By Dr Jeremy Koay
Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, and Romeo and Juliet are examples of some of the most well-known literary texts. Such texts are usually the works of authors from decades or centuries ago, and the language they use is different from modern English. However, the...
By Dr Jeremy Koay
You need a singular verb! Check your spelling! These are some common examples of feedback in a language classroom. Such comments can be categorised as corrective feedback because their main goal is to address a particular error. From my experience, frequent...
by Dr Jeremy Koay
Vocabulary learning is fundamentally about knowing words. However, the idea of knowing a word is not always well understood. Some say that knowing a word means knowing what a word means. Others say that it means knowing the written form (e.g., spelling)....
By James Jenkin
As I mentioned in my previous post, there’s little evidence for the widespread view that Chinese students don’t like speaking in class. In fact, a number of large-scale studies (e.g., Littlewood, 2001, 2010; Kim, 2006) show students from the PRC question...
By James Jenkin
We’ve heard the stereotype: Chinese students don’t like speaking in class, expressing opinions, or playing games.
Is it true?
In fact, for decades this view of Chinese learners was received opinion in the literature.
Chinese students were...
by Dr Jeremy Koay
Based on my teaching experience in Southeast Asia, there seems to be an admiration for people who are able to speak in English with a ‘native speaker’ accent. If one investigates further, the idea of ‘native speaker’ is often...
by Dr Jeremy Koay
Grammar is probably the most common word that parents, students and teachers use when they talk about English language learning. English grammar is often understood as a set of universal rules that governs the language. Where do these rules come from? Who set...
by Dr Jeremy Koay
Let’s start by observing the following scenario. A student asks her teacher to repeat his instructions. The student said: Excuse me, Mr Li. Can you repeat again? The teacher responded: You shouldn’t use again after repeat. Not...
by Dr Jeremy Koay
I was once asked to transcribe a 3-minute long news recording. I played the recording and I could fully understand the news. However, when I started transcribing it word for word, I discovered very quickly that some words were not clear. This experience...
by Dr Jeremy Koay
When I was teaching academic writing at university level, I often asked my students about their learning goals. In every semester, almost all my international students would say they need to improve their grammar. Some would say they need to improve their...
by Dr Jeremy Koay
As a young child, my mother would spend time reading graded readers with me. This is what it looks like. I would read aloud from a book and my mother would ‘correct’ my pronunciation. At primary school, I was sometimes asked to read a passage...
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