With the globalization and internationalization of education, many teachers from Asian countries pursue their professional development in English-speaking settings. However, there seems to be scarce research on these teachers’ expectations, lived experiences and identities in these contexts, and how their personal experiences influence their views and teaching when they return to their home countries. Using interviews and email correspondences, the current article examines the perceptions and personal experiences of three teachers of English (from Vietnam, China and Taiwan) who studied in Australia. Among others, findings suggest that the participants negotiated their expectations, lived experiences and sense of identity in different ways regardless of the degree to which their experiences in Australia matched their expectations. As teachers of English, they were constantly reflecting on the suitability of applying the teaching methods learned in their local teaching contexts. When they returned to their home countries, all of them found it useful to share their personal experiences of living and studying abroad with their students. Their strategic and practical application of what they had learned and/or experienced in Australia assisted them in having new options in dealing with teaching and learning issues in their home countries. This article hopes to shed light on aspects that may influence the growth of teachers of English.
This qualitative study explored the use of doodling to surface experiences in the psychological phenomenon of language anxiety in an English classroom. It treated the doodles of 192 freshmen from a premier university in Northern Luzon, Philippines. Further, it made use of phenomenological reduction in analysing the data gathered. Findings reveal that doodling can be an effective tool in surfacing experiences of a psychological phenomena, such as language anxiety, although this may not be generalizable. The gathered doodles show that English language learners go through shimming and shaming experiences, specifically, buffing, baffling, shutting, sweating and shivering, and shattering. The findings of the study can benefit teachers for they can use doodling, a non-verbal tool, in generating the classroom experiences of their students. More so, the anxiety experiences unveiled in this study will help language teachers realize the impact of language anxiety on English language learners.
This article reports on the views of selected Southeast Asian and Mexican second language teacher education students regarding the characteristics and pedagogical behaviours of good EFL instructors. A total of 116 participants from Mexico, Brunei, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam took part in the current investigation. These countries have all been characterized as pedagogically conservative and slow to adopt educational innovations. Data was gathered using the repertory grid technique and was subjected to content, cluster, and principal component analyses. Results foregrounded the importance placed on teachers’ positive personality traits. Most significantly, findings indicated a preference for modern teaching approaches among the research participants, despite the pedagogic conservatism of their home countries.
Although there is an ever-growing volume of research focused on TESOL textbooks (or coursebooks, as they are sometimes known), I argue that the TESOL research community should pay more attention to textbook research in mainstream education, that is, to the work of those scholars who focus on L1 rather than L2 education, given that there is a rich, methodologically sound tradition of L1 textbook research from which we can usefully learn lessons. I support this argument by describing in detail three exemplary empirical studies of textbooks from mainstream education, identifying how they can inspire and strengthen TESOL research.
This article explores teachers’ classroom monitoring in English language learning and asks if it has a role to play beyond what we know and recognize as mainstream classroom management. As part of a larger study of pedagogical practices in classrooms in Singapore, researchers collected and analyzed videographic data on the types and subject-specific content of teachers’ monitoring activities. The findings showed that teachers mostly monitored for supervisory purposes to individuals within a limited set of language learning activities. Overall, there were few occurrences of classroom monitoring for formative purposes and in the subject-specific areas of creative and descriptive writing, expression, conveying information and persuasion. In conclusion, the article suggests that one way to broaden monitoring activities in classrooms would be through setting short- and long-term questioning as an instructional strategy.
This study examines the relationship between L2 willingness to communicate (L2WTC), L2 unwillingness to communicate (L2UWTC) and the personality traits of openness to experience and extraversion in an Iranian context. The Pearson correlation and descriptive statistics were used to analyse the results from a study with 217 English major students. A model for L2WTC was proposed and examined by employing structural equation modelling (SEM). The results showed that openness to experience and extraversion were the main predictors of L2WTC. The paths from openness to experience and extraversion to L2UWTC were not significant. In addition, a negative path was found from L2UWTC to L2WTC. The proposed model proved to be a good fit to the data collected. The results provided implications for the applicability of the L2WTC model to the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context.
Developing English for communicative purposes is a key objective of language classes in many parts of the world. As a logical prerequisite to communication practice, learners need to have Willingness to Communicate (WTC) before they will engage in L2 interaction (Macintyre et al., 1998). Teachers can play an important role in helping learners to develop WTC (Dörnyei, 2007), however, since research into this topic is relatively recent, not much is known about how teachers go about this process. For this reason, the present study investigated teachers’ perceptions of their role in fostering WTC through interviews and questionnaires and compared these with observations of their classroom practices. The research was conducted in New Zealand ESOL class that focused predominantly on communicative skills, catering mostly to Asian learners. The results showed that teachers believed they play a key role in helping learners to develop WTC and identified a range of strategies they used in class. Classroom observations confirmed the use of some strategies although no explicit encouragement of language practice outside the classroom was made. This paper identifies some possible reasons for this mismatch and concludes with practical recommendations for ESOL teachers who wish to support learners’ WTC.
