recounts
his experiences teaching ELLs in the United States and teaching
English as a foreign language (EFL) outside the United States, draw-
ing distinctions between the two teaching tasks. He concludes this
chapter with a summary of the lessons he learned based on his early
teaching experiences. He makes useful and straightforward recom-
mendations for schools on creating meaningful and relevant curricula
REVIEWS 875
for ELLs and incorporating students’ home language as a part of
instruction in contexts where full bilingual education programs are
not feasible.
Chapter 2 presents a historical overview and description of
three broad theoretical bases of language acquisition: behaviorist,
cognitive or nativist, and sociocultural. Following a comprehensive
review of the main tenets of these approaches, chapter 3 applies
theory to instructional practice with a historical look at key lan-
guage teaching methodologies developed over the last century.
While providing a succinct explanation of numerous approaches
from traditional to communicative, Adamson goes further to relate
language teaching techniques to content-area instruction in reading
and mathematics.
Next, couching his discussion in an extensive and historic over-
view of language variation in the United States, Adamson takes on
issues surrounding English as a second dialect. Chapter 4 provides
a robust discussion of the evolution of standard English and of
African American vernacular English (AAVE) in the United States
and of the social and political forces shaping their development.
Furthermore, Adamson highlights the sociopolitical and cultural
overtones of the Ebonics controversy in the Oakland School District
in California and describes classroom implications related to the use
of black English in school districts in Oakland and around the
United States.
In chapter 5, Adamson revisits the theme, initiated in chapter 3, of
ELLs’ access to subject-area knowledge and the best ways of acquiring
academic content. He examines relevant and current scholarship
related to Vygotskian theory and demonstrates how the principles of
scaffolding and the zone of proximal development can be applied to
the teaching and learning of academic discourse and registers.
Adamson cogently outlines instructional recommendations for educa-
tors to assist ELLs in learning specific content-area knowledge and to
promote their success in mainstream classrooms. His suggestions
include overt teaching of academic learning and metacognitive strate-
gies, providing access to mainstream curricula, and constructing ESL
courses that develop the linguistic skills needed for learning challeng-
ing academic content.
In chapter 6, Adamson turns to his own research, which he con-
ducted in a middle school in Tuscon, Arizona, serving a predomi-
nantly Latino student population. Providing rich qualitative data in
the form of observation field notes (in ESL classes, mainstream
classes, and the community), interview transcripts, and work samples,
Adamson reports a case study of three children, siblings who func-
tioned at somewhat varying levels of English language and academic
876 TESOL QUARTERLY

proficiency. The chapter describes how the three navigated their way
through an often unfamiliar and challenging academic arena at
Cholla Middle School. Moreover, Adamson describes both obstacles
and strengths of the school’s response to these students and other
ELLs.
The book concludes with a more general discussion of bilingual
education, including its history and the way it is conceptualized and
operationalized around the globe; current research on bilingual pro-
grams from both advocates and opponents in the field; and a com-
parison/contrast of bilingual versus ESL programs. One of the greatest
strengths of the book is the inclusion of suggested additional reading
for each of the chapter topics. Although Adamson’s approach is read-
able and personable, some of the content (particularly content related
to language acquisition theory) might be challenging for the novice
reader.
Notwithstanding, Language Minority Students in American Schools is a
comprehensive, balanced, and timely view of language education in
the United States that is appropriately contextualized in the often
heated social, cultural, and political climate of U.S. classrooms.
JULIET E. HART
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, Virginia, United States
REVIEWS 877
Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community.
Barbara Rogoff, Carolyn Goodman Turkanis, and Leslee Bartlett (Eds.).
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 250.
䊏 This book describes an innovative model of learning: learning as a

community in which teachers, parents, and children engage in learning
activities in a collaborative way. It is a realistic, vivid record of a school
in Salt lake City, Utah, called the OC (Open Classroom). With the pho-
tos depicting all the activities of the OC, readers may feel as if they were
members of this community. This model emphasizes the active involve-
ment of adults and children together. By handling all learning activities
in a collaborative way, adults are supposed to take responsibilities for
fostering children’s learning, for guiding the overall process and for
supporting children’s changing participation in their shared endeavors.
The book offers a range of topics not often covered in other peda-
gogical books; it strikes a balance between theory and practice, generally
REVIEWS 877
in favor of the practice. The authors begin by presenting some past
models and highlight adults and children together, with children
involved in their own learning and exploring. These earlier models
inspire the development of a schooling model based on a “community
of learners”(p. 8), that in the authors’ perspective, involves multifaceted
relationships among students, parents, and teachers. The first section
also discusses the principles in action of the learning community and
its structure, which is followed by a section on how the school functions
as a community.
The heart of this book is the section on how children’s learning
occurs in a community of learners. It focuses on creating a curricu-
lum that relies on the flexible and respectful collaboration among
children and adults as exemplified in this statement: “The teachers
shape the curriculum around the children’s interests, using children’s
curiosity, being alert to opportunities for learning as they occur”(p.
39). As the authors describe, students’ interests and plans are a part
of curriculum planning. For example, student can take part in the
negotiation of meaning of what to do and how to do it concerning
the time, the available activities, projects, skill groups, and so on;
parents are also encouraged to participate in parts of the curriculum
that they enjoy. Moreover, there are regular parent-teacher-student
conferences, where children can reflect, set goals, and make plans for
themselves.
In fact, the idea of working with children to develop curriculum is
a very innovative approach in education. Tyler (1977) mentioned stu-
dents’ interests and concerns but failed to provide any means for their
effects on curriculum, selection of objectives, or learning experiences.
Moreover, he thought that many curriculum projects overlook the
active role of students in learning.
One special thing about the curriculum design for this community
of learners is that no textbooks are used; the curriculum is developed
using any available resources, given that they are alive, authentic, and
invigorating. Actually, the authors point out, “books, but not textbooks,
have central place at the OC”(p. 98).
Another point highlighted about in this community of learners is
team building. The operation of the community looks simple, yet it is
deceptive. From preparation to planning, to refining and cooperation,
all is based on the efforts among teachers, parents, and children, and
the key to this success is sharing and co-oping. The authors mention
sharing circles as a tradition of the OC: “Everyone sit on the floor,
including the teacher, and the parent co-opers, and we can all see
each other’s faces so each person has an equal and involved position”(p.
75). In fact, apart from adults’ co-oping, “kid co-oping” characterizes
the community; it gives children experience in communicating, taking
878 TESOL QUARTERLY

responsibility, leading and cooperating in a group, and motivating
themselves and others”(p. 74). These two characteristics relate to the
Savignon’s (1997) paradigm of second language teaching and com-
municative language teaching: “As they shape curricula for the lan-
guage programs of tomorrow teachers should see the learners as a
physical, psychological, and intellectual beings with needs and interests
that extend far beyond those of the language classroom”(p. 169).
The next three sections focus on the processes of teachers’ learning
about teaching children in a community, parents’ learning about chil-
dren’s learning in a community, and teachers’ learning about parents’
learning in a community. This collaborative approach is a struggle for
teachers and parents because they were brought up in traditional pub-
lic schools. Hence, the idea of learning and working together can’t be
conceptualized overnight. According to the authors, the contribution
of parents determines the survival of such a model; parents’ learning
about principles of the school through their classroom involvement
with the teachers and children is the key aspect to the development
of the community of learners. It seems that only by participating in
the classroom do the parents come to understand the principles of
the learning community.
The last section of the book focuses on the community learning
together, and the authors discuss the process of creating learning com-
munities in the OC and beyond. Again, the collaborative construction
of decisions and philosophy is emphasized as the sense of shared own-
ership; mutual support and sharing are regarded as critical to the
community’s success. Actually, teaching in the OC is about learning
from others. Furthermore, the authors also affirm throughout the
book that the ability to work well with others is a primary qualification
for most employment and, as such, should direct the strategies for
restructuring schools.
After summarizing the crucial principles of learning in a commu-
nity, the authors point out some current issues with which the com-
munity continues to struggle. The authors contend that this book
serves as a starting point, and it is meant to be “an inspiration, not a
manual”(p. 243). Therefore, it would be a mistake for anybody to try
to copy it directly for other environments.
In general, this is a valuable book, full of detailed information about
an innovative model in children’s education by which children can
fully develop their skills and creativity. To sum up, I will quote an
anonymous former OC teacher, who wrote the following on the last
page of an early draft of the book:
One idea throughout this book is the impact of this program on all
who have been a part of it—why is that? Why will I (and most of the
REVIEWS 879
authors) always value my role in the OC and see my time spent with them
as one of the most growth producing educational episodes of my life?
(p. 197).
REFERENCES
Savignon, S. J. (1997). Communicative competence: Theory and classroom practice. Texts and
contexts in second language learning. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Tyler, R. W. (1977). Desirable content for a curriculum development syllabus today.
In A. Molnar & J. A. Zahorik (Eds.), Curriculum theory (pp. 36–44). Washington
DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
HOANG TINH BAO

The University of Queensland
Queensland, Australia
880 TESOL QUARTERLY

Second Language Teacher Education: International Perspectives.
Diane J. Tedick (Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xxiv + 348.
䊏 Diane Tedick deserves considerable praise for this book, which

brings together a vast array of teacher and teacher educator perspec-
tives in a successful effort to highlight the diversity of second language
teacher education and encourage professional dialogue across
contexts.
The book, whose 18 chapters are organized into four thematic units,
addresses four essential areas of second language teacher education.
Theme One focuses on the knowledge base of teacher education, delv-
ing into the controversial issue of what teachers should be expected to
know. Theme Two explores the contexts in which second language
teacher education occurs, highlighting how outside forces influence
teachers and their practice. Theme Three examines the collaborations
of teachers and Theme Four provides an overview of second language
teacher education in practice by describing and detailing model pro-
grams and courses.
Two definite strengths make this work a welcome addition to any
teacher educator’s library. The first is the broad range of perspectives
Tedick has accumulated. Contributors and research subjects represent
elementary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions; preservice, nov-
ice, and experienced teachers; ESL, EFL, foreign language, bilingual,
and immersion contexts; and international and national viewpoints.
880 TESOL QUARTERLY

