An investigation into EFL pre-service teachers' academic writing strategies.

Recent research has shown writing strategies to have a substantial impact on language learners' writing performance but little is known about what strategies EFL learners use and how they use them in writing academic texts such as reports, final assignments, and project papers. The study reported in this paper extends this line of research by investigating the strategies Vietnamese EFL pre-service teachers use in academic writing. Data included document analysis of 17 pre-service teachers' final assignment papers (one paper per teacher) and individual semi-structured interviews with ten teachers. The study adopted a content-based approach to qualitative data analysis with reference to a comprehensive research-based taxonomy for L2 academic writing strategies, including rhetorical, metacognitive, cognitive, and social affective strategies. The results show that rhetorical, metacognitive, and cognitive strategies were most frequently used by the teacher participants. The results further show that self-efficacy and self-regulation determined the teachers' use of strategies during the writing process. Implications for the L2 writing classroom focused on academic writing strategies to enhance pre-service teachers' writing quality will be discussed.

Teachers' and Learners' Beliefs About Pronunciation Instruction in Tertiary English as a Foreign Language Education.

Recent studies have sought to describe and understand English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) teachers' pronunciation teaching practices in different contexts, but much less research has examined how teachers and learners perceive pronunciation instruction at tertiary level, especially in EFL settings. The qualitative study reported in this paper extends this line of research by investigating the beliefs of teachers and learners with regard to pronunciation instruction in tertiary EFL education in Vietnam. Data were collected from individual semi-structured interviews with six EFL teachers and focus group interviews with 24 students (four students per group) at a Vietnamese university. The study adopted a content-based approach to qualitative data analysis. The findings show that both the teachers and students considered pronunciation instruction an important component in tertiary EFL programs, which deserves explicit and systematic delivery. The findings suggest that both groups of participants believed communicative pronunciation teaching to have the potential to improve learners' pronunciation and facilitate their general communicative purposes. The study has implications for language curriculum design and L2 pronunciation teaching and learning.

Oral corrective feedback in English as a foreign language classrooms: A teaching and learning perspective.

Oral corrective feedback, a key topic in second language pedagogy and research in applied linguistics and second language acquisition, has widely been investigated for the past two decades. However, the relationship between teachers' and students' beliefs about oral corrective feedback has been relatively underexplored. The current study extends this line of research by examining the extent to which Vietnamese English as a foreign language teachers' and students' beliefs concerning the importance, types, and timing of feedback are aligned. The data consisted of questionnaires with 250 students, interviews with 15 of those who completed the questionnaires, and interviews with 24 teachers at four public secondary schools in Vietnam. The findings showed some matches and mismatches between the teachers' and students' beliefs. Both the teachers and students highly valued the efficacy of feedback and were positive about explicit feedback types such as explicit corrections and metalinguistic feedback. Regarding feedback timing, the students preferred immediate feedback while the teachers expressed their concerns about the students' emotional state and the possibility of disruption of immediate feedback on the flow of students' speech. The findings are interpreted in relation to sociocultural factors, contextual factors, and teachers' and students' experiences. Implications for language teachers, teacher educators, and professional development program designers are discussed.

Targets and Sources of Oral Corrective Feedback in English as a Foreign Language Classrooms: Are Students' and Teachers' Beliefs Aligned?

Recent decades have witnessed extensive research focusing on oral corrective feedback (CF), a key aspect of English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) learning and teaching, but relatively little research has examined the relationship between learner and teacher beliefs about CF. The study reported in this article investigated the relationship between teacher and learner beliefs regarding the optimal targets and sources of CF in Vietnamese secondary EFL contexts. Data which were collected at four Vietnamese public high schools included questionnaires completed by 250 students, interviews with 15 of them, and interviews with 24 teachers. The findings showed that the students were happy to receive CF to all types of errors, including less important errors such as those not influencing their communicative success. The teachers were generally more selective in their choices of error types, but they sometimes faced some tensions between their overall teaching objective and the students' practical needs to learn the material that would be tested in subsequent exams. Regarding CF sources, the students preferred teacher correction to self-correction or peer correction although they believed that self-correction was effective for their learning and wished their teachers would provide them with training on how to conduct peer correction and self-correction. The teachers also thought that it was part of their role to be the main CF providers to ensure the accuracy of classroom feedback. Some teachers were skeptical about their students' ability to provide peer CF. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Immunotherapeutic potential of B7-DC (PD-L2) cross-linking antibody in conferring antitumor immunity.

A naturally occurring human antibody potentiates dendritic cell function on cross-linking B7-DC (PD-L2), supporting robust T-cell responses in vitro. Moreover, treatment of dendritic cells with B7-DC cross-linking antibody resulted in secretion of interleukin-12, suggesting a TH1 polarization of this response. Here we show an in vivo immunotherapeutic effect of this B7-DC cross-linking antibody using a poorly immunogenic B16 melanoma tumor model. Treatment of mice systemically with antibody at the time of tumor cell engraftment prevented tumor growth in a CD4 and CD8 T-cell-dependent manner. The protective effect of B7-DC cross-linking antibody treatment was independent of endogenous antibody responses. Tumor-specific CTL precursors could be isolated from lymph nodes draining the tumor site in animals treated with B7-DC cross-linking antibody, but not from those treated with isotype control antibodies. The elicited antitumor responses in vivo were specific and long-lasting. More strikingly, treatment of mice with B7-DC cross-linking antibody after the tumors were established in the lungs resulted in protection in a CD8-, perforin-, and granzyme B-dependent fashion. Depletion of natural killer cells did not block the effects of treatment with B7-DC cross-linking antibody. Together, these findings demonstrate that cross-linking B7-DC with the human IgM antibody sHIgM12 can induce a protective immune response against a weakly antigenic experimental tumor and therefore has potential as a novel immunotherapeutic approach for treating cancer.