Despite the high frequency of occurrences of wh-interrogatives in daily use, there are repeated negative comments about the poor mastery of the wh-interrogative structure among Hong Kong students. However, so far little attention has been paid to their difficulties in the acquisition of the structure. There is a strong need to understand what linguistic knowledge they possess, and identify the learning difficulties in order to seek ways to address them. This study obtained its quantitative data from three classes of Hong Kong Secondary 3 students through a written test and an oral test. The major learning difficulties found include the word order transfer from the Chinese language, failure to use correct verb phrase structures, and erroneous use of some wh-words (whose, which, and how) and wh-phrases (e.g. how far, whose bag). The findings also reveal learning difficulties related to learner variables. Students of different English proficiency levels showed wide variation in their understanding of interrogative structures. The pedagogical implications are discussed.
The field of English Language Teaching (ELT) has long sought to identify traits of good language learners, in an effort to teach these traits to less successful language learners (Rubin, 1975). Emotional Intelligence has recently come to the forefront of research on language learning and teaching, and is now increasingly recognized as an important predictor of success in academic achievement in general, and success in learning a language (Goleman, 1995; Rastegar and Karami, 2013; Sucaromana, 2012). Recent years have seen a proliferation of research linking Emotional Intelligence to success in the English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. Hence researchers have recommended explicit Emotional Intelligence instruction in language classrooms.
With the importance of English in today’s globalized world, and the greater need to communicate in English, fostering a student’s communicative ability is important, particularly in an EFL context like Oman. The Government of Oman has invested heavily in English language instruction, but unfortunately, the investment has not paid off. While there exists a substantial volume of research identifying possible reasons for students’ inadequate grasp of English even after years of language instruction both at the school and university levels, research linking emotional skills and language learning success in Oman is lacking. This article investigates whether a lack of Emotional Intelligence skills could be one of the reasons for the failure of students to achieve competence in English. Results from questionnaires of multiple choice and open-ended questions distributed to 60 university students at a large public university in the Sultanate of Oman show that a lack of Emotional Intelligence impacts a student’s ability to learn. The authors conclude that directly focusing on Emotional Intelligence skills in Omani university classrooms could result in improving students’ overall achievement both at university in general, and in English specifically.
This article provides preliminary validity evidence for the shorter Mandarin version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) under the content aspect, technical quality, substantive and generalizability aspect of Messick’s (1995) construct validity framework. The shorter version with 177 Chinese university students in three proficiency levels indicates that the test enjoys a high level of validity both from the perspective of classical test theory and item response theory. A one-way ANOVA and detailed statistics of Rasch analyses demonstrate that the test could effectively distinguish learners from different proficiency levels. The first eight levels of the VST generally display an ascending difficulty continuum except that some loan words in the seventh and the eighth level prove to be problematic in assessing Chinese learners’ vocabulary size accurately. The generalizability aspect of construct validity is demonstrated in that there is no item bias for learners of the same proficiency group in terms of gender. Compared with the results of other studies either on monolingual or bilingual version, this research attempts to justify the appropriateness of the Mandarin version and calls for cautious applications of the test instrument on Chinese learners.
This study investigates the effects on developing L2 listening fluency through doing extended listening-focused activities after reading and listening to audio graded readers. Seventy-six EFL university students read and listened to a total of 15 graded readers in a 15-week extensive listening programme. They were divided into three groups (Group 5, n = 30; Group 10, n = 20; Group 15, n =26) according to the number of post-listening-focused activities they completed. Another group who did not receive extensive listening served as the control group (Group 0, n =39). All participants were given a pre-test containing teacher-developed tests and a full-length simulated Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) listening test. Similar tests were repeated at the end of the programme. The study addresses the effect size of improvement that students made from listening to audio graded readers and doing post-listening-focused activities, the degree to which students progressed on their TOEIC listening test, and the transferring effect from narrative-type input to conversational-type listening. Results show that the effect size was very small, medium, and very large on the listening improvement for Group 5, Group 10 and Group 15 respectively. On their post-TOEIC tests, Groups 5, 10 and 15 made approximately 2, 9 and 16 points out of 100 respectively. Finally, only Group 15 demonstrated some transfer effect from narrative to conversational input type of listening. This study also discussed the reasons low-level learners need to read many more texts to see more significant improvement.