With so many points of view represented, one might expect that this
book would highlight the differences in teacher education needs.
However, the opposite is true. To borrow from Poyner’s chapter (9)
on transactional teaching, the power of this book is in the strength of
its “collective text” (p. 167). Although the contributors speak from
their individual experiences, it is the similarity of the processes that
teachers undergo as they reflect on their practice and develop their
understanding of language and student needs that bind the themes
together and create a clear picture of what second language teacher
education must include. Among the necessary elements is an under-
standing that teachers are professionals who are constantly engaged in
constructing knowledge about their profession and personal pedagogy.
Through collaboration with their students and their peers, teachers
create the conditions that lead them to challenge, question, and
develop insights and practices. Strong teacher education programs give
teachers the chance to explore their beliefs and develop reflective
reasoning systems by allow them to apply knowledge in authentic
contexts.
The book’s second strength is that the qualitative descriptions within
many of the contributions give a clear sense of how teachers come to
know their discipline and to negotiate within it. For instance, Scarino
(chapter 3) shares the narrative of a teacher who is making judgments
of her students’ writing in French. From this account, we see how the
teacher’s framework of knowledge, values, and ethical dispositions are
integrated into the final judgment. Several chapters explore, through
the use of teacher reflections, how teachers’ classroom experiences
lead them to a deeper understanding of language theory. One exam-
ple of this is Cormany’s (chapter 12) discussion of her own nonlinear
developmental process which led her, after researching and reflecting
on her second language writing classes, to reexamine academic
research, and consequently, to develop her own theory of writing
instruction.
In addition to reflective voices and qualitative descriptions, Tedick
also includes contributions from individuals who provide specific
advice on how to best empower and train second language teachers.
Shohamy (chapter 6) offers an excellent overview of the power of
tests to control teachers and their students. She suggests alternative,
democratic, and critical approaches to testing that teachers can use
to minimize a test’s detrimental effects. Poyner (chapter 9) writes
about how participating in an ESL/bilingual transaction reading and
language methods class affects first-year teachers. Smith (chapter 11)
describes how the professional growth of adjunct faculty members
can be facilitated through peer collaboration. And Theme Four offers
five chapters devoted to demonstrating the practices, challenges, and
REVIEWS 881
successes of model programs and courses in second language teacher
education.
The chapters mentioned stand out as exceptional additions to the
book. If there is a weakness to the overall collection, it is that the
audience for the articles is fairly limited to those who are teacher
educators. The style and focus of the collection may not appeal to the
average teacher in the field.
Overall, Second Language Teacher Education is a well-chosen and well-
organized collection of perspectives on current issues and trends in
second language teacher education. The qualitative descriptions and
focus on real teachers in their practice make this book enjoyable read-
ing for those who are involved in educating educators. Additionally,
the advice and model programs that are highlighted should provide
substantial stimulus for educators around the world to reflect on and
discuss.
NOELLE VANCE
Pikes Peak Community College
Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States
882 TESOL QUARTERLY

Teaching, Learning and Researching in an ESL Context.
Cindy L. Gunn. Dallas, TX: United Press of America, 2003. Pp. xvii + 93.
䊏 Teaching and researching have tended to be seen as two separate

activities with distinct roles. In fact, teachers are often supposed to be
the consumers of the theories produced by educational researchers.
However, it has been increasingly recognized that teachers with “the
access and insight of a participant observer” are at an advantageous
position to research and to understand classroom life (Freeman, 1996,
p. 103). Gunn’s book is yet another work seeking to demonstrate the
potential of teacher research.
This book can be roughly divided into two parts. In the first
theoretical part, consisting of four chapters, the author discusses in
turn communicative competence (chapter 2), second language
teaching approaches and methods (chapter 3), and errors in second
language learning (chapter 4). These chapters are apparently writ-
ten to anticipate the classroom-based study on communicative com-
petence in the second part. Chapter 5 details a 6-month study
conducted at an international school in Thailand, with an aim to
882 TESOL QUARTERLY

“help understand the challenges of educating for second or foreign
language communicative competence” (p. 50). The main data col-
lected included audiotaped student-led interviews with native English
speakers, student transcriptions of these interviews, teacher-student
discussions of the transcriptions, and student journals reflecting on
their performances in the interviews. The analysis found that the
students were able to develop competence in interacting with inter-
viewees through reflection and self-discovery, as well as direct teach-
ing and practice. In chapter 6, Gunn broadens the discussion to
consider the areas (such as pronunciation and strategic compe-
tence) contributing to either “actual or potential communicative
misunderstanding” (p. 66), and she concludes that “the theoretical
components [of communicative competence] do not incorporate
the difficulty of teaching students how to use the target language
to meet their communicative needs in ever changing situations” (p.
72). Chapter 7 provides final reflections on the study and reasserts
the value of teacher research, namely, a teacher researcher’s profes-
sional and personal growth driven by knowing language teaching
theories and “challenging [the] theories with evidence from [one’s
own] classroom” (p. 78).
In the Preface, the author expresses the wish that after reading the
book “novice and experienced teachers alike will be encouraged to
begin some classroom research of their own” (p. xv). This book
has certainly made a valuable contribution by demonstrating through
on-site inquiry that research practice can be incorporated into class-
room teaching to inform pedagogical decisions and to benefit learners.
Furthermore, the triangulation obtained by the several data collection
methods and their systematic application have enhanced the credibility
of the analysis. Equally interesting is the discussion of the problem of
implementing “neat, conceptual theories” (p. 73) in the real world, an
issue that flows naturally out of a study firmly grounded in classroom
reality.
For all its contribution, Gunn’s book does have a number of weak-
nesses. Although examining the concept of communicative compe-
tence can well be justified in a study report on the topic, I found that
the chapter on approaches to second language teaching (chapter 3)
did not seem to relate directly to the book’s focus. Rather, it reads
like a quick overview of the development of teaching methodologies,
often without pinpointing how these approaches address the theories
of communicative competence.
Another weakness of the book lies in the study report (chapter 5)
itself. It is acknowledged that reporting a longitudinal study contain-
ing rich data poses a challenge to all researchers. Yet, the author
might have made the report more reader-friendly by, for example,
REVIEWS 883
focusing one section on the actual implementation of the student
project and by segmenting and labeling more appropriately various
stages in the analysis process. As the chapter stands, the paragraph
headings can be misleading. For example, the section labeled
“Analyzing the data” (pp. 54–55) only deals with the initial research
stage, although one may expect that it contain all the data analysis
decisions taken in the research cycle. I was also disappointed that no
student voices can be heard in this study. No examples of student
language production are provided, which makes it difficult for the
reader to determine the degree of development that the students have
attained.
Notwithstanding the faults mentioned above, this book has demon-
strated that research done by teachers, grounded in classroom life, is
in a promising position to explore the discrepancies between theory and
practice. As such, the book is a welcome addition to the ESL research
literature and will serve as a delightful companion to language teachers
who wish to develop their professional expertise through classroom
research.
REFERENCE
Freeman, D. (1996). Redefining the relationship between research and what
teachers know. In K. M. Bailey & D. Nunan (Eds.), Voices from the language classroom
(pp. 88–117). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
CHUN-CHUN YEH
National Chung Cheng University
Chiayi, Taiwan
884 TESOL QUARTERLY

INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS
EDITORIAL POLICY
TESOL Quarterly, a professional, refereed journal, encourages submission
of previously unpublished articles on topics of significance to individuals
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Quarterly invites manuscripts on a wide range of topics, especially in the
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1. psychology and sociology of language 3. testing and evaluation
learning and teaching; issues in research 4. professional
and research methodology preparation
2. curriculum design and development; 5. language planning
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techniques
Because the Quarterly is committed to publishing manuscripts that contribute
to bridging theory and practice in the profession, it particularly welcomes
submissions drawing on relevant research (e.g., in anthropology, applied
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[including reading and writing theory], psycholinguistics, psychology, first
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dressing implications and applications of this research to issues in TESOL.
The Quarterly prefers that all submissions be written so that their content
is accessible to a broad readership, including those individuals who may
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an international journal. It welcomes submissions from English language
contexts around the world.
GENERAL INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

Submission Categories
TESOL Quarterly invites submissions in five categories:
Full-length articles. Full length articles typically present empirical research
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methods. The Quarterly publishes both quantitative and qualitative studies.
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Contributors are strongly encouraged to submit manuscripts of no more
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885
abstract of not more than 200 words. If possible, indicate the number of
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thors’ names should appear only on a cover sheet, not on the title page; do
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Editor, TESOL Quarterly
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The following factors are considered when evaluating the suitability of a
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Reviews. TESOL Quarterly invites succinct, evaluative reviews of professional
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886 TESOL QUARTERLY

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Review articles should provide a description and evaluative comparison
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INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 887

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INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 889

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890 TESOL QUARTERLY

CUMULATIVE INDEX
TESOL Quarterly, Volumes 39–40 (2005–2006)
Author Index
Alkhatnai, Mubarak. Review of Teaching Non-Western Contexts. Vol. 39, no. 2,

Culture: Perspectives in Practice (P. R. pp. 299–307.
Moran). Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 867–869. Belcher, Diane D. English for Specific
Allwright, Dick. From Teaching Points to Purposes: Teaching to Perceived Needs and
Learning Opportunities and Beyond. Imagined Futures in Worlds of Work, Study,
Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 9–31. and Everyday Life. Vol. 40, no. 1,
Anthony, Natasha, Hilliker-VanStrander, pp. 133–156.
Shannon, Tseng, Chi-Hua, You, Jieun, & Bigelow, Martha, delMas, Robert, Hansen,
Meskill, Carla. CALL: A Survey of K–12 Kit, & Tarone, Elaine. Literacy and the
Teacher Uses and Preferences. Vol. 40, Processing of Oral Recasts in SLA. Vol. 40,
no. 2, pp. 439–451. no. 4, pp. 665–689.
Armenta, Ireri. Review of Teaching Language Braine, George. The Challenge of Academic
and Content to Linguistically and Culturally Publishing: A Hong Kong Perspective.
Diverse Students: Principles, Ideas and Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 707–716.
Materials (Yu Ren Dong). Vol. 39, no. 4, Broussard, Kathleen M. Review of Essential
pp. 797–799. Linguistics: What You Need to Know to
Arteagoitia, Igone, Louguit, Mohammed, Teach Reading, ESL, Spelling, Phonics, and
Malabonga, Valerie, Kenyon, Dorry M., Grammar (D. E. Freeman & Y. S. Freeman).
& Howard, Elizabeth R. The Development Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 346–348.
of the English Developmental Contrastive Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Conclusion.
Spelling Test: A Tool for Investigating In Toward a More Inclusive Applied
Spanish Influence on English Spelling Linguistics and English Language Teaching:
Development. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 399–420. A Symposium. Vol. 39, no. 4, 745–748,
Bao, Hoang Tinh. Review of Learning 748–753.
Together: Children and Adults in a School Canagarajah, A. Suresh. TESOL at Forty: What
Community (B. Rogoff, C. G. Turkanis, & Are the Issues? Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 9–34.
L. Bartlett). Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 877–880. Canagarajah, A. Suresh, Makoni, Sinfree, Pakir,
Bashir-Ali, Khadar. Language Learning and the Anne, Menzes de Souza, Lynn Mario T.,
Definition of One’s Social, Cultural, and Omoniyi, Tope, Kamwangamalu, Nkonko
Racial Identity. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 628–639. M., & Karmani, Sohai. Toward a More
Baynham, Mike. Contingency and Agency in Inclusive Applied Linguistics and English
Adult ESOL Classes for Asylum Seekers. Language Teaching: A Symposium. Vol. 39,
Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 777–780. no. 4, 716–753.
Beckett, Gulbahar H., & MacPherson, Chang, Anna Ching-Shyang, & Read, John. The
Seonaigh. Comments on Nunan’s “The Effects of Listening Support on the Listening
Impact of English as a Global Language on Performance of EFL Learners. Vol. 40,
Educational Policies and Practices in the no. 2, pp. 375–397.
Asia Pacific Region.” Readers Respond: Chang, Huo-Tsan, Chen, Judy F., & Warden,
Researching the Impact of English on Clyde A. Motivators That Do Not Motivate:
Minority and Indigenous Languages in The Case of Chinese EFL Learners and the

