Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education

The variety of activities and techniques suggested for improving the writing skill shows that EFL/ESL learners need scaffolding to gain mastery over it. The present study employed the reader-response approach to provide the assistance EFL learners require for writing argumentative essays. Five upper-intermediate EFL learners in a private class participated in the qualitative case study. The participants were not selected from the fields related to the English language and did not have any previous instruction on literary texts. During the treatment that took 20 sessions, each session 2 h, the participants read five short stories. Different classroom activities were used as sources of information, which helped the researcher to collect the required data. The classroom activities consisted of group discussions, writing tasks, and responses to the short stories that helped the learners to reflect on the short stories. Think-aloud protocols helped the researcher to learn about the participants’ mental processes during writing. The semi-structured interviews provided the researcher with the information necessary for a deeper understanding of the efficacy of the classroom procedure. As the results of the study showed, successful writing requires manipulation of meta-cognitive strategies and thought-provoking activities. Although the findings of the study cannot be generalized, they can inspire EFL/ESL teachers and material developers to seek a variety of procedures in their approaches to teaching writing.

Nowadays, one of the most important questions in teaching and learning involves increasing the degree of students’ engagement in learning. According to Astin’s Theory of Student engagement, the best learning environment is one in which it is possible to increase students’ engagement. The current study investigates the influences that using these networks for educational purposes may have on learners’ engagement, motivation, and learning. By a detailed comparison of a control group using face to face education and an experimental group using the social network Facebook, this study found significant differences between the two groups in terms of learning, engagement and motivation. The Facebook group showed higher outcomes in the TOEFL post-test than the face to face group with no differences in the pre-test. The Facebook group report significantly higher levels of engagement and motivation after the course than the face to face group. Engagement was related to learning outcomes in the Facebook group, but not in the face to face group. Also the results of the Facebook group supported Astin’s theory (the fourth principle: ‘Development is proportional to quantity and quality of involvement’ and fifth principle ‘The effectiveness of any educational practice is directly related to the ability of that practice to increase student engagement’). No correlation between engagement and motivation was found. The discussion focuses on the role of engagement in learning.

This study aimed to evaluate whether or not students engage in self-help behavior when they encounter difficulties during their presentations. The participants were second year EFL college trainees; the data were obtained from their classroom presentations. The audio recorded data has been transcribed, coded, and categorized into quantitative and qualitative data. Descriptive statistical tools were employed to analyze the quantitative component, while thematic analysis was used to explain the qualitative data. Based on the findings, the students engaged in different kinds of strategies for self-repair, including same-information repair (repetition) 48 (36.9%); appropriateness repair 46 (35.4%); error repair 32 (24.6%); and back-to-error 4 (3.1%). From the point of view of the trouble sources that trigger self-repair, this research highlighted difficulties with syntactic and lexical errors as the most prevalent problems among EFL learners. The self-repair evidences revealed the importance of giving time for students to modify their utterances by themselves. In addition, the result could help teachers determine where to focus their efforts in helping students.

To meet the increasing needs for translators and interpreters, Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) program was launched in Chinese universities. Discussion on how to cultivate MTI students who are supposed to be excellent users of foreign language except their mother tongue attracts many Chinese researchers, while little is done from the perspective of students, the main stakeholders of the program. Therefore, this case study, informed by self-concept theories, tracked one MTI student in a Chinese key university, to investigate factors influencing students’ learning motivation and their response towards the influence. Using the student’s diaries reflecting on daily translation training and the semi-structured interviews, the study found significant others, self-perceived ability, curriculum, and coursework played significant roles in the ebbs and flows of translation learning motivation. The findings also reveal the dynamic interaction among students’ self-representations (including the ideal self, the ought self, the actual self, and the feared self) in the dynamic context. This paper not only provides a new understanding to the translation education by incorporating students’ voice into professional training, but also offers advice for MTI program management.

