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Lecturing still remains today the most common form of teaching in Higher Education notwithstanding its critics. Giving lectures has both strengths and limitations. This paper reports on the outcomes of a study that investigates the lecturing mode at the English Department, Oum El Bouaghi University, Algeria. The focus group method is used to characterize lecturers' principles, practices and challenges, and students' views, worries and aspirations. Techniques are eventually suggested to make lectures a true learning experience for foreign language learners.

Despite its importance, extensive reading is still neglected in Algerian EFL classes, and the focus is generally on intensive reading. This study aims to identify if students practise extensive reading. Besides, it seeks to determine if students hold positive reading attitudes and if a correlation exists between extensive reading and good writing performance. To achieve these aims, a quantitative method was adopted. A questionnaire and a written test were administered to seventy-seven students of English at the University of Oum El Bouaghi. The results revealed that students practise most of the principles of extensive reading. Additionally, they showed that students hold positive reading attitudes towards English. The findings also indicated that good writing is positively associated with more reading. In the light of these findings, it is recommended that EFL teachers integrate extensive reading in their classes to help their learners reap its benefits.

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) and learning is a growing area in SLA research. It has gained its rightful place in language teaching. TBLT suggests sequencing tasks from simple to complex in order to design a syllabus. However; research on the effects of task-complexity on written productions is rare. This study intends to examine the effects of manipulating task complexity along resource-directing factors and resource-dispersing ones on L2 learners' written performance. To attain this aim, we collected academic writings from 44 first year students of English at the University of Oum El Bouaghi that participated in a repeated measures experiment. The written data were measured in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexity. A one-way ANOVA test was used for statistical analysis. We found that task complexity affects students' writing fluency and accuracy, but it does not affect their syntactic complexity.

Burgeoning interest in the role of working memory (WM) in most cognitive endeavors has led to an increase in WM training programs. Within the field second language writing, however, WM improvement interventions are scarce, and even scarcer is research into how other variables interact with WM in their effect on performance. Hence, this study examines how anxiety, often believed to be an impediment for both WM and writing, moderates the effect of WM training on writing. Learners' (N=80) writing performance was assessed before and after Dual N-back training. Anxiety levels were examined for any interaction with the intervention. Results from ANCOVA, Pearson's correlation, and Two-Way ANOVA have revealed that writing anxiety is significantly correlated with writing performance and that the treatment group outperformed the control group even after controlling for both initial performance and anxiety levels. The findings indicate that there is a significant anxiety treatment interaction effect on writing performance.

Although the native/non-native speaking teacher dichotomy has stirred up ample scholarly consideration and debate in the field of English language teaching, insufficient attention has been devoted to the interactional features that characterize teacher talk, primarily teachers' questioning behavior. This study sought to determine the extent to which native and non-native English-speaking teachers diverge in terms of the different types of questions they employ in their classes. Accordingly, eight classes of a native and a non-native speaking teacher at the department of English of Constantine Teachers' College, Algeria, were audio recorded, transcribed and analyzed according to the different types of questions. The analysis of the results reveals that the native-speaking teacher is more inclined toward promoting a genuine classroom interaction by employing more procedural and referential questions along with an extensive use of comprehension checks, whereas the non-native speaking teacher tended to foster students' participation through an extensive use of display and convergent questions combined with an abundance of clarification requests and confirmation checks.

The cultural component has become as important as the other language components in foreign language instruction. Teaching materials in general and course books in particular are required to assist learners to develop intercultural communicative competence in today's globalization era. This work is an attempt to analyses,, My Book of English-Year One\", one of the \"second generation\" course books introduced recently at the Algerian middle school level, to see to what extent it incorporates the necessary ingredients for intercultural teaching/learning to take place. The analysis revealed that knowing oneself, is predominant in the book and pupils are not encouraged to consider cultural information in a comparative frame of reference, facts which do not promote the development of intercultural understanding.

Language and culture are inextricably tied: they cannot be separated without losing their essence and significance. What is language if not a means of communication operating in a defined socio-cultural context? Without language, communication would be very restricted; without culture, there would be no communication at all. A crucial implication is that one cannot be taught without the other. Notwithstanding the inseparability of language and culture, the foreign culture is not always welcome in the foreign language class. Some teaching professionals put forward heated arguments against incorporating it in language curricula and textbooks. Others believe it to be a 'taken-for-granted' component in foreign language pedagogy, for several other arguments. The object of this paper is to shed light on the place of culture in the foreign language class, drawing on seminal works in the field of language and culture teaching / learning. Adopting a convincing stance towards this issue is, no doubt, a prerequisite for effective teaching / learning.

Teacher-student writing conferences are individual conversations about the students' writing or writing process. This study aims to investigate and shed some light on first-year students' attitudes towards writing conferencing in EFL writing productions. It attempts to demonstrate that conferencing with students can help them improve their writing abilities. To this end, data was collected through a perception questionnaire that was handed to a randomly selected sample of 15 first-year students at the department of English in the Ecole Normale Supérieure -Assia Djebar- de Constantine. The data analyses were descriptive. Results demonstrated that the writing conference is an effective technique to improve students' writing.

Over the last two centuries, the place of culture in language teaching has been present in different approaches and methods to language teaching. However, few studies were conducted to examine the teaching of culture under the framework of the Competency-Based Approach (CBA). Certainly, since 2004, this approach has been implemented in the Algerian Educational System as a new interdisciplinary approach and medium of instruction and hence the textbooks of both levels, middle and secondary, were designed accordingly. Therefore, this study purports itself to investigate the role of CBA in upholding and fostering the teaching of culture in the Algerian context. In the light of this, a questionnaire was submitted to seventy secondary school EFL teachers at the district (Wilaya) of Oum El Bouaghi, Algeria. The obtained results disclose that there is a great awareness among EFL teachers of the significant role of culture in language teaching/learning. Nevertheless, the majority of them displayed a lack of what constitutes this role in terms of CBA classroom practices. Moreover, the amount of the target language culture is inadequately supplemented in the secondary school textbooks, notably through activities.

The concern of the present paper is to see to what extent is assessment in the Algerian secondary schools compatible with competency-based requirements. It explores the methods used to assess EFL learners and unveils some practical problems faced by EFL teachers when it comes to assessing their learners. The findings of the questionnaire demonstrated that though teachers are aware of how to assess their learners' performance within the CBA framework, they still rely on traditional means of assessment. A set of suggestions are provided to help teachers to assess EFL learners regarding the CBA assessment system requirements.