891
Influence of Culture on Motivation. Vol. 39, Díaz-Rico, Lynne. Review of Antiracist
no. 4, pp. 609–633. Education (J. Kailin). Vol. 40, no. 3,
Chen, Judy F., Warden, Clyde A., & Chang, pp. 649–651.
Huo-Tsan. Motivators That Do Not Ellis, Rod. Comments on Rod Ellis’s “Current
Motivate: The Case of Chinese EFL Issues in the Teaching of Grammar: An
Learners and the Influence of Culture on SLA Perspective.” The Author Replies [to
Motivation. Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 609–633. R. Sheen]. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 833–837.
Cheong, Cheong-Hwa. Review of Teaching Ellis, Rod. Comments on Rod Ellis’s “Current
and Learning in Two Languages: Issues in the Teaching of Grammar: An
Bilingualism and Schooling in the SLA Perspective.” The Author Replies
United States (E. Garcia). Vol. 40, no. 2, [to M. Swan & C. Walter]. Vol. 40, no. 4,
pp. 460–462. pp. 839–840.
Chun, Dorothy. Review of Streaming Speech: Ellis, Rod. Current Issues in the Teaching of
Listening and Pronunciation for Grammar: An SLA Perspective. Vol. 40,
Advanced Learners of English [Software] no. 1, pp. 83–107.
(R. Cauldwell). Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 559–562. Fairbairn, Shelley B. Review of Language
Clemente, Angeles. Remembered Histories Assessment: Principles and Classroom
and Other Controversial Issues. Review of Practices (H. D. Brown). Vol. 39, no. 2,
America’s Second Tongue: American Indian pp. 344–346.
Education and the Ownership of English, Ferst, Phillipa. Review of Gateways to
1860–1900 (R. Spack), A History of English Academic Writing: Effective Sentences,
Language Teaching (Second Edition) Pararagraphs and Essays (A. Meyers).
(A. P. R Howatt. with H. G. Widdowson), Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 802–804.
and Controversies in Applied Linguistics Field, John. Intelligibility and the Listener: The
(B. Seidlhofer, Ed.). Vol. 39, no. 4, Role of Lexical Stress. Vol. 39, no. 3,
pp. 787–793. pp. 399–423.
Curran, Mary, & Stelluto, Donna. Folse, Keith S. The Effect of Type of Written
Opportunities for Adult ESOL Learners Exercise on L2 Vocabulary Retention.
to Revision and Envision Their Social Vol. 40, no. 2, 273–293.
Identities. Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 781–785. Frank, Natasha. Review of Making
Dauer, Rebecca M. The Lingua Franca Core: A Connections: An Interactive Approach to
New Model for Pronunciation Instruction? Academic Reading (2nd Edition) (K. J.
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 543–550. Pakenham). Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 800–802.
Davies, Matthew. Parlinguistic Focus on Form. Galindo Merino, Mar. Review of Adquisicion
Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 841–855. de segundas lenguas (Guía bibliográfica
Day, Elaine M. Review of Converging Worlds: 1957–2001) (V. S. García). Vol. 40, no. 2,
Play, Literacy, and Culture in Early pp. 453–455.
Childhood (M. Kendrick). Vol. 40, no. 4, Galloway, Ishbel. Computer Learner Corpora
pp. 870–872. and Their Pedagogical Application.
Deckert, Glenn. Review of Values in English Review of Second Language Writers’
language Teaching (B. Johnson). Vol. 40, Text (E. Hinkel) and Teaching Academic
no. 4, pp. 872–875. ESL Writing: Practical Techniques in
delMas, Robert, Hansen, Kit, Tarone, Elaine, Vocabulary and Grammar (E. Hinkel).
& Bigelow, Martha. Literacy and the Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 333–339.
Processing of Oral Recasts in SLA. Vol. 40, Gatbonton, Elizabeth, Trofimovich, Pavel, &
no. 4, pp. 665–689. Magid, Michael. Learners’ Ethnic Group
Derwing, Tracey M., & Munro, Murray J. Affiliation and L2 Pronunciation Accuracy:
Second Language Accent and Pronunciation A Sociolinguistic Investigation. Vol. 39,
Teaching: A Research-Based Approach. no. 3, pp. 489–511.
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 379–397. Gebhard, Meg. School Reform, Hybrid
Deterding, David. Listening to Estuary English Discourses, and Second Language
in Singapore. Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 425–440. Literacies. Vol. 39, no. 2., pp. 187–210.
892 TESOL QUARTERLY

Gelfer, Jeffrey, Perkins, Peggy, & Xu, Yaoying. Howard, Elizabeth R., Arteagoitia, Igone,
Using Peer Tutoring to Increase Social Louguit, Mohammed, Malabonga, Valerie,
Interactions in Early Schooling. Vol. 39, & Kenyon, Dorry M. The Development
no. 1, pp. 83–106. of the English Developmental Contrastive
Golombek, Paula, & Rehn Jordan, Stephanie. Spelling Test: A Tool for Investigating
Becoming “Black Lambs” Not “Parrots”: A Spanish Influence on English Spelling
Poststructuralist Concept of Intelligibility Development. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 399–420.
and Identity. Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 513–533. Hu, Guangwei. Contextual Influences on
Hammond, Kay. More Than a Game: A Critical Instructional Practices: A Chinese Case for
Discourse Analysis of a Racial Inequality an Ecological Approach to ELT. Vol. 39,
Exercise in Japan. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 545–571. no. 4, pp. 635–660.
Haneda, Mari. Classroom Communities of Ingram, John, & Nguyen, Thu T. A. Vietnamese
Practice: A Re-Evaluation. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. Acquisition of English Word Stress. Vol. 39,
807–817. no. 2, pp. 309–319.
Hansen, Jane. Review of An Island of English: Inutsuka, Kumiko, Riney, Timothy, J., &
Teaching ESL in Chinatown (D. Fu). Takagi, Naoyuki. Phonetic Parameters and
Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 341–342. Perceptual Judgments of Accent in English
Hansen, Kit, Tarone, Elaine, Bigelow, Martha, & by American and Japanese Listeners.
delMas, Robert. Literacy and the Processing Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 441–466.
of Oral Recasts in SLA. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. James, Mark Andrew. Transfer of Learning
665–689. From a University Content-Based EAP
Hanuer, David Ian, & Newman, Michael. Course. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 783–806.
The NCATE/TESOL Teacher Education Jenkins, Jennifer, & Suzuki, Ayako. Comments
Standards: A Critical Review. Vol. 39, no. 4, on Jennifer Jenkins’s “Implementing
pp. 753–764. an International Approach to English
Hart, Juliet E. Review of Language Minority Pronunciation: The Role of Teacher
Students in American Schools: An Education Attitudes and Identity.” The Author Replies
in English (H. D. Adamson). Vol. 40, no. 4, [to M. Kubota]. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 609–613.
pp. 875–877. Jenkins, Jennifer. Current Perspectives on
Hart, Juliet E. Review of Room for Talk: Teaching Teaching World Englishes and English
and Learning in a Multilingual Kindergarten as a Lingua Franca. Vol. 40, no. 1,
(R. Fassler). Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 129–131. pp. 157–181.
Hawkins, Margaret R. Becoming a Student: Jenkins, Jennifer. Implementing an International
Identity Work and Academic Literacies in Approach to English Pronunciation: The
Early Schooling. Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 59–82. Role of Teacher Attitudes and Identity.
Hayes-Harb, Rachel. Native Speakers of Arabic Vol. 39, no. 3, 535–543.
and ESL Texts: Evidence for the Transfer Johnson, Karen E. The Sociocultural Turn and
of Written Word Identification Processes. Its Challenges for Second Language Teacher
Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 321–339. Education. Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 235–257.
Hill, Kent. Comments on Jane Zuengler and Jones, Shelley. Review of English in Africa
Elizabeth R. Miller’s “Cognitive and After the Cold War (A. M. Mazrui) and
Sociocultural Perspectives: Two Parallel Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and
SLA Worlds?” A Reader Responds . . . A Politics in Africa and the Americas
Sociocognitive Perspective: The Best of (S. Makoni, G. Smitherman, A. F. Ball, A. K.
Both Worlds. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 819–826. Spears, Eds.). Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 329–333.
Hilliker-VanStrander, Shannon, Tseng, Chi- Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M. Mother Tongues
Hua, You, Jieun, Meskill, Carla, & Anthony, and Language Planning in Africa. In Toward
Natasha. CALL: A Survey of K–12 Teacher a More Inclusive Applied Linguistics and
Uses and Preferences. Vol. 40, no. 2, English Language Teaching: A Symposium.
pp. 439–451. Vol. 39, no. 4, 734–738, 748–753.
Hinkel, Eli. Current Perspectives on Teaching Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M., Karmani, Sohai,
the Four Skills. Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 109–131. Canagarajah, A. Suresh, Makoni, Sinfree,
CUMULATIVE INDEX 893

Pakir, Anne, Menzes de Souza, Lynn Mario Lee, Siok H., & Muncie, James. From
T., & Omoniyi, Tope. Toward a More Receptive to Productive: Improving
Inclusive Applied Linguistics and English ESL Learners’ Use of Vocabulary in a
Language Teaching: A Symposium. Vol. 39, Postreading Composition Task. Vol. 40,
no. 4, 716–753. no. 2, pp. 295–320.
Karmani, Sohai. TESOL in a Time of Terror. Leibowitz, Brenda. Learning in an Additional
In Toward a More Inclusive Applied Language in a Multilingual Society: A South
Linguistics and English Language Teaching: African Case Study on University-Level
A Symposium. Vol. 39, no. 4, 738–744, Writing. Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 661–681.
748–753. Leung, Constant, & Lewkowicz, Jo.
Karmani, Sohai, Canagarajah, A. Suresh, Expanding Horizons and Unresolved
Makoni, Sinfree, Pakir, Anne, Menzes de Conundrums: Language Testing and
Souza, Lynn Mario T., Omoniyi, Tope, & Assessment. Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 211–234.
Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M. Toward a More Levis, John M. Changing Contexts and Shifting
Inclusive Applied Linguistics and English Paradigms in Pronuniciation Teaching.
Language Teaching: A Symposium. Vol. 39, Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 369–377.
no. 4, 716–753. Lewkowicz, Jo, & Leung, Constant.
Kataoka, Minoru. Review of English Language Expanding Horizons and Unresolved
Learning and Technology (C. A. Chapelle). Conundrums: Language Testing and
Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 342–344. Assessment. Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 211–234.
Kenyon, Dorry M., Howard, Elizabeth R., Lin, Angel, & Kubota, Ryuko. Race and
Arteagoitia, Igone, Louguit, Mohammed, & TESOL: Introduction to Concepts and
Malabonga, Valerie. The Development of the Theories. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 471–493.
English Developmental Contrastive Spelling Ling, Shi, Wang, Wenyu, & Xu, Jinwei.
Test: A Tool for Investigating Spanish Publication Culture of Foreign Language
Influence on English Spelling Development. Education Journals in China. Vol. 39,
Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 399–420. no. 4, pp. 765–776.
Kern, Richard. Perspectives on Technology in Louguit, Mohammed, Malabonga, Valerie,
Learning and Teaching Languages. Vol. 40, Kenyon, Dorry M., Howard, Elizabeth
no. 1, pp. 183–210. R., & Arteagoitia, Igone. The Development
Kim, Youngkyu. Effects of Input Elaboration on of the English Developmental Contrastive
Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading Spelling Test: A Tool for Investigating
by Korean Learners of English as a Foreign Spanish Influence on English Spelling
Language. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 341–373. Development. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 399–420.
Kubota, Mitsuo. Comments on Jennifer Jenkins’s Low, Ee Ling. A Cross-Varietal Comparison
“Implementing an International Approach to of Deaccenting and Given Information:
English Pronunciation: The Role of Teacher Implications for Intenrational Intelligibility
Attitudes and Identity.” A Reader Responds. and Pronunciation Teaching. Vol. 40,
Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 604–609. no. 4, pp. 739–761.
Kubota, Ryuko, & Lin, Angel. Race and Lynch, Brian, & Shaw, Peter. Portfolios,
TESOL: Introduction to Concepts and Power, and Ethics. Vol. 39, no. 2,
Theories. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 471–493. pp. 262–297.
Kumaravadivelu, B. TESOL Methods: Changing MacPherson, Seonaigh, & Beckett, Gulbahar H.
Tracks, Challenging Trends. Vol. 40, no. 1, Comments on Nunan’s “The Impact of
59–81. English as a Global Language on Educational
Lee, Ena, & Simon-Maeda, Andrea. Racialized Policies and Practices in the Asia Pacific
Research Identities in ESL/EFL Research. Region.” Readers Respond: Researching
Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 573–594. the Impact of English on Minority and
Lee, Hyeong-Jong. Review of Testcraft: A Indigenous Languages in Non-Western
Teacher’s Guide to Writing and Using Contexts. Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 299–307.
Language Test Specifications (F. Davidson MacPherson, Seonaigh. Negotiating Language
& B. K. Lynch). Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 131–133. Contact and Identity Change in Developing
894 TESOL QUARTERLY

