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This study investigates how different form-focused instruction (FFI) timing impacts English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' grammar development. A total of 169 Chinese middle school learners were assigned to four conditions randomly: control, before-isolated FFI, integrated FFI, and after-isolated FFI. The three experimental groups received treatments which combined form and meaning with the English passive voice as the teaching target, but learners' attention was drawn to the passive voice with different timing. The before-isolated and after-isolated groups received the treatment before and after communicative activities, respectively. For the integrated FFI group, intervention occurred during communicative activities. A picture writing test and a written error correction test were employed to measure students' performance. The results indicated that the three experimental groups manifested significant improvement. Before-isolated FFI produced the best immediate and delayed effects, and integrated FFI produced better immediate effect than after-isolated FFI, while after-isolated FFI produced better delayed effect than integrated FFI. The findings indicated that pedagogical sequences in FFI are important, and teachers might need to guide adolescent learners to focus on form explicitly before communicative activities.

The affective turn in the second language (L2) acquisition literature has witnessed a shift from the periphery to a clear focus on emotions. Nevertheless, this shift tends to examine emotion separately from cognition. Vygotsky's "perezhivanie" provides a theoretical lens to explore the inextricable interconnectedness of emotion and cognition in a dialectical and nonreductionist way. This article investigates the concept of "perezhivanie" in two Chinese learners of L2 Japanese and its relevance for their language development. Data mainly collected through interviews and narrative journals were thematically analyzed. The study demonstrates how cognition and emotion dialectically foreground one another (i.e., one gains an upper hand over the other), thus shaping each learner's unique "perezhivanie" as they undertook to learn Japanese. The study showed that the two students had their own purposes for learning Japanese and that affect functioned as both facilitator and inhibitor of the learning processes. Interestingly, this study does not support the notion that negative affect results in a lack of development and that positive affect always leads to development. It also emphasizes that negative and positive affect constitute a dialectical process.

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems have been increasingly incorporated in L2 writing instruction. However, how the instructional use of AWE influences learners' writing has remained inconclusive partly due to variations in heterogeneous learners. Underpinned by a sociocultural theory, this classroom-based study was to understand how English learners of different proficiency levels differed in their written products measured by complexity, accuracy and fluency, multiple revisions, and the perceived usefulness after 15-week instructional use of AWE. The results showed that disparity in writing accuracy of learners with different proficiency levels greatly reduced after the mandatory use of AWE feedback, but syntactic complexity and fluency remained unchanged. Meanwhile, perceived usefulness of AWE feedback was contingent on language proficiency. Limitations and pedagogical implications were also discussed.

Globalization and internationalization in higher education have promoted the worldwide popularity of English-medium instruction (EMI) programs. The successful implementation of EMI programs calls for content-language integration, which requires EMI teachers' language awareness. Yet, empirical studies investigating EMI teachers' language awareness still remains scarce. This study aimed to explore the development of language awareness through a Chinese EMI teacher's 10-month team teaching with an English teacher. With data mainly gathered from semi-structured retrospective interviews and video-recorded classroom observation, the study found that the EMI teacher experienced noticeable changes in language awareness and pedagogical practice. This study also yielded some important implications for EMI teacher education.

This study contributes to the limited research on teacher agency in task-based language teaching. Conceptualising agency through the lens of activity theory, the study investigated how two EFL teachers enacted their agency in TBLT implementation at a Chinese university and what factors mediated the enactment of their agency. Data collected by means of classroom observation, interviews and course documents were triangulated to provide a descriptive synthesis of teacher participants' experiences with task-based language teaching. The analysis of the data revealed that these two teachers demonstrated agency through teaching as adaptation and teaching as learning to overcome the contradictions in the instructional activity system. They engaged with both proactive and reactive agency. A number of mediational factors were found to account for their agency. The study highlights the crucial role of teachers' shared beliefs on the value of TBLT and curriculum reform and institutional support in influencing teachers' adoption of task-supported language teaching.

This laboratory-based research investigated how 40 university EFL learners responded to their peers' linguistic errors and made their moment-to-moment decisions of whether or not to provide corrective feedback (CF) to their peers' errors in task-based peer interaction. Data from the transcripts of videotaped pair interaction and audio-taped stimulated recall interviews were utilized and analysed to report the findings. Results showed that learners did not provide CF to their partners frequently and of the three CF strategies, they favoured recast over prompts and explicit correction. Furthermore, more morphosyntactic errors than lexical and phonological errors were provided CF. More importantly, results revealed that learners' CF decision-making was mediated by six categories of factors: provider-related factors (e.g. providers' lack of knowledge), receiver-related factors (e.g. receivers' showing signs of seeking help), task-related factors (e.g. the time of story happening), error-related factors (e.g. salience of errors), and interpersonal factors (e.g. peer relationship). Implications are discussed especially regarding the important role of teachers in raising learners' language awareness in peer interaction.

English language education has always been accorded paramount importance in China since the mid-1980s. In order to improve English teaching quality, China has initiated several rounds of English curriculum reform at various levels against the backdrop of the unprecedented spread of English as a lingua franca. Drawing upon the texts of the national curriculum documents and the relevant research literature, this paper examines the evolution of the College English curriculum for non-English majors in Chinese higher institutions over the past three decades. It reviews a number of what we see as the most important trends relating to the College English curriculum development, together with some discussion of particularly controversial issues arising from this process. We base the paper's findings on a three-part theoretical framework consisting of social development, students' needs and knowledge development to identify the factors which provide the impetus for change in the College English curricula.