English Teaching and Learning

Teacher-student interactions have been extensively explored in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms using the tripartite Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) model. Past research concentrates mainly on the exploration of interactions in classrooms where language skills and components are taught. However, the analysis of IRF exchanges in EFL content courses is under-researched. The present study, therefore, was designed to explore IRF interactions in these types of EFL classes. The main purpose was to describe student-teacher interactions in these classes and explore the possible effects of teachers’ gender and teaching experience on IRF use. The participants included a group of seven EFL teachers and 25 undergraduate EFL learners studying English Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Kashan, Iran. The researchers recorded 26 90-min content classes through participant observation. Guided by expert opinion, the researchers purposively selected and transcribed 390 min of the recorded exchanges and then coded them using the Sinclair and Coulthard Model. The analysis of exchange types and frequencies indicated that the student’s reply act, the teacher’s elicitation act, and the teacher’s accept act were the most frequently observed classroom interactions. However, teachers’ starters and asides were not observed at all. At the level of interactional moves, the opening move by the teacher and the answering move by the students were the most frequent. Results also showed that student initiation addressed to the teacher was observed more frequently in classes taught by teachers with average teaching experience (10–20 years) than those taught by a novice (below 10 years) or more experienced teachers (+ 20 years). Teachers’ gender did not significantly influence their interaction patterns with students. Implications for teaching EFL content courses are discussed.

Although TED talks are commonly used as supplementary listening materials in English classrooms, whether they are suitable materials for academic listening is still arguable. This study thus employs the Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) and the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) lists to analyze TED talks’ vocabulary profiles in a corpus consisting of transcripts of 2085 such talks from six main topics. The analysis reveals high coverage of the ASWL over TED talks at approximately 90%. The coverage figure is similar to that of the ASWL over academic speech, suggesting that TED talks should be suitable materials for academic listening. Learners are also likely to learn high-frequency academic spoken vocabulary from such talks. This study also discovers that learners can reach the same coverage of TED talks by studying either the 1741 word families in the ASWL or the first 2000 word families in the BNC/COCA lists. The learning load is lower for learners to study the ASWL, thus making it a more suitable vocabulary support for comprehending TED talks. Based on the findings, this study provides several useful suggestions regarding how TED talks can be used in EAP courses.

The ability to understand and use multiword expressions is essential in developing nativelike competency in English. This study focused on noun-noun compounds and examined L2 learners’ sensitivity to preferred semantic relations, a competency necessary for nativelike interpretation of ambiguous noun-noun compounds. Three groups of college-level English L2 students (intermediate, advanced, and post ESL groups) performed a compound inference task, in which they identified the meanings of ambiguous novel compounds (e.g., child art) from multiple-choice options, including the dominant meaning (e.g., Art that is made by a child), the non-dominant meaning (e.g., Art that is created for children), and two distractors. The results indicated that the advanced and post ESL groups were significantly more accurate in identifying the dominant meanings, but all groups demonstrated sensitivity to the degree of ambiguity. The findings are discussed in light of the usage-based theory in multiword processing and learning.

Abstract While TED talks with their video format are popular teaching materials, limited corpus studies have been conducted to provide systematic evidence on their linguistic features. Further, hardly any of the existing research has examined the multi-word units of these talks, particularly phrasal verbs (PVs), a group of polysemous, high-frequency English lexical items. Following Liu and Myers’ approach (2020), this study characterized the most common meaning senses of 150 PVs (Garnier and Schmitt, Language Teaching Research, 19, 645–666, 2015) among 500 TED talk transcripts based on corpus analyses with their frequency information of meaning senses. Among the final 148 PV types identified in our TED corpus, 61 of them have one dominant meaning sense (over 80% incidents). With contrasting analyses of PV semantic information between the TED corpus and COCA sub-corpora, we found that PVs in the TED corpus are not similar to either the COCA spoken or academic writing register (contrasted in Liu and Myers). Then, a frequency-based TED PV list was compiled as a pedagogical reference to facilitate vocabulary learning via watching TED Talks. We suggest instructors to teach the 61 PVs first, then move to the others with more diversified meaning to alleviate students’ memory burden of learning these multi-word units.

The recent emergence and spread of COVID-19 have altered the way the world operates. As this pandemic continues to run its course, both language educators and learners around the world are facing a unique set of challenges. In this day and age, there are no more relevant, pressing, or internationally ubiquitous news stories than those related to COVID-19. For L2 learners to have a seat at the global table, it is necessary to learn languages using news stories. Hence, the current study applied text mining techniques to explore and identify patterns among news stories related to COVID-19. In the study, a corpus collecting online news reports about COVID-19 was analyzed. A number of R packages including readtext, tidytext, ggplot2, and ggraph were jointly employed to extract key phrases and construct a graphic model underlying the news corpus. A popular term-extraction method often used in text mining—term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF)—was utilized to extract the key phrases from the news reports on the COVID-19 virus. A wordnet structure was then established to uncover potentially salient thematic components. The pedagogical implications for language education and vocabulary assessment are further discussed.

As technologies advance, the use of corpora and concordance programs has shown their potential to help second language writing classes. Although some writing research has demonstrated usefulness of corpora in different ways, much less is known concerning how corpora can scaffold students’ correction and uptake of written corrective feedback for revision. The current study adopted a semester-long classroom-based research design keeping classroom ecology in order to examine how second-year EFL college students took up teacher-coded feedback by consulting corpus tools and other e-reference resources to rectify errors in their essays. Fourteen participants composed three multi-draft essay assignments plus a diagnostic essay in various genres. They used two Chinese–English concordance programs and “Corpus of Contemporary American English” to help their revisions. Questionnaires, interviews, students’ marked and revised essays, their written revision records, and video recording of learner–corpus interaction were analyzed and triangulated. Errors were found to decrease with increased frequency of corpus consultation over the semester. Although most participants appreciated the assistance of corpus tools, reservations were noted in the process. Two student cases with average writing performance point to learners’ engagement with corpora as one crucial factor interacting with perceptions and outcomes of lookups. Pedagogical implications and limitations are discussed.

Recent years have seen increased attention being given to English-medium instruction (EMI) in university academic subjects. Task or mastery goal plays an indispensable role in determining how students develop their academic abilities and how they motivate themselves to succeed in academic subjects. Task goal orientations and students’ perceived communication competence are found to relate negatively to negative emotions, which undermine their motivation to participate and willingness to communicate (WTC) in class. This study aims to investigate the mediating role of foreign language anxiety (FLA) in the relationship between task goal orientations, perceived communication competence, English ability, and WTC in EMI classrooms. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 613 university students in Taiwan. The structural model revealed that students’ WTC in EMI classes was strongly influenced by their task goal orientations and perceived communication competence. Foreign language anxiety fully mediated the relation between perceived communication competence and WTC, but partially mediated the relation between task goal orientations and WTC at subject content-focused level. Foreign language anxiety did not mediate the relations between the two predictors (i.e., communication competence and task goal orientations) and WTC at language-focused level. Although English ability was weakly related to FLA and WTC at language-focused level in EMI classes, it did not affect FLA and students’ WTC in the model.