Tibetan-English Bilingualism. Vol. 39, no. 4, Miller, Elizabeth R., & Zuengler, Jane.
pp. 585–607. Cognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives:
Magid, Michael, Gatbonton, Elizabeth, & Two Parallel SLA Worlds? Vol. 40. no. 1,
Trofimovich, Pavel. Learners’ Ethnic Group pp. 35–58.
Affiliation and L2 Pronunciation Accuracy: Morita, Naoko. Comments on Naoko Morita’s
A Sociolinguistic Investigation. Vol. 39, “Negotiating Participation and Identity in
no. 3, pp. 489–511. Second Language Academic Communities.”
Makoni, Sinfree. Introduction. Toward a More The Author Replies [to Trent]. . . Studying
Inclusive Applied Linguistics and English Power, Agency, and Transformation in
Language Teaching: A Symposium. Vol. 39, Classroom Settings. Vol. 40, no. 2,
no. 4, 716–719, 748–753. pp. 435–437.
Makoni, Sinfree, Pakir, Anne, Menzes de Motha, Suhanthie. Racializing ESOL Teacher
Souza, Lynn Mario T., Omoniyi, Tope, Identities in U.S. K–12 Public Schools.
Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M., Karmani, Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 495–518.
Sohai, & Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Toward Moussu, Lucie. Review of Learning and
a More Inclusive Applied Linguistics and Teaching From Experience: Perspectives on
English Language Teaching: A Symposium. Nonnative English Speaking Professionals
Vol. 39, no. 4, 716–753. (L. Kamhi-Stein). Vol. 40, no. 2,
Malabonga, Valerie, Kenyon, Dorry M., pp. 455–457.
Howard, Elizabeth R., Arteagoitia, Igone, Muncie, James, & Lee, Siok H. From Receptive
& Louguit, Mohammed. The Development to Productive: Improving ESL Learners’ Use
of the English Developmental Contrastive of Vocabulary in a Postreading Composition
Spelling Test: A Tool for Investigating Task. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 295–320.
Spanish Influence on English Spelling Munro, Murray J., & Derwing, Tracey M.
Development. Vol. 40, no. 2, Second Language Accent and Pronunciation
pp. 399–420. Teaching: A Research-Based Approach.
Menard-Warwick, Julia. Intergenerational Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 379–397.
Trajectories and Sociopolitical Context: Nemtchinova, Ekaterina. Host Teachers’
Latina Immigrants in Adult ESL. Vol. 39, Evaluations of Nonnative-English-Speaking
no. 2, pp. 165–185. Teacher Trainees—A Perspective from the
Menzes de Souza, Lynn Mario T. A Change Classroom. Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 235–261.
of Skin: The Grammar of Indigenous Newman, Michael, & Hanuer, David Ian.
Communities in Brazil. In Toward a More The NCATE/TESOL Teacher Education
Inclusive Applied Linguistics and English Standards: A Critical Review. Vol. 39,
Language Teaching: A Symposium. no. 4, pp. 753–764.
Vol. 39, no. 4, 724–728, 748–753. Nguyen, Thu T. A., & Ingram, John.
Menzes de Souza, Lynn Mario T., Omoniyi, Vietnamese Acquisition of English Word
Tope, Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M., Stress. Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 309–319.
Karmani, Sohai, Canagarajah, A. Suresh, Nunan, David. Comments on Nunan’s “ The
Makoni, Sinfree, & Pakir, Anne. Toward Impact of English as a Global Language on
a More Inclusive Applied Linguistics and Educational Policies and Practices in the
English Language Teaching: A Symposium. Asia Pacific Region.” The Author Replies
Vol. 39, no. 4, 716–753. [to MacPherson & Beckett]. Vol. 39,
Meskill, Carla, Anthony, Natasha, Hilliker- no. 2, pp. 307–308.
VanStrander, Shannon, Tseng, Chi-Hua, Omoniyi, Tope. Toward a Re-Theorization of
& You, Jieun. CALL: A Survey of K–12 Code Switching. In Toward a More Inclusive
Teacher Uses and Preferences. Vol. 40, Applied Linguistics and English Language
no. 2, pp. 439–451. Teaching: A Symposium. Vol. 39, no. 4,
Michael-Luna, Sara. Review of Critical 729–734, 748–753.
Pedagogies and Language Learning Omoniyi, Tope, Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M.,
(B. Norton & K. Toohey, Eds.). Vol. 39, Karmani, Sohai, Canagarajah, A. Suresh,
no. 1, pp. 126–129. Makoni, Sinfree, Pakir, Anne, & Menzes

de Souza, Lynn Mario T. Toward a More Read, John, & Chang, Anna Ching-Shyang.
Inclusive Applied Linguistics and English The Effects of Listening Support on the
Language Teaching: A Symposium. Vol. 39, Listening Performance of EFL Learners.
no. 4, 716–753. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 375–397.
Pakir, Anne. Applied Linguistics Proper? Rehn Jordan, Stephanie, & Golombek, Paula.
Relocation, Reorientation, and Realignment. Becoming “Black Lambs” Not “Parrots”: A
In Toward a More Inclusive Applied Poststructuralist Concept of Intelligibility
Linguistics and English Language Teaching: and Identity. Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 513–533.
A Symposium. Vol. 39, no. 4, 720–724, Rich, Sarah, & Troudi, Salah. Hard Times:
748–753. Arab TESOL Students’ Experiences of
Pakir, Anne, Menzes de Souza, Lynn Mario T., Racialization and Othering in the United
Omoniyi, Tope, Kamwangamalu, Kingdom. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 615–627.
Nkonko M., Karmani, Sohai, Canagarajah, Richard, Dara, Wu, Su Hui, Scales, Julie, &
A. Suresh, & Makoni, Sinfree. Toward a Wennerstrom, Ann. Language Learners’
More Inclusive Applied Linguistics and Perceptions of Accent. Vol. 40, no. 4,
English Language Teaching: A Symposium. pp. 715–738.
Vol. 39, no. 4, 716–753. Riney, Timothy, J., Takagi, Naoyuki, &
Palfreyman, David. Othering in an English Inutsuka, Kumiko. Phonetic Parameters and
Language Program. Vol. 39, no. 2, Perceptual Judgments of Accent in English
pp. 211–233. by American and Japanese Listeners.
Parmegiani, Andrea. On Race, Language, Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 441–466.
Power and Identity: Understanding Rosa, Joao J. Review of The Hegemony of
the Intricacies through Multi-cultural English (D. Macedo, B. Dendrinos, &
Communication, Language Policies, and the P. Gounari). Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 125–126.
Ebonics Debate. Review of Intercultural Scales, Julie, Wennerstrom, Ann, Richard,
Communication: An Advanced Resource Dara, & Wu, Su Hui. Language Learners’
Book (A. Holliday, M. Hyde, & J. Kullman, Perceptions of Accent. Vol. 40, no. 4,
Eds.), Language Policy: Theory and pp. 715–738.
Method (T. Ricento, Ed.), and Ebonics: Schmenk, Barbara. Globalizing Learner
The Urban Education Debate (2nd Edition) Autonomy. Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 107–118.
(J. Ramirez, T. Wiley, G. de Klerk, E. Lee, Séror, Jérémie. Computers and Qualitative Data
& W. Wright Eds.). Vol. 40, no. 3, Analysis: Paper, Pens, and Highlighters vs.
pp. 641–648. Screen, Mouse, and Keyboard. Vol. 39,
Pawan, Faridah, & Thomalla, Terri. Making no. 2, 321–328.
the Invisible Visible: A Responsive Setter, Jane. Speech Rhythm in World
Evaluation Study of ESL/Spanish Language Englishes: The Case of Hong Kong. Vol. 40,
Services for Immigrants in a Small Rural no. 4, pp. 763–782.
County in Indiana. Vol. 39, no. 4, Shaw, Peter, & Lynch, Brian. Portfolios,
pp. 683–705. Power, and Ethics. Vol. 39, no. 2,
Perkins, Peggy, & Xu, Yaoying, & Gelfer, pp. 262–297.
Jeffrey. Using Peer Tutoring to Increase Sheen, Ron. Comments on Rod Ellis’s “Current
Social Interactions in Early Schooling. Issues in the Teaching of Grammar: Am
Vol. 39. no. 1, pp. 83–106. SLA Perspective.” A Reader Responds.
Petrić, Bojana. Review of Global Issues Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 828–832.
(R. Sampedro & S. Hillyard). Vol. 39, Shehadeh, Ali. Review of Task-based Language
no. 2, pp. 348–351. Learning and Teaching (R. Ellis). Vol. 39,
Pickering, Lucy. Review of Connected Speech no. 4, pp. 795–797.
[Software] (V. W. Westwood & Sifakis, Nicos, & Sougari, Areti-Maria.
H. Kaufmann). Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 563–565. Pronunciation Issues and EIL Pedagogy in
Ramanathan, Vaidehi. Seepages, Contact the Periphery: A Survey of Greek State
Zones, and Amalgam: Internationalizing School Teachers’ Beliefs. Vol. 39, no. 3,
TESOL. Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 119–123. pp. 467–488.
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Simon-Maeda, Andrea, & Lee, Ena. Taylor, Lisa. Wrestling With Race: The
Racialized Research Identities in ESL/EFL Implications of Integrative Antiracism
Research. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 573–594. Education for Immigrant ESL Youth.
Smith, Bryan. The Relationship Between Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 519–544.
Negotiated Interaction, Learner Uptake, Tembe, Juliet. Teacher Training and the English
and Lexical Acquisition in Task-Based Language in Uganda. Vol. 40, no. 4,
Computer-Mediated Communication. pp. 857–861.
Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 33–58. Thomalla, Terri, & Pawan, Faridah. Making the
Sougari, Areti-Maria, & Sifakis, Nicos. Invisible Visible: A Responsive Evaluation
Pronunciation Issues and EIL Pedagogy Study of ESL/Spanish Language Services
in the Periphery: A Survey of Greek State for Immigrants in a Small Rural County in
School Teachers’ Beliefs. Vol. 39, no. 3, Indiana. Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 683–705.
pp. 467–488. Trent, John. Comments on Naoko Morita’s
Spack, Ruth. English Lessons. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. “Negotiating Participation and Identity in
595–604. Second Language Academic Communities.”
Stelluto, Donna, & Curran, Mary. A Reader Responds . . . Speaking in a
Opportunities for Adult ESOL Learners Foreign Language Academic Community
to Revision and Envision Their Social Of Practice: Toward A Holistic
Identities. Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 781–785. Understanding. Vol. 40, no. 2,
Stewart, Timothy. Review of Reflecting on pp. 430–435.
Classroom Communication in Asia Trofimovich, Pavel, Magid, Michael, &
(T. S. C. Farrell). Vol. 39, no. 4, Gatbonton, Elizabeth. Learners’ Ethnic
pp. 804–806. Group Affiliation and L2 Pronunciation
Stewart, Timothy. Teacher-Researcher Accuracy: A Sociolinguistic Investigation.
Collaboration or Teachers’ Research? Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 489–511.
Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 421–430. Troudi, Salah, & Rich, Sarah. Hard Times:
Stoller, Fredricka L. Review of Extensive Arab TESOL Students’ Experiences of
Reading Activities for Teaching Language Racialization and Othering in the United
(J. Bamford & R. R. Day, Eds.). Vol. 39, Kingdom. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 615–627.
no. 2, pp. 351–353. Tseng, Chi-Hua, You, Jieun, Meskill, Carla,
Suzuki, Ayako, & Jenkins, Jennifer. Anthony, Natasha, & Hilliker-VanStrander,
Comments on Jennifer Jenkins’s Shannon. CALL: A Survey of K–12 Teacher
“Implementing an International Approach Uses and Preferences. Vol. 40, no. 2,
to English Pronunciation: The Role of pp. 439–451.
Teacher Attitudes and Identity.” The Author Vance, Noelle. Review of Second Language
Replies [to M. Kubota]. Vol. 40, Teacher Education: International
no. 3, pp. 609–613. Perspectives (D. J. Tedick). Vol. 40, no. 4,
Swan, Michael, & Walter, Catherine. Comments pp. 880–882.
on Rod Ellis’s “Current Issues in the Walker, Robin. Using Student-Produced
Teaching of Grammar: An SLA Recordings With Monolingual Groups
Perspective.” Readers Respond: “Teach the to Provide Effective, Individualized
Whole of the Grammar.” Vol. 40, no. 4, Pronunciation Practice. Vol. 39, no. 3,
pp. 837–839. pp. 550–558.
Takagi, Naoyuki, Inutsuka, Kumiko, & Riney, Walter, Catherine, & Swan, Michael. Comments
Timothy, J. Phonetic Parameters and on Rod Ellis’s “Current Issues in the Teaching
Perceptual Judgments of Accent in English of Grammar: Am SLA Perspective.” Readers
by American and Japanese Listeners. Respond: “Teach the Whole of the Grammar.”
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 441–466. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 837–839.
Tarone, Elaine, Bigelow, Martha, delMas, Wang, Wenyu, Xu, Jinwei, & Ling, Shi.
Robert, & Hansen, Kit. Literacy and the Publication Culture of Foreign Language
Processing of Oral Recasts in SLA. Vol. 40, Education Journals in China. Vol. 39, no. 4,
no. 4, pp. 665–689. pp. 765–776.