The uniqueness of the Language Classroom and its complexity raises a need for foreign language teachers to develop necessary skills and knowledge to observe, analyse and evaluate their classroom discourse. Hence, interactional awareness of language teachers is an integral part of pedagogical and practical knowledge. In this article, the Self-Evaluation of Teacher Talk framework (SETT) proposed by Walsh (2006) will be discussed in detail and its contribution to critical reflective practice will be probed. The extracts are taken from 12 hours of tape recording of a university General English course and supported by a teacher’s diary for analysis. The results demonstrate that although the SETT framework is representative and useful, setting and institutional requirements should not be ignored. This article has implications not only for developing critical reflective practice for in-service teachers but also for teacher training.
Investigating supervision comments, as a form of interaction between the teacher and the learner, is an area of research that has received little attention so far in spite of being crucial in creating an atmosphere of friendship and confidence-building. Previous research in this area has emphasized the role of affect in supervision comments in distance learning, however, this issue has not been investigated with regard to native versus non-native supervisors’ comments in face-to-face supervision settings. To address this, an attempt was made, in this study, to examine the use of affective markers in the supervision comments provided by native/non-native supervisors on MA TESOL/TEFL Iranian students. To do so, the written comments of the supervisors on the students’ theses were analysed using a framework called Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CSARP) Coding Manual. The results indicated that the non-native supervisors tended to rely entirely on ‘bold on record’ strategies for providing written comments on their students’ theses and this was in contrast to the native supervisors’ tendency to use ‘redressive moves’ with affective markers rather than non-redressive or direct moves. The percentage of application of internal and external ‘redressive moves’ was another finding of the present study.
English has been referred to as a lingua franca for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). As the region moves towards establishing the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), the diversity of pronunciation of the ASEAN member states is seen as a forefront issue for English language teaching (ELT). From a sociocultural perspective, this study explored teachers’ cognitions about pronunciation instruction and their classroom practice. The findings were based on qualitative data collected from three pre-service non-native English teachers. All the findings were based on these multicultural and multilingual context. Data were obtained from interviews and practicum-teaching observations and were coded and analysed thematically to understand the teachers’ emic perspectives of pronunciation instruction. Four themes emerged from the data and were discussed in relation to the 2015 AEC, based on which I challenge the current status of English as a foreign language in the Cambodian ELT mindset. Briefly, these themes include the teachers’ self-acknowledgement of their own pronunciation, the perceived goal of pronunciation instruction, their approaches to teaching pronunciation and their attitudes towards ASEAN English as a lingua franca (ELF). The article concludes with implications for English language teacher education in Cambodia and beyond and calls for more research to expand the ASEAN ELF literature.
This paper investigates the use of lexical bundles in Chinese students’ academic writing across different levels of studies at an English medium university. Frequency-based bundles were retrieved from a corpus of student academic texts written at four points of time between Year 1 and Year 4, and the structures and functions of the bundles were analysed to reveal the developmental patterns in bundle use. The analysis shows that, overall, students used more types of bundles when they progressed to the higher level of studies, but there were differences in the use of preferred structural forms. The analysis also suggests a developmental order of bundle use in L2 students’ academic writing: clausal and nominal bundles appeared to be acquired prior to prepositional bundles. In terms of functional distributions, discourse organizing bundles were much more prevalent than stance and referential expressions in student writing at all levels of studies, particularly in final year project dissertations. The findings indicate a linkage between levels of academic studies and the patterns of bundle use in student writing, as well as the effects of EAP instruction on the learning of lexical bundles by Chinese student writers at an English medium university in China.
Despite the fact that Singaporean students consistently perform well in literacy tests such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, employers have reported that Singaporean employees in general lack confidence in articulating their views in the workplace. This may be attributed to the practice of teacher-fronted and monologic classroom discourse, which does not allow opportunities for teachers and students to construct knowledge and understanding together during curriculum time. The article reports on one classroom-based research conducted on a Secondary Three (age 15) class in one Singaporean government school. The purpose of this article is to show how classroom talk could be made more dialogic, through an intervention, to enhance students’ talk opportunities and to build up literacy skills. The article argues that over time, the habitual practice of a dialogic form of teacher-student talk would help to open up the space of learning for students. To do that, it would be necessary to begin with raising teachers’ awareness of the benefits of dialogic talk.