Maximizing learning opportunities has long been the focus of research in teaching English as a foreign language. Besides the degree to which learners are engaged with the linguistic aspects, investigating other potential of the tasks is of prime importance for maximizing learning opportunities. The present research investigates the potential of four different task types (translation, dictogloss, text reconstruction and jigsaw) performed by 80 Iranian English as foreign language (EFL) intermediate students in promoting learner engagement. Learner's movement from limited to elaborate behavioral, affective and cognitive engagement at verbal, paralinguistic and functional levels while performing the tasks was studied using conversation analysis techniques. The conversation and episodes were coded using a predetermined template of coding. The conversation and ANOVA (analysis of variance) results show that as mind goes through transformation, it is indicated in the transformation in dialogic discourse (speech). The results also indicated that although task engagement patterns were the same across all tasks, the tasks have different potential in promoting task engagement. The results imply that besides other task characteristics including task utility, naturalness and essentiality which focus on linguistic aspects, task engagement is an equally important criterion for the quality assessment of the tasks and should be taken into account since it not only creates sustained attention on linguistic aspects but also mediates learning as it engages learners behaviorally, affectively and cognitively. The results also shed lights on the concept of interactional authenticity and how it can be operationalized in practice.

Engagement is a core issue in language teaching and learning. Without the students’ active involvement in the teaching–learning process, educational objectives could not be achieved. Accordingly, the concept of engagement has been the focus of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. This research examined the effects of corpus-based instruction on engineering students’ engagement in academic writing classes. The participants were 77 randomly selected fourth-year mechanical engineering students. The data were gathered through a self-reflective report and a journal and analyzed through an independent t-test, One-Way ANOVA, and narration techniques. The data showed that students who were instructed via corpus-based instruction improved their behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagements better than their counterparts; the experimental group enjoyed the activities and actively participated in different academic writing processes. The data also attested that there was a significant statistical difference between the experimental group and the control group engagements. This research implied that EFL teachers should consider genuine and real-life linguistic features and activities when they design academic writing instruction to enhance their engagement during the instruction.

In this interview Professor Farzad Sharifian, a pioneer of Cultural Linguistics, gives a concise history of this relatively new field, which he introduces as a multidisciplinary area of research that examines the intricate relationship between language and cultural conceptualizations. Prof. Sharifian asserts this flourishing field of research can be applied in areas such as intercultural communication, cross-cultural pragmatics, language and politics, and World Englishes. He believes Cultural Linguistics has important implications for the practice of English Language Teaching (ELT) too, especially for Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL). Professor Sharifian also touches on the notion of “metacultural competence” and how new communication technology can help language learners develop that competence. He concludes by saying that the English as an International Language and World Englishes paradigms require us to revisit how we define and assess language proficiency and that intercultural communication skills should constitute the heart of the new definitions and assessment procedures.

For me, language policy and planning (LPP) is both a field of practical enquiry and a field of theoretical enquiry. As a practical field, LPP is about actions; actions that are taken by various agents and agencies on the structure, use and acquisition of language. As a theoretical field, LPP critically assesses these actions and further our understanding of why individuals and society decide to take certain actions at certain times in certain ways with regard to language structure, language use and language acquisition. Ultimately, this will help to further our understanding of society. Crucially, LPP as a theoretical field of enquiry needs to raise critical questions about the actions, rather than simply describing and documenting what the actions are. In doing so, LPP studies need to adopt specific theoretical stances. In the present case, the theoretical perspective that the contributors to this special issue have adopted is that of Translanguaging. I am grateful to the editors of the special issue for their invitation to write this short foreword to introduce and contextualise the special issue. I want to do so by highlighting what I think the potential contributions of Translanguaging as an analytical concept are to the studies of LPP, with reference to the Greater Bay Are of China that I would describe as an emerging and evolving Translanguaging Space.

Teacher self-efficacy has been abundantly studied. However, it seems that the consequences of teachers’ self-efficacy have not been appropriately explored yet. The research objective was to investigate the consequences of teachers’ teaching self-efficacy. The researchers used a qualitative research method. They collected the data through semi-structured interviews with 20 EFL teachers who were selected through purposive sampling. The interviews were content analyzed thematically. Findings showed that self-efficacy has different consequences: pedagogical, learner-related, and psychological. Each consequence has several sub-categories. It is concluded that high self-efficacy affects teachers’ teaching practices, learners’ motivation, and achievement. It also affects teachers’ burn-out status, psychological being, as well as their job satisfaction. The findings can be theoretically and pedagogically important to EFL teachers, teacher-trainers, and administrators of educational settings.