Warden, Clyde A., Chang, Huo-Tsan, & Chen, Xu, Yaoying, Gelfer, Jeffrey, & Perkins, Peggy.
Judy F. Motivators That Do Not Motivate: Using Peer Tutoring to Increase Social
The Case of Chinese EFL Learners and the Interactions in Early Schooling. Vol. 39.,
Influence of Culture on Motivation. Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 83–106.
no. 4, pp. 609–633. Yeh, Chun-Chun. Teaching, Learning and
Wennerstrom, Ann, Richard, Dara, Wu, Researching in an ESL Context (C. L.
Su Hui, & Scales, Julie. Language Learners’ Gunn). Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 882–884.
Perceptions of Accent. Vol. 40, no. 4, You, Jieun, Meskill, Carla, Anthony, Natasha,
pp. 715–738. Hilliker-VanStrander, Shannon, & Tseng,
Wood, David. Review of Formulaic Chi-Hua. CALL: A Survey of K–12 Teacher
Sequences: Acquisition, Processing and Uses and Preferences. Vol. 40, no. 2,
Use (N. Schmitt). Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 439–451.
pp. 457–460. Zuengler, Jane, & Miller, Elizabeth R.
Wu, Su Hui, Scales, Julie, Wennerstrom, Ann, Cognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives:
& Richard, Dara. Language Learners’ Two Parallel SLA Worlds? Vol. 40. no. 1,
Perceptions of Accent. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 35–58.
pp. 715–738. Zuengler, Jane. Comments on Jane Zuengler
Xu, Jinwei, Ling, Shi, & Wang, Wenyu. and Elizabeth R. Miller’s “Cognitive and
Publication Culture of Foreign Language Sociocultural Perspectives: Two Parallel
Education Journals in China. Vol. 39, no. 4, SLA Worlds?” The Authors Reply [to K.
pp. 765–776. Hill]. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 826–828.
Topic Index
BILINGUALISM, BILINGUAL Yeh, Chun-Chun. Teaching, Learning

EDUCATION and Researching in an ESL Context
Bao, Hoang Tinh. Review of Learning Together: (C. L. Gunn). Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 882–884.
Children and Adults in a School Community
(B. Rogoff, C. G. Turkanis, & L. Bartlett). CLASSROOM-CENTERED RESEARCH
Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 877–880. (CLASSROOM PROCESSES)
Cheong, Cheong-Hwa. Review of Teaching Allwright, Dick. From Teaching Points to
and Learning in Two Languages: Learning Opportunities and Beyond.
Bilingualism and Schooling in the United Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 9–31.
States (E. Garcia). Vol. 40, no. 2, Bashir-Ali, Khadar. Language Learning and the
pp. 460–462. Definition of One’s Social, Cultural, and
Gatbonton, Elizabeth, Trofimovich, Pavel, & Racial Identity. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 628–639.
Magid, Michael. Learners’ Ethnic Group Baynham, Mike. Contingency and Agency in
Affiliation and L2 Pronunciation Accuracy: Adult ESOL Classes for Asylum Seekers.
A Sociolinguistic Investigation. Vol. 39, Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 777–780.
no. 3, pp. 489–511. Curran, Mary, & Stelluto, Donna. Opportunities
Hart, Juliet E. Review of Language Minority for Adult ESOL Learners to Revision and
Students in American Schools: An Education Envision Their Social Identities. Vol. 39,
in English (H. D. Adamson). Vol. 40, no. 4, no. 4, pp. 781–785.
pp. 875–877. Davies, Matthew. Parlinguistic Focus on Form.
MacPherson, Seonaigh. Negotiating Language Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 841–855.
Contact and Identity Change in Developing Haneda, Mari. Classroom Communities of
Tibetan-English Bilingualism. Vol. 39, no. 4, Practice: A Re-Evaluation. Vol. 40, no. 4,
pp. 585–607. pp. 807–817.
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Morita, Naoko. Comments on Naoko Morita’s CONTRASTIVE STUDIES
“Negotiating Participation and Identity in Howard, Elizabeth R., Arteagoitia, Igone,
Second Language Academic Communities.” Louguit, Mohammed, Malabonga, Valerie,
The Author Replies [to Trent]. . . Studying & Kenyon, Dorry M. The Development
Power, Agency, and Transformation in of the English Developmental Contrastive
Classroom Settings. Vol. 40, no. 2, Spelling Test: A Tool for Investigating
pp. 435–437. Spanish Influence on English Spelling
Sifakis, Nicos, & Sougari, Areti-Maria. Development. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 399–420.
Pronunciation Issues and EIL Pedagogy
in the Periphery: A Survey of Greek State CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
School Teachers’ Beliefs. Vol. 39, no. 3,
Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Conclusion. In Toward
pp. 467–488.
a More Inclusive Applied Linguistics and
Stewart, Timothy. Review of Reflecting on
English Language Teaching: A Symposium.
Classroom Communication in Asia (T. S. C.
Vol. 39, no. 4, 745–748, 748–753.
Farrell). Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 804–806.
Curran, Mary, & Stelluto, Donna. Opportunities
Stewart, Timothy. Teacher-Researcher
for Adult ESOL Learners to Revision and
Collaboration or Teachers’ Research?
Envision Their Social Identities. Vol. 39,
Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 421–430.
no. 4, pp. 781–785.
Trent, John. Comments on Naoko Morita’s
Hammond, Kay. More Than a Game: A Critical
“Negotiating Participation and Identity in
Discourse Analysis of a Racial Inequality
Second Language Academic Communities.”
Exercise in Japan. Vol. 40, no. 3,
A Reader Responds . . . Speaking in a
pp. 545–571.
Foreign Language Academic Community Of
Kubota, Ryuko, & Lin, Angel. Race and
Practice: Toward A Holistic Understanding.
TESOL: Introduction to Concepts and
Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 430–435.
Theories. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 471–493.
Xu, Yaoying, Gelfer, Jeffrey, & Perkins, Peggy.
Lee, Ena, & Simon-Maeda, Andrea. Racialized
Using Peer Tutoring to Increase Social
Research Identities in ESL/EFL Research.
Interactions in Early Schooling. Vol. 39,
Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 573–594.
no. 1, pp. 83–106.
Makoni, Sinfree. Introduction. Toward a More
Inclusive Applied Linguistics and English
COMPUTER-ASSISTED Language Teaching: A Symposium. Vol. 39,
LANGUAGE LEARNING no. 4, 716–719, 748–753.
Kataoka, Minoru. Review of English Language Makoni, Sinfree, Pakir, Anne, Menzes de
Learning and Technology (C. A. Chapelle). Souza, Lynn Mario T., Omoniyi, Tope,
Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 342–344. Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M., Karmani,
Kern, Richard. Perspectives on Technology in Sohai, & Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Toward
Learning and Teaching Languages. Vol. 40, a More Inclusive Applied Linguistics and
no. 1, pp. 183–210. English Language Teaching: A Symposium.
Meskill, Carla, Anthony, Natasha, Hilliker- Vol. 39, no. 4, 716–753.
VanStrander, Shannon, Tseng, Chi-Hua, Menzes de Souza, Lynn Mario T. A Change
& You, Jieun. CALL: A Survey of K–12 of Skin: The Grammar of Indigenous
Teacher Uses and Preferences. Vol. 40, Communities in Brazil. In Toward a More
no. 2, pp. 439–451. Inclusive Applied Linguistics and English
Séror, Jérémie. Computers and Qualitative Data Language Teaching: A Symposium. Vol. 39,
Analysis: Paper, Pens, and Highlighters vs. no. 4, 724–728, 748–753.
Screen, Mouse, and Keyboard. Vol. 39, Michael-Luna, Sara. Review of Critical
no. 2, 321–328. Pedagogies and Language Learning
Smith, Bryan. The Relationship Between (B. Norton & K. Toohey, Eds.). Vol. 39,
Negotiated Interaction, Learner Uptake, no. 1, pp. 126–129.
and Lexical Acquisition in Task-Based Motha, Suhanthie. Racializing ESOL Teacher
Computer-Mediated Communication. Identities in U.S. K–12 Public Schools.
Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 33–58. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 495–518.