Test takers’ beliefs or experiences have been overlooked in most validation studies in language education. Meanwhile, a mutual exclusion has been observed in the literature, with little or no dialogue between validation studies and studies concerning the uses and consequences of testing. To help fill these research gaps, a group of Senior III students in Guangdong Province, mainland China, were interviewed concerning their views of the high-stakes Computer-based English Listening and Speaking Test (CELST) and their experiences of preparing for and taking the test. The data analysis indicated that the students had a distinct understanding of the CELST validity and also tentatively suggested a relationship between the students’ views of the CELST design, their test preparation practice and their test taking process. These findings provided information useful for sharpening a computer-based English listening and speaking test and for generating positive washback on English learning.
Reflection has often been considered a powerful tool for students in composition, helping them develop rhetorical awareness and the ability to transfer their knowledge to future writing tasks. However, the methods that promote reflection have often been debated, and students have considered the process both puzzling and difficult. Furthermore, few studies have directly compared the reflections of native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers to determine if they are likely to reflect in the same ways and if methods to improve reflective writing would be effective for both groups. To assist in this endeavour, the current study builds on work by Krol (1996) and Kathpalia and Heah (2008) to categorize student reflections and the developments they select to discuss in the small-group tutorial program for L1 and L2 speakers at a large, research university. The aim of this work is to better understand how and to what extent these students are reflecting to help guide the program and offer suggestions that could be more widely applied to peer review groups and composition classrooms in general. This study also indicates future areas of inquiry, including analysing how the number of guiding questions provided influences reflection, assessing student reflections before and after modelling, and comparing the reflections of L2 students with different native languages.
Lack of knowledge in the conventional usage of collocations in one’s respective field of expertise cause Taiwanese students to produce academic writing that is markedly different than more competent writing. This is because Taiwanese students are first and foremost English as a Foreign language (EFL) readers and may have difficulties picking up on the regularly encountered patterns of collocating words found in texts, since nothing on the page highlights collocations as such. As one step in determining a solution to this problem, this paper reports on action research that took place in an EFL writing classroom where undergraduate Taiwanese medical students (n = 25) were encouraged to self-edit their academic writing for verb-noun collocation errors through the use of a web-based English/Chinese bilingual parallel corpus collocational concordancer. Statistical analysis of students’ drafts revealed the use of the collocational concordancer resulted in verb-noun collocation accuracy increasing steadily with each subsequent draft for two essay types (i.e. descriptive and opinion). However, qualitative analysis of student feedback regarding their experience in using the collocational concordancer to self-edit their academic writing showed a difference in acceptance and success. Furthermore, students expressed negativity towards the EFL writing teacher requesting students to self-edit academic writing. The collocational concordancer functions, nuanced statistical results in terms of collocation accuracy, and pedagogical implications of the action research results are discussed.
The rhetorical organization of research articles has attracted extensive attention in genre study, and the focus of move-based analysis is on the textual function. The primary aim of the present study was the comparison of the rhetorical moves of English research articles in the field of Applied Linguistics written by Thai first authors and published in national Thai journals with those written by authors of different nationalities and published in international journals. Each of the two corpora was represented by 30 English research articles with sections of introduction, method, results and discussion. These sections were examined according to different move models: Introduction: Swales (2004), Methods: Peacock (2011), and Results and Discussion: Yang and Allison (2003). The study provided detailed rhetorical structures of research articles from both corpora with linguistic features used in each move. It was found that the frequency of rhetorical move occurrence of the two corpora was quite similar, but there were some differences in how gaps in research were established and in how credibility of the data analysis was gained. The findings of this study provide a picture of how research articles of the two corpora are written. This may lead to implications for English for Academic Purposes teachers and researchers and novice writers in Applied Linguistics.
English as foreign language (EFL) writers are often found to have weaker control of their academic writing, among which presenting an effective authorial stance has been reported as particularly challenging (Hyland, 1998a; Schleppegrell, 2004). In particular, student writers tended to deploy a stronger stance and be less effective with tentative claims. The study investigated a small group of EFL doctoral students’ conceptions, which, as hypothesized, may affect their presentation of stance in academic arguments. Twelve doctoral candidates were recruited from two disciplines, soft and hard sciences. They answered questions and made judgments related to authorial stance, adapted into two ‘extreme’ versions, assertive and tentative, in academic texts taken from both domain-specific and domain-neutral journal articles. The results revealed that the doctoral participants’ conceptions pertained to three dimensions, Stance as linguistic construct, as cognitive or behavioural entity and as institutional norm. Their conceptions generally lacked sophistication and depth and instead were reductive and polarized. Assertive claims obtained more favourable considerations than tentative claims, and students from both disciplines varied considerably in their views of language. The results can inform academic stance instruction to allow for more exposure to nuanced presentations of stance and engagement with explicit discussions of the nuances of stance-taking.