The Opportunities and Limitations of Blended Learning and the Flipped Classroom for Second Language Teaching

Over the last decade, many educators have been investigating the pedagogical effectiveness of blended learning and flipped classroom models. In the conventional teaching process, instructors have been playing an essential role in the lecturing process. Conversely, students lead the learning process in the flipped classroom because they must complete tasks with extracurricular materials and classroom collaboration. Likewise, blended learning also asks students to dominate classroom learning procedures, but its communication medium is a mixture of face-to-face and online interaction. This essay evaluates blended learning and the flipped classroom model by evidence of both pros and cons. Lastly, the article concluded that the two new models provide significant reference cases in exploring better practice modes to increase the quality of second language teaching.

Language Acquisition: The Role of Grammar Acquisition and Instruction in Second Language Teaching and Learning

This scoping review studies the role of grammar in second language teaching and learning. This scoping review mainly directs to synthesizing relevant studies and literature on acquiring grammar and looking for strategies for achieving it. Grammar acquisition requires the subconscious mind of accepting grammatical knowledge that is then confined and used in communication. Its implicit nature makes it hard to conduct studies about it, and there is a need for more information that can help contribute to the existing knowledge about it. Hence, this scoping review gathered and scrutinized recent and relevant papers from various databases. The collected papers consist of qualitative and quantitative studies. Many language teachers agree that pedagogic grammar is crucial in second language acquisition. Hence, this paper analyzes recent and relevant papers about grammar acquisition. This scoping review found out that the importance of studies about grammar acquisition should not be forsaken; thus, more investigations must be done to contribute to the already existing knowledge. A byproduct of these studies can lead to better strategies for promoting grammar acquisition to language learners. Hence, the amelioration of Second Language Learning and Second Language Teaching is inevitable.

Influence of Working Memory Capacity on the Frequency of Self-Repairs

This article explored the influence of working memory capacity on the frequency of self-repairs. The narrative task and listening span task were used. Twenty post-graduate students participated in this study. Overall, the results of this study illustrated that the working memory is a factor of self-repairs. Speakers who have higher working memory capacity produce lesser self-repairs. This finding provides teachers with a new insight into second language teaching; that is, teachers can improve the amount of lexical knowledge when teaching students who have lower working memory in order to help them produce more accurate language during the process of L2 speech production.

Contrastive Study of the Conjunction ‘and’ in English and Armenian

In linguistics the structuring role of conjunctions is emphasized, whereas its pragmatic and contrastive study is often foregrounded. Conjunction may be prerequisite for contrastive study. The present research is mainly aimed at establishing semantic – functional characteristics of the conjunction “and”, as well as identifying its equivalents in Armenian translation. In other words only one translation direction is investigated, namely English to Armenian. The merit of this research lies in the fact that the study of conjunction from contrastive perspective reveals structural similarities and dissimilarities of the source language and the target language. Contrastive study can be used to get new insights into syntax and the findings of this analysis can prove to be useful in such fields as comparative grammar, pragmatics, second-language teaching, etc.

Peer Repair in a Second Language Class: A Conversation Analytic Study

Conversation analysis is a significant approach on research of the second language teaching and learning, among which repair has attracted more and more attention from scholars. This study investigates peer repair sequences between three nonnative speakers of English while they engaged in free talk in the second language classroom. 40 minutes of naturally occurring talk between nonnative speakers were collected and analyzed. The present study reports on the data shows two types of peer repair: first, self-initiated and other-corrected; second, other-initiated and other-corrected. The analysis of the peer repair sequences shows that the self-initiated and other-corrected repair sequences follow a pattern of asking for confirmation on the production of a language item and receiving a correction, while the other-initiated repair do not follow the rules of preference for self-correction described in conversation analysis.

THE STRATEGIES USED BY LECTURERS IN TEACHING TRANSLATION OF IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS

It is known that the lexicon of a particular language is much more than a list of individual words. The English language is full of somewhat formulaic language, especially established idiomatic expressions. Considering everyday situations in which such expressions are used and the significant role that they play in communication, there has been increasing awareness of these expressions in second language teaching and learning. It is therefore very important for lecturers to create strategies to make these expressions more understandable and memorable to their students as possible. This study investigates teaching strategies used by lecturers in teaching translation of idiomatic expressions to translation students and to what extent are these strategies effective. The researchers conducted informal open-ended interviews with experts in the field of translation that analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings of the study revealed that lecturers employ several different strategies in teaching translation of idiomatic expressions to improve students’ comprehension, which are authentic materials from real life, teaching within context, using L1 to comprehend L2 expressions, pictures, exercises, and activities, and dialogues and role play. In addition, the lecturers consider these strategies effective and useful in teaching figurative expressions. In light of these findings, the researcher recommends that idiomatic language should be taught inside classrooms before encountering the real English world, and it is the lecturers’ role to raise students’ awareness of these expressions and explore strategies that can improve students’ comprehension and production of these expressions. The study offers pedagogical suggestions on using multimodal strategies to teaching translation of English idiomatic expressions.