Palfreyman, David. Othering in an English Hu, Guangwei. Contextual Influences on
Language Program. Vol. 39, no. 2, Instructional Practices: A Chinese Case for
pp. 211–233. an Ecological Approach to ELT. Vol. 39,
Rich, Sarah, & Troudi, Salah. Hard Times: no. 4, pp. 635–660.
Arab TESOL Students’ Experiences of Jenkins, Jennifer. Current Perspectives on
Racialization and Othering in the United Teaching World Englishes and English
Kingdom. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 615–627. as a Lingua Franca. Vol. 40, no. 1,
Stewart, Timothy. Review of Reflecting on pp. 157–181.
Classroom Communication in Asia (T. S. C. Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M. Mother Tongues
Farrell). Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 804–806. and Language Planning in Africa. In Toward
Taylor, Lisa. Wrestling With Race: The a More Inclusive Applied Linguistics and
Implications of Integrative Antiracism English Language Teaching: A Symposium.
Education for Immigrant ESL Youth. Vol. 39, no. 4, 734–738, 748–753.
Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 519–544. MacPherson, Seonaigh. Negotiating Language
Contact and Identity Change in Developing
CURRICULUM, SYLLABUS DESIGN Tibetan-English Bilingualism. Vol. 39,
Dauer, Rebecca M. The Lingua Franca Core: A no. 4, pp. 585–607.
New Model for Pronunciation Instruction? Makoni, Sinfree, Pakir, Anne, Menzes de
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 543–550. Souza, Lynn Mario T., Omoniyi, Tope,
Levis, John M. Changing Contexts and Shifting Kamwangamalu, Nkonko M., Karmani,
Paradigms in Pronunciation Teaching. Sohai, & Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Toward
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 369–377. a More Inclusive Applied Linguistics and
English Language Teaching: A Symposium.
DISCOURSE, PRAGMATICS Vol. 39, no. 4, 716–753.
Nunan, David. Comments on Nunan’s “The
Hammond, Kay. More Than a Game: A Critical
Impact of English as a Global Language on
Discourse Analysis of a Racial Inequality
Educational Policies and Practices in the
Exercise in Japan. Vol. 40, no. 3,
Asia Pacific Region.” The Author Replies
pp. 545–571.
[to MacPherson & Beckett]. Vol. 39, no. 2,
pp. 307–308.
ENGLISH FOR SPECIAL PURPOSES,
Pawan, Faridah, & Thomalla, Therese Groff.
EST, TECHNICAL WRITING
Making the Invisible Visible: A Responsive
Belcher, Diane D. English for Specific Purposes: Evaluation Study of ESL/Spanish Language
Teaching to Perceived Needs and Imagined Services for Immigrants in a Small Rural
Futures in Worlds of Work, Study, County in Indiana. Vol. 39, no. 4,
and Everyday Life. Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 683–705.
pp. 133–156.
James, Mark Andrew. Transfer of Learning LEXICON, VOCABULARY USAGE
From a University Content-Based EAP AND TEACHING
Course. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 783–806.
Folse, Keith S. The Effect of Type of Written
Exercise on L2 Vocabulary Retention.
LANGUAGE POLICY, Vol. 40, no. 2, 273–293.
LANGUAGE PLANNING Hayes-Harb, Rachel. Native Speakers of Arabic
Armenta, Ireri. Review of Teaching Language and ESL Texts: Evidence for the Transfer of
and Content to Linguistically and Culturally Written Word Identification Processes.
Diverse Students: Principles, Ideas and Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 321–339.
Materials (Yu Ren Dong). Vol. 39, no. 4, Kim, Youngkyu. Effects of Input Elaboration on
pp. 797–799. Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading
Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Conclusion. In Toward by Korean Learners of English as a Foreign
a More Inclusive Applied Linguistics and Language. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 341–373.
English Language Teaching: A Symposium. Lee, Siok H., & Muncie, James. From Receptive
Vol. 39, no. 4, 745–748, 748–753. to Productive: Improving ESL Learners’ Use
900 TESOL QUARTERLY

of Vocabulary in a Postreading Composition Menzes de Souza, Lynn Mario T. A Change
Task. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 295–320. of Skin: The Grammar of Indigenous
Communities in Brazil. In Toward a More
Inclusive Applied Linguistics and English
LISTENING
Language Teaching: A Symposium. Vol. 39,
Chang, Anna Ching-Shyang, & Read, John. The no. 4, 724–728, 748–753.
Effects of Listening Support on the Listening
Performance of EFL Learners. Vol. 40,
no. 2, pp. 375–397. METHODS, MATERIALS
Chun, Dorothy. Review of Streaming Speech: Allwright, Dick. From Teaching Points to
Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learning Opportunities and Beyond. Vol.
Learners of English [Software] 39, no. 1, pp. 9–31.
(R. Cauldwell). Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 559–562. Armenta, Ireri. Review of Teaching Language
Deterding, David. Listening to Estuary English and Content to Linguistically and Culturally
in Singapore. Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 425–440. Diverse Students: Principles, Ideas and
Field, John. Intelligibility and the Listener: The Materials (Yu Ren Dong). Vol. 39, no. 4,
Role of Lexical Stress. Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 797–799.
pp. 399–423. Frank, Natasha. Review of Making Connections:
Hinkel, Eli. Current Perspectives on Teaching An Interactive Approach to Academic
the Four Skills. Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 109–131. Reading (2nd Edition) (K. J. Pakenham).
Riney, Timothy, J., Takagi, Naoyuki, & Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 800–802.
Inutsuka, Kumiko. Phonetic Parameters and Hu, Guangwei. Contextual Influences on
Perceptual Judgments of Accent in English Instructional Practices: A Chinese Case for
by American and Japanese Listeners. an Ecological Approach to ELT. Vol. 39,
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 441–466. no. 4, pp. 635–660.
Kumaravadivelu, B. TESOL Methods: Changing
Tracks, Challenging Trends. Vol. 40, no. 1,
LITERACY
59–81.
Bigelow, Martha, delMas, Robert, Hansen, Ramanathan, Vaidehi. Seepages, Contact Zones,
Kit, & Tarone, Elaine. Literacy and the and Amalgam: Internationalizing TESOL.
Processing of Oral Recasts in SLA. Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 119–123.
Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 665–689. Shehadeh, Ali. Review of Task-based Language
Braine, George. The Challenge of Academic Learning and Teaching (R. Ellis). Vol. 39,
Publishing: A Hong Kong Perspective. no. 4, pp. 795–797.
Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 707–716. Walker, Robin. Using Student-Produced
Folse, Keith S. The Effect of Type of Written Recordings With Monolingual Groups
Exercise on L2 Vocabulary Retention. to Provide Effective, Individualized
Vol. 40, no. 2, 273–293. Pronunciation Practice. Vol. 39, no. 3,
Gebhard, Meg. School Reform, Hybrid pp. 550–558.
Discourses, and Second Language Literacies.
Vol, 39, no. 2., pp. 187–210.
Hayes-Harb, Rachel. Native Speakers of Arabic PHONOLOGY, PRONUNCIATION
and ESL Texts: Evidence for the Transfer of TEACHING
Written Word Identification Processes. Chun, Dorothy. Review of Streaming Speech:
Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 321–339. Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced
Leibowitz, Brenda. Learning in an Additional Learners of English [Software]
Language in a Multilingual Society: A South (R. Cauldwell). Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 559–562.
African Case Study on University-Level Derwing, Tracey M., & Munro, Murray J.
Writing. Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 661–681. Second Language Accent and Pronunciation
Ling, Shi, Wang, Wenyu, & Xu, Jinwei. Teaching: A Research-Based Approach.
Publication Culture of Foreign Language Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 379–397.
Education Journals in China. Vol. 39, no. 4, Deterding, David. Listening to Estuary English
pp. 765–776. in Singapore. Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 425–440.

Dauer, Rebecca M. The Lingua Franca Core: A Sifakis, Nicos, & Sougari, Areti-Maria.
New Model for Pronunciation Instruction? Pronunciation Issues and EIL Pedagogy
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 543–550. in the Periphery: A Survey of Greek State
Field, John. Intelligibility and the Listener: The School Teachers’ Beliefs. Vol. 39, no. 3,
Role of Lexical Stress. Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 467–488.
pp. 399–423. Suzuki, Ayako, & Jenkins, Jennifer. Comments
Gatbonton, Elizabeth, Trofimovich, Pavel, & on Jennifer Jenkins’s “Implementing
Magid, Michael. Learners’ Ethnic Group an International Approach to English
Affiliation and L2 Pronunciation Accuracy: Pronunciation: The Role of Teacher
A Sociolinguistic Investigation. Vol. 39, Attitudes and Identity.” The Author Replies.
no. 3, pp. 489–511. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 609–613.
Golombek, Paula, & Rehn Jordan, Stephanie. Walker, Robin. Using Student-Produced
Becoming “Black Lambs” Not “Parrots”: A Recordings With Monolingual Groups
Poststructuralist Concept of Intelligibility to Provide Effective, Individualized
and Identity. Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 513–533. Pronunciation Practice. Vol. 39, no. 3,
Jenkins, Jennifer. Implementing an International pp. 550–558.
Approach to English Pronunciation: The
Role of Teacher Attitudes and Identity. PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 535–543. AND CONCERNS
Kubota, Mitsuo. Comments on Jennifer
Canagarajah, A. Suresh. TESOL at Forty:
Jenkins’s “Implementing an International
What Are the Issues? Vol. 40, no. 1,
Approach to English Pronunciation: The
pp. 9–34.
Role of Teacher Attitudes and Identity.”
Clemente, Angeles. Remembered Histories
A Reader Responds. Vol. 40, no. 3,
and Other Controversial Issues. Review of
pp. 604–609.
America’s Second Tongue: American Indian
Levis, John M. Changing Contexts and Shifting
Education and the Ownership of English,
Paradigms in Pronunciation Teaching.
1860–1900 (R. Spack), A History of English
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 369–377.
Language Teaching (Second Edition)
Low, Ee Ling. A Cross-Varietal Comparison
(A. P. R Howatt. with H. G. Widdowson),
of Deaccenting and “Given” Information:
and Controversies in Applied Linguistics
Implications for Intenrational Intelligibility
(B. Seidlhofer, Ed.). Vol. 39, no. 4,
and Pronunciation Teaching. Vol. 40, no. 4,
pp. 787–793.
pp. 739–761.
Deckert, Glenn. Review of Values in English
Nguyen, Thu T. A., & Ingram, John. Vietnamese
language Teaching (B. Johnson). Vol. 40, no.
Acquisition of English Word Stress. Vol. 39,
4, pp. 872–875.
no. 2, pp. 309–319.
Newman, Michael, & Hanuer, David. The
Pickering, Lucy. Review of Connected
NCATE/TESOL Teacher Education
Speech [Software] (V. W. Westwood &
Standards: A Critical Review. Vol. 39,
H. Kaufmann). Vol. 39, no. 3,
no. 4, pp. 753–764.
pp. 563–565.
Riney, Timothy, J., Takagi, Naoyuki, &
Inutsuka, Kumiko. Phonetic Parameters and PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION AND
Perceptual Judgments of Accent in English EVALUATION
by American and Japanese Listeners. Lynch, Brian, & Shaw, Peter. Portfolios,
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 441–466. Power, and Ethics. Vol. 39, no. 2,
Scales, Julie, Wennerstrom, Ann, Richard, pp. 262–297.
Dara, & Wu, Su Hui. Language Learners’ Pawan, Faridah, & Thomalla, Therese Groff.
Perceptions of Accent. Vol. 40, no. 4, Making the Invisible Visible: A Responsive
pp. 715–738. Evaluation Study of ESL/Spanish Language
Setter, Jane. Speech Rhythm in World Englishes: Services for Immigrants in a Small Rural
The Case of Hong Kong. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. County in Indiana. Vol. 39, no. 4,
763–782. pp. 683–705.
902 TESOL QUARTERLY

