In the rapidly changing environment of language learning and teaching, electronic literacies have an increasingly important role to play. While much research on new literacies focuses on the World Wide Web, the aim in this study is to investigate the importance of corpus consultation as a new type of literacy which is of particular relevance in the context of language learning and teaching. After briefly situating the theoretical and pedagogical context of the study in relation to authenticity and learner autonomy, the paper describes an empirical study involving eight postgraduate students of French. As part of a Masters course they write a short text and subsequently attempt to improve it by using concordancing software to consult a small corpus containing texts on a similar subject. The analysis of the results reveals a significant number of changes made by the learners which may be classified as follows in order of frequency: grammatical errors (gender and agreement, prepositions, verb forms/mood, negation and syntax); misspellings, accents and hyphens; lexico-grammatical patterning (native language interference, choice of verb and inappropriate vocabulary); and capitalisation. The conclusion notes that the situation in which these students found themselves (i.e. faced with a text on which the teacher had indicated phrases which could be improved) is replicated in many cases every day, and suggests that corpus consultation may have a useful role to play in the context of interactive feedback, particularly in cases where traditional language learning resources are of little use.

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Many students with autism engage in a variety of complex stereotypic behaviors, impacting task completion and interfering with social opportunities. Self-monitoring is an intervention with empirical support for individuals with ASD to increase behavioral repertoires and decrease behaviors that are incompatible with successful outcomes. However, there is limited evidence for its utility for decreasing stereotypy, particularly for adolescents in school settings. This study evaluated the functional relationship between I-Connect, a technology-delivered self-monitoring program, and decreases in the level of stereotypy for two students with ASD in the school setting utilizing a withdrawal design with an embedded multiple baseline across participants. Both students demonstrated a marked decrease in stereotypy with the introduction of the self-monitoring application. Results and implications for practice and future research will be discussed.

While Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is a teaching methodology favoured by the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE), it has not been sufficiently researched to be validated empirically in practice in the EFL classroom (Carless 2009;Cheng and Samuel 2011). Few studies have investigated teachers' responses to TBLT in the Chinese college English context. This research contributes to addressing this gap by investigating EFL teachers' perceptions of TBLT and assessing the current implementation of TBLT. A mixed-method methodology was used with quantitative and qualitative data collected via questionnaires and interviews. The findings show that there is potential for the positive implementation of TBLT in the Chinese context. Most of the Chinese ELT teachers surveyed hold positive views on TBLT implementation and report a high frequency of using TBLT. However, this study also reveals that the majority of the participants are not confident in their understanding of TBLT, though but they are willing to undergo training. In addition, the study found that the public examination system is seen as one of the key reasons that impede the implementation of TBLT. The article concludes with a discussion of practical implications of the findings of this small scale-study on how successful implementation of TBLT can be encouraged in the Chinese context.

Many companies pigeon‐hole marketing as a non‐value adding activity. But an auditing framework developed with 600 managers is putting marketing measurement on the senior executive agenda. Users include First Direct, Sainsbury and SmithKline Beecham.

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Although the use of corpus data in language learning is a steadily growing research area, direct access to corpora by teachers and learners and the use of the data in the classroom are developing slowly. This paper explores how teachers can integrate corpus approaches in their practice. After situating the topic in relation to current research and practice in ICT and language learning, we examine some easily available resources, suggesting how they can provide examples of naturally occurring discourse for use in the language classroom. Beginning with easily available online corpus resources with built-in concordancers which require no prior technical training, we continue by discussing the challenges which more advanced use of corpora presents. This is illustrated by examples from corpora of business communication and casual conversation. We conclude by emphasising that there is considerable scope for both research and dissemination in relation to corpus applications in language learning.

Although there is a large and increasing body of research on the use of corpus data by language teachers and learners, the language teachers in question are also the researchers reporting on their use of corpora with their own learners. There is thus a gap, which this plenary speech addresses, between this research and the practice of language teachers who are not corpus linguists. After a brief account of the successful integration of corpus data in the production of language learning resources such as dictionaries, grammars and course books, the potential benefits of having direct access to corpora by teachers and learners are discussed. Following this, a number of publications on the use of corpora in the language classroom, both in higher education and at secondary level, are examined, focussing on how easy or difficult it would be for teachers to replicate the use of corpus data in their own classrooms. This leads to a final section where possible solutions to the research–practice gap are considered, involving language teacher education, publishers of course books, and research involving the use of corpora in the classroom by language teachers who are not also corpus linguists.