Current TESL issues (Teaching English as a Second Language) in an interactive fashion enriched with distinctive keywords and tags and comment forms to discuss the issues
Language Learning Strategies Language Learning Strategies They are mental and communicative procedures learners use in order to learn and use language. Strategies can help the students to increase their level of consciousness and awareness over their learning process. Learning strategies are perhaps best defined in terms of a set of characteristics that figure in most…
Validity Validity The two scholars who proposed the concept of validity were Cronbach and Meehl (1950s). Messick changed the way in which we understand validity. He described validity as: An integrated evaluative judgement of the degree to which empirical evidence and theoretical rationales support the adequacy and appropriateness of inferences and actions based on test…
Reliability Reliability The key feature of this important trait requires the standardization of administration and tasks as well as scoring. Reliability is the consistency of test scores across facets of the test. Independent items or tasks in a single test should correlate with each other and the test-total score. That is, there is an assumption…
Universal Grammar Universal grammar may be thought of as some system of principles common to the species and available to each individual prior to experience. Universal Grammar might be defined as the study of the conditions that must be met by the grammars of all human languages. In a highly idealized picture of language acquisition,…
Language Faculty Language Faculty We may assume that the linguistic theory of the language faculty is a theory of the cognitive architecture for language knowledge and acquisition. Chomsky postulated that there is a language organ, which is part of a human’s biological endowment and which houses the universal principles and parameters without which a child…
Action Research Action research was begun in the United States by Lewin (1946) in the 1940s as a means of addressing social problems. This type of research is often conducted by teachers in language classrooms. In addition, it focuses on particular features of classroom interaction. The term ‘action research’ is an approach to collecting and…
Narrative Research Narrative Research The methods of conducting a narrative study do not follow a lock-step approach, but instead, represent an information collection of topics. Narrative research is best for capturing the detailed stories or life experiences of a single life or lives of a small number of individuals (Creswell, 2007). You should select one…
Delimitations of the Study Delimitations of the Study The tense is present and not past because the research has not been carried out yet. List all those variables that have narrowed the scope of the study, e.g. if you have focused only on selected aspects of the problem, certain areas of interest, a limited range…
Construct Validity Construct Validity In this type of validity, it is attempted to test psychologically real constructs that have an independent existence in the test taker, and that the test scores represent the degree of presence or absence of this very real property. In this response, Cronbach and Meehl (1955) state: This type of validity…
Figures Figures are used to display information discussed in the text in a concise format that is easy to comprehend. They generally consist of graphs, charts, pictures, diagrams, and illustrations. Figures should not be used to duplicate textual information. Rather, they are used as a helpful complement to or amplification of what is expressed verbally…