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS Sociocultural Perspectives: Two Parallel
(AREAS OTHER THAN SLA) SLA Worlds?” The Authors Reply
READING [to K. Hill]. Vol. 40, no. 4,
pp. 826–828.
Frank, Natasha. Review of Making Connections:
Zuengler, Jane, & Miller, Elizabeth R. Cognitive
An Interactive Approach to Academic
and Sociocultural Perspectives: Two
Reading (2nd Edition) (K. J. Pakenham).
Parallel SLA Worlds? Vol. 40. no. 1,
Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 800–802.
pp. 35–58.
Hinkel, Eli. Current Perspectives on Teaching
the Four Skills. Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 109–131.
SOCIOLINGUISTICS, CULTURE
Kim, Youngkyu. Effects of Input Elaboration on
Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading Alkhatnai, Mubarak. Review of Teaching
by Korean Learners of English as a Foreign Culture: Perspectives in Practice
Language. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 341–373. (P. R. Moran). Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 867–869.
Stoller, Fredricka L. Review of Extensive Bashir-Ali, Khadar. Language Learning and
Reading Activities for Teaching Language the Definition of One’s Social, Cultural,
(J. Bamford & R. R. Day, Eds.). Vol. 39, and Racial Identity. Vol. 40, no. 3,
no. 2, pp. 351–353. pp. 628–639.
Beckett, Gulbahar H., & MacPherson,
Seonaigh. Comments on Nunan’s “The
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Impact of English as a Global Language on
Bigelow, Martha, delMas, Robert, Hansen, Educational Policies and Practices in the
Kit, & Tarone, Elaine. Literacy and the Asia Pacific Region.” Readers Respond:
Processing of Oral Recasts in SLA. Vol. 40, Researching the Impact of English on
no. 4, pp. 665–689. Minority and Indigenous Languages in Non-
Chen, Judy F., Warden, Clyde A., & Chang, Western Contexts. Vol. 39, no. 2,
Huo-Tsan. Motivators That Do Not pp. 299–307.
Motivate: The Case of Chinese EFL Chen, Judy F., Warden, Clyde A., & Chang,
Learners and the Influence of Culture on Huo-Tsan. Motivators That Do Not
Motivation. Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 609–633. Motivate: The Case of Chinese
Galindo Merino, Mar. Review of Adquisicion EFL Learners and the Influence of
de segundas lenguas (Guía bibliográfica Culture on Motivation. Vol. 39, no. 4,
1957–2001) (V. S. García). Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 609–633.
pp. 453–455. Díaz-Rico, Lynne. Review of Antiracist
Hill, Kent. Comments on Jane Zuengler and Education (J. Kailin). Vol. 40, no. 3, pp.
Elizabeth R. Miller’s “Cognitive and 649–651.
Sociocultural Perspectives: Two Parallel Hansen, Jane. Review of An Island of English:
SLA Worlds?” A Reader Responds . . . A Teaching ESL in Chinatown (D. Fu).
Sociocognitive Perspective: The Best of Both Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 341–342.
Worlds. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 819–826. Hart, Juliet E. Review of Room for Talk:
Nguyen, Thu T. A., & Ingram, John. Vietnamese Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual
Acquisition of English Word Stress. Vol. 39, Kindergarten (R. Fassler). Vol. 39, no. 1,
no. 2, pp. 309–319. pp. 129–131.
Smith, Bryan. The Relationship Between Hawkins, Margaret R. Becoming a Student:
Negotiated Interaction, Learner Uptake, Identity Work and Academic Literacies
and Lexical Acquisition in Task-Based in Early Schooling. Vol. 39, no. 1,
Computer-Mediated Communication. pp. 59–82.
Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 33–58. Hill, Kent. Comments on Jane Zuengler and
Wood, David. Review of Formulaic Sequences: Elizabeth R. Miller’s “Cognitive and
Acquisition, Processing and Use Sociocultural Perspectives: Two Parallel
(N. Schmitt). Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 457–460. SLA Worlds?” A Reader Responds . . . A
Zuengler, Jane. Comments on Jane Zuengler Sociocognitive Perspective: The Best of Both
and Elizabeth R. Miller’s “Cognitive and Worlds. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 819–826.

Jenkins, Jennifer. Current Perspectives on Schmenk, Barbara. Globalizing Learner
Teaching World Englishes and English Autonomy. Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 107–118.
as a Lingua Franca. Vol. 40, no. 1, Taylor, Lisa. Wrestling With Race: The
pp. 157–181. Implications of Integrative Antiracism
Jenkins, Jennifer. Implementing an International Education for Immigrant ESL Youth.
Approach to English Pronunciation: The Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 519–544.
Role of Teacher Attitudes and Identity. Tembe, Juliet. Teacher Training and the English
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 535–543. Language in Uganda. Vol. 40, no. 4,
Jones, Shelley. Review of English in Africa pp. 857–861.
After the Cold War (A. M. Mazrui) and
Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and SPEAKING
Politics in Africa and the Americas Hinkel, Eli. Current Perspectives on Teaching
(S. Makoni, G. Smitherman, A. F. Ball, the Four Skills. Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 109–131.
A. K. Spears, Eds.). Vol. 39, no. 2, Trent, John. Comments on Naoko Morita’s
pp. 329–333. “Negotiating Participation and Identity in
Lee, Ena, & Simon-Maeda, Andrea. Racialized Second Language Academic Communities.”
Research Identities in ESL/EFL Research. A Reader Responds . . . Speaking in a
Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 573–594. Foreign Language Academic Community Of
Menard-Warwick, Julia. Intergenerational Practice: Toward A Holistic Understanding.
Trajectories and Sociopolitical Context: Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 430–435.
Latina Immigrants in Adult ESL. Vol. 39,
no. 2, pp. 165–185. STANDARD ENGLISH AS
Omoniyi, Tope. Toward a Re-Theorization of A SECOND DIALECT
Code Switching. In Toward a More Inclusive
Motha, Suhanthie. Racializing ESOL Teacher
Applied Linguistics and English Language
Identities in U.S. K–12 Public Schools.
Teaching: A Symposium. Vol. 39, no. 4,
Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 495–518.
729–734, 748–753.
Pakir, Anne. Applied Linguistics Proper?
Palfreyman, David. Othering in an English
Relocation, Reorientation, and Realignment.
Language Program. Vol. 39, no. 2,
In Toward a More Inclusive Applied
pp. 211–233.
Linguistics and English Language Teaching:
Parmegiani, Andrea. On Race, Language, Power
A Symposium. Vol. 39, no. 4, 720–724,
and Identity: Understanding the Intricacies
748–753.
through Multi-cultural Communication,
Scales, Julie, Wennerstrom, Ann, Richard, Dara, &
Language Policies, and the Ebonics Debate.
Wu, Su Hui. Language Learners’ Perceptions
Review of Intercultural Communication:
of Accent. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 715–738.
An Advanced Resource Book (A. Holliday,
M. Hyde, & J. Kullman, Eds.), Language
Policy: Theory and Method (T. Ricento, SYNTAX, GRAMMAR TEACHING
Ed.), and Ebonics: The Urban Education Ellis, Rod. Comments on Rod Ellis’s “Current
Debate (2nd Edition) (J. Ramirez, T. Wiley, Issues in the Teaching of Grammar: An
G. de Klerk, E. Lee, & W. Wright Eds.). SLA Perspective.” The Author Replies
Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 641–648. [to M. Swan & C. Walter]. Vol. 40, no. 4,
Petrić, Bojana. Review of Global Issues pp. 839–840.
(R. Sampedro & S. Hillyard). Vol. 39, Ellis, Rod. Comments on Rod Ellis’s “Current
no. 2, pp. 348–351. Issues in the Teaching of Grammar: An SLA
Rich, Sarah, & Troudi, Salah. Hard Times: Perspective.” The Author Replies
Arab TESOL Students’ Experiences of [to R. Sheen]. Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 833–837.
Racialization and Othering in the United Ellis, Rod. Current Issues in the Teaching of
Kingdom. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 615–627. Grammar: An SLA Perspective. Vol. 40,
Rosa, Joao J. Review of The Hegemony of no. 1, pp. 83–107.
English (D. Macedo, B. Dendrinos, & Sheen, Ron. Comments on Rod Ellis’s “Current
P. Gounari). Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 125–126. Issues in the Teaching of Grammar: An SLA
904 TESOL QUARTERLY

