The ELTWO team has posted a research paper entitled “A Systematic Approach to Teaching Critical Thinking through Debate” by David Rear.

Read the abstract of the research paper. The full paper is available on the ELTWO website.

The development of critical thinking (CT) skills has become a key goal for educators in first and second language contexts. Teachers in EFL contexts, however, are often constrained by the linguistic skills of their students. This paper outlines a systematic approach towards developing the critical thinking skills of students with relatively low linguistic abilities. It will report on a program designed by the author at a university in Japan, which used a taxonomy of skills drawn up by Facione (1990)

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The ELTWO team has posted a research paper entitled “Readers Theatre: Improving Oral Proficiency in a Japanese University EFL Course” by Patrick NG & Esther Boucher-Yip.

Read the abstract of the research paper. The full paper is available on the ELTWO website.

Improving oral proficiency in the EFL classroom is usually a major goal for most EFL instructors. One effective approach in teaching oral skills is the use of drama called Readers Theatre (RT). It is a presentational performance based on principles and techniques of oral interpretation which seeks to entertain, instruct and persuade (Adams, 2003). The ‘actors’ first read a story and then transform it into a script involving several characters. To portray a character, readers strive for voice flexibility, good articulation, proper pronunciation and projection. In this action research study, we explore the use of RT activities in improving oral skills in one EFL course in a Japanese classroom. Our objective is to examine students’ observations of their own language learning experiences through RT. We first provide a literature review on the pedagogical values of drama in developing oral competence. We then describe the implementation of the RT activity

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The ELTWO team has posted a research paper entitled “Using Blogs to Practice Grammar Editing Skills” by Christopher Harwood.

Read the abstract of the research paper. The full paper is available on the ELTWO website.

This paper reports on the pedagogic reasons for using blogs as a learning aid and how blogging was integrated into a curriculum at the National University of Singapore to support the learning of grammar editing skills of music students.

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The ELTWO team has posted a research paper entitled “Teacher Reflections: Teaching Article Use to Graduate Students” by Chitra Varaprasad.

Read the abstract of the research paper. The full paper is available on the ELTWO website.

Many studies have highlighted students’ problems with article use among international students, particularly students from China (Milton, 2001; Papp, 2004; Chuang, 2005; Deng et al, 2010). This paper reports on the impact of an approach to teaching article use to post graduate students (mainly students from China) at the National University of Singapore. The study had several objectives. Firstly, it set out to explore the extent to which article usage was a problem for these doctoral students. Secondly, having decided to experiment with a learner-centred approach to article use, it also set out to assess the impact of such an interventionist approach on students’ learning.

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Read the full paper at eltworldonline.com.

This paper is based on the premise that a considerable amount of language can be acquired outside the classroom lesson, and that as educators it is our responsibility to raise awareness of the value of self-directed learning. Self-access language learning (SALL) promotes the idea that as there are different types of learners with different language needs, students learn better if they are actively in control of their own learning. The paper focuses on how a SALL course was integrated into the curriculum at a private university in Japan.

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