Perspective.” A Reader Responds. Stewart, Timothy. Teacher-Researcher
Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 828–832. Collaboration or Teachers’ Research?
Swan, Michael, & Walter, Catherine. Comments Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 421–430.
on Rod Ellis’s “Current Issues in the Vance, Noelle. Review of Second Language
Teaching of Grammar: An SLA Teacher Education: International
Perspective.” Readers Respond: “Teach the Perspectives (D. J. Tedick). Vol. 40, no. 4,
Whole of the Grammar.” Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 880–882.
pp. 837–839.
TESTING
TEACHER PREPARATION Fairbairn, Shelley B. Review of Language
Armenta, Ireri. Review of Teaching Language Assessment: Principles and Classroom
and Content to Linguistically and Culturally Practices (H. D. Brown). Vol. 39, no. 2,
Diverse Students: Principles, Ideas and pp. 344–346.
Materials (Yu Ren Dong). Vol. 39, no. 4, Lee, Hyeong-Jong. Review of Testcraft:
pp. 797–799. A Teacher’s Guide to Writing and
Broussard, Kathleen M. Review of Essential Using Language Test Specifications
Linguistics: What You Need to Know to (F. Davidson & B. K. Lynch). Vol. 39,
Teach Reading, ESL, Spelling, Phonics, and no. 1, pp. 131–133.
Grammar (D. E. Freeman & Y. S. Freeman). Leung, Constant, & Lewkowicz, Jo. Expanding
Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 346–348. Horizons and Unresolved Conundrums:
Golombek, Paula, & Rehn Jordan, Stephanie. Language Testing and Assessment. Vol. 40,
Becoming “Black Lambs” Not “Parrots”: no. 1, pp. 211–234.
A Poststructuralist Concept of Intelligibility Lynch, Brian, & Shaw, Peter. Portfolios, Power,
and Identity. Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 513–533. and Ethics. Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 262–297.
Johnson, Karen E. The Sociocultural Turn and
Its Challenges for Second Language Teacher TEXT ANALYSIS
Education. Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 235–257.
Galloway, Ishbel. Computer Learner Corpora
Low, Ee Ling. A Cross-Varietal Comparison
and Their Pedagogical Application. Review
of Deaccenting and Given Information:
of Second Language Writers’ Text
Implications for Intenrational Intelligibility
(E. Hinkel) and Teaching Academic ESL
and Pronunciation Teaching. Vol. 40, no. 4,
Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary
pp. 739–761.
and Grammar (E. Hinkel). Vol. 39, no. 2,
Meskill, Carla, Anthony, Natasha, Hilliker-
pp. 333–339.
VanStrander, Shannon, Tseng, Chi-Hua,
& You, Jieun. CALL: A Survey of K–12
WRITING
Teacher Uses and Preferences. Vol. 40,
no. 2, pp. 439–451. Braine, George. The Challenge of Academic
Moussu, Lucie. Review of Learning and Publishing: A Hong Kong Perspective.
Teaching From Experience: Perspectives on Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 707–716.
Nonnative English Speaking Professionals Ferst, Phillipa. Review of Gateways to Academic
(L. Kamhi-Stein). Vol. 40, no. 2, Writing: Effective Sentences, Paragraphs
pp. 455–457. and Essays (A. Meyers). Vol. 39, no. 4,
Nemtchinova, Ekaterina. Host Teachers’ pp. 802–804.
Evaluations of Nonnative-English-Speaking Galloway, Ishbel. Computer Learner Corpora
Teacher Trainees—A Perspective from the and Their Pedagogical Application. Review
Classroom. Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 235–261. of Second Language Writers’ Text
Newman, Michael, & Hanuer, David. The (E. Hinkel) and Teaching Academic ESL
NCATE/TESOL Teacher Education Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary
Standards: A Critical Review. Vol. 39, and Grammar (E. Hinkel). Vol. 39, no. 2,
no. 4, pp. 753–764. pp. 333–339.
Spack, Ruth. English Lessons. Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. Hinkel, Eli. Current Perspectives on Teaching
595–604. the Four Skills. Vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 109–131.

Lee, Hyeong-Jong. Review of Testcraft: A of Vocabulary in a Postreading Composition
Teacher’s Guide to Writing and Using Task. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 295–320.
Language Test Specifications (F. Davidson & Leibowitz, Brenda. Learning in an Additional
B. K. Lynch). Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 131–133. Language in a Multilingual Society: A South
Lee, Siok H., & Muncie, James. From Receptive African Case Study on University-Level
to Productive: Improving ESL Learners’ Use Writing. Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 661–681.
Index of Books Reviewed
Adamson, H. D. Language Minority Students in Fu, Danling. An Island of English: Teaching ESL
American Schools: An Education in English in Chinatown (J. Hansen). Vol. 39,
(J. E. Hart). Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 875–877. no. 2, pp. 341–342.
Bamford, Julian, & Day, Richard R. Day (Eds.). Garcia, Eugene E. Teaching and Learning in
Extensive Reading Activities for Teaching Two Languages: Bilingualism and Schooling
Language (F. L. Stoller). Vol. 39, no. 2, in the United States (C.-H. Cheong). Vol. 40,
pp. 351–353. no. 2, pp. 460–462.
Brown, H. Douglas. Language Assessment: García, Ventura Salazar. Adquisicion de
Principles and Classroom Practices segundas lenguas (Guía bibliográfica
(S. B. Fairbairn). Vol. 39, no. 2, 1957–2001) (M. G. Merino). Vol. 40, no. 2,
pp. 344–346. pp. 453–455.
Cauldwell, Richard. Streaming Speech: Gunn, Cindy L. Teaching, Learning and
Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Researching in an ESL Context (C.-C. Yeh).
Learners of English [Software] (D. Chun). Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 882–884.
Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 559–562. Hinkel, Eli. Second Language Writers’ Text
Chapelle, Carol A. English Language Learning (I. Galloway). Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 333–339.
and Technology (M. Kataoka). Vol. 39, Hinkel, Eli. Teaching Academic ESL Writing:
no. 2, pp. 342–344. Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and
Davidson, Fred, & Lynch, Brian K. Testcraft: Grammar (I. Galloway). Vol. 39, no. 2,
A Teacher’s Guide to Writing and Using pp. 333–339.
Language Test Specifications (H.-J. Lee). Holliday, Adrian, Hyde, Martin, & Kullman,
Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 131–133. John. Intercultural Communication: An
Dong. Yu Ren. Teaching Language and Advanced Resource Book (A. Parmegiani).
Content to Linguistically and Culturally Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 641–648.
Diverse Students: Principles, Ideas and Howatt, A. P. R., & Widdowson, H. G.
Materials (I. Armenta). Vol. 39, A History of English Language Teaching
no. 4, pp. 797–799. (Second Edition) (A. Clemente). Vol. 39,
Ellis, Rod. Task-based Language Learning and no. 4, pp. 787–793.
Teaching (A. Shehadeh). Vol. 39, no. 4, Johnston, Bill. Values in English language
pp. 795–797. Teaching (G. Deckert). Vol. 40, no. 4,
Farrell, Thomas S. C. Reflecting on Classroom pp. 872–875.
Communication in Asia (T. Stewart). Kailin, Julie. Antiracist Education (L. T. Díaz-
Vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 804–806. Rico). Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 649–651.
Fassler, Rebekah. Room for Talk: Teaching Kamhi-Stein, Lía (Ed.). Learning and Teaching
and Learning in a Multilingual from Experience: Perspectives on Nonnative
Kindergarten (J. E. Hart). Vol. 39, English Speaking Professionals (L. Moussu).
no. 1, pp. 129–131. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 455–457.
Freeman, David E., & Freeman, Yvonne S. Kendrick, Maureen. Converging Worlds: Play,
Essential Linguistics: What You Need to Literacy, and Culture in Early Childhood
Know to Teach Reading, ESL, Spelling, (E. M. Day). Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 870–872.
Phonics, and Grammar (K. M. Broussard). Macedo, Donaldo, Dendrinos, Bessie, &
Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 346–348. Gounari, Donaldo. The Hegemony of
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English (J. J. Rosa). Vol. 39, no. 1, (2nd Edition) (A. Parmegiani). Vol. 40,
pp. 125–126. no. 3, pp. 641–648.
Makoni, Sinfree, Smitherman, Geneva, Ball, Ricento, Thomas. An Introduction to Language
Arnetha F., & Spears, Arthur K. (Eds.). Policy: Theory and Method (A. Parmegiani).
Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 541–648.
Politics in Africa and the Americas Rogoff, Barbara, Turkanis, Carolyn Goodman,
(S. Jones). Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 329–333. & Bartlett, Leslee. Learning Together:
Mazrui, Alamin M. English in Africa After the Children and Adults in a School Community
Cold War (S. Jones). Vol. 39, no. 2, (H. T. Bao). Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 739–761.
pp. 329–333. Sampedro, Ricardo, & Hillyard, Susan. Global
Meyers, Alan. Gateways to Academic Writing: Issues (B. Petrić). Vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 348–351.
Effective Sentences, Pararagraphs and Schmitt, Norbert (Ed.). Formulaic Sequences:
Essays (P. Ferst). Vol. 39, no. 4, Acquisition, Processing and Use (D. Wood).
pp. 802–804. Vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 457–460.
Moran, Patrick R. Teaching Culture: Seidlhofer, Barbara (Ed.). Controversies in
Perspectives in Practice (M. Alkhatnai). Applied Linguistics (A. Clemente). Vol. 39,
Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 867–869. no. 4, pp. 787–793.
Norton, Bonny, & Toohey, Kelleen (Eds.). Spack, Ruth. America’s Second Tongue:
Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning American Indian Education and the
(S. Michael-Luna). Vol. 39, no. 1, Ownership of English, 1860–1900
pp. 126–129. (A. Clemente). Vol. 39, no. 4,
Pakenham, Kenneth J. Making Connections: An pp. 787–793.
Interactive Approach to Academic Reading Tedick, Diane J. Second Language Teacher
(2nd Edition) (N. Frank). Vol. 39, no. 4, Education: International Perspectives
pp. 800–802. (Noelle Vance). Vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 880–882.
Ramirez, J. David, Wiley, Terrence G., de Klerk, Westwood, Virginia W., & Kaufmann, Heather.
Gerda, Lee, Enid, & Wright, Wayne E. (Eds.). Connected Speech [Software] (L. Pickering).
Ebonics: The Urban Education Debate Vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 563–565.
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Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice

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BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES

In this exploratory study, we examine the role of literacy in the acqui-

LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL

R esearch to date on adolescent and adult second language acquisi-

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 40, No. 4, December 2006 665

ORAL PROCESSING AND CHILD L1 LITERACY

Researchers of monolingual language development have claimed

666 TESOL QUARTERLY

Writing is what introduces our speech to us, revealing our speech as

One of Olson’s most interesting claims, in light of the current inter-

ORAL PROCESSING AND ADULT ILLITERACY

This transformative effect of literacy is supported by experimental

LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL RECASTS IN SLA 667

Learning to match graphemes and phonemes is learning an operation

668 TESOL QUARTERLY

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: INTERACTION

LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL RECASTS IN SLA 669

In addition to length of recast, the number of changes made to the

670 TESOL QUARTERLY

The participants were recruited from a community where a large

LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL RECASTS IN SLA 671

The participants’ L1 and L2 literacy levels were determined using

672 TESOL QUARTERLY

Abukar 15 M 5 4 6 5 50 0 4.5 4.5

nine according to an analytic rubric describing their fluency and com-

LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL RECASTS IN SLA 673

The data were typically collected in two sessions.10 Each participant

674 TESOL QUARTERLY

The target of this acquisition study, as in Philp (2003), is question

LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL RECASTS IN SLA 675

Trigger: What she doing?

Recast: What is she doing? [2 knocks]

Recall: What is she doing? [correct]

Recast: Is he surprised? [2 knocks]

Recall: Is he is surprised? [modified]

Trigger: What color it is?

Recast: What color is it? [2 knocks]

Recall: What colorrrrr [no recall]

Analyses approximated those of Philp with the addition of two vari-

676 TESOL QUARTERLY

Trigger: Why he’s so happy?

Recast: Why is he so happy? [2 knocks]

Recall: Why is he so happy? [correct]

Recalling recasts with 2 + changes:

Trigger: What he doing, the man in the sitting chair?

Recast: What is the man sitting in the chair doing? [2 knocks]

Recall: What is the man sitting in the chair doing? [correct]

The small sample size makes it difficult to assess the assumption of

LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL RECASTS IN SLA 677

678 TESOL QUARTERLY

Is the ability to recall a recast related to the length of the recast?

LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL RECASTS IN SLA 679

An exact permutation test (Good, 2001) was conducted by computing

680 TESOL QUARTERLY

Mean literacy level

of recast length on recall is shown for learners at higher and lower

Is the ability to recall a recast related to the number of changes

LITERACY AND THE PROCESSING OF ORAL RECASTS IN SLA 681