Earticle

The use of citations constitutes a great difficulty for Chinese MA students. Based upon a detailed study of a corpus of 100 MA thesis introductions written by Chinese students in English, the present study aims to find the main problems of this group of students in handling citations. Findings show that (1) some students lack awareness of the importance of citation for the purpose of creating their research space in the introduction part of their most important academic writing, the MA theses; (2) Chinese MA students tend to use one citation pattern and a reluctance to use the other patterns. Regarding the use of reporting verbs and verb tenses, Chinese students also show a preference for a limited number of verbs, and a predominating use of the Present Simple tense, indicating that these students do not have sufficient skills in employing citations appropriately; (3) Chinese students tend to overuse citations as authoritative support for their own work, with little critical evaluation of previous research. To ensure the effective use of citations, genre-based teaching of citations is suggested, through both explicit teaching and the practice of analyzing mature writing as well as the writing itself.

The present study examined effects of task demands on second language speech performance by manipulating the task complexity dimension of intentional reasoning, which was proposed as one of the task complexity features by Robinson (2007a). Twenty-four Japanese college students participated in the study and performed a control task and two intentional reasoning tasks. Six production measures of fluency, complexity and accuracy were employed in order to test whether intentional reasoning would lead to increases in accuracy and complexity at the cost of fluency, as predicted by the Cognition Hypothesis (e.g., Robinson, 2005, 2007a). The results showed that intentional reasoning produced 1) positive effects on syntactic as well as lexical complexity and accuracy, and 2) a negative effect on fluency (i.e., disfluency).

As English has increasingly become popular as a lingua franca, various Asian countries have introduced educational reforms to enhance English instruction. One such reform has been the introduction of English at the elementary school level. Many of the policy decisions on curricula, instructional approach and assessment, however, have been made on a trial-and-error basis. The present study aims to identify those variables that most strongly influence students’ performance in learning English at the elementary school level in Japan. The Junior STEP Silver TEST (a proficiency test that measures basic oral skills among young learners) was administered to 6,541 elementary school students who had received various types of English instruction in Japan. We found that the students’ grade levels and frequencies of instruction received outside of their schools turned out to be good predictors among those variables that we examined. Other variables including the total hours of English instruction at school and the frequencies of instruction led by foreign teachers at school had less influence on students’ performance. Our study also suggests that the one-hour of English instruction commonly taught at schools may exert a different influence on students’ performance between middle grade level and upper grade level students.

This study investigated university students’ perceptions of learner autonomy in English learning in the East Asian region. The study was conducted in 2006 based on the assumption that promoting learner autonomy is an appropriate pedagogical goal in EFL environments if teachers are aware of their roles, and that unique concepts of learner autonomy should be established and their applications for East Asian classrooms explored. The purposes were 1) to find out whether subjects from three different language areas could be surveyed about learner autonomy by one set of questionnaires and 2) to discover any common factors related to learner autonomy with regard to the subjects’ perceptions of responsibility and English learning activities outside of class. One hundred and seven Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese students were asked to answer the questionnaires. The authors analyzed the data using factor analysis. Three common factors were identified: “class management,” “study outside the class,” and “past regret.” These results proved the appropriateness of the questionnaires, though some revision is needed. The data also indicated the existence of a factor that may inhibit students from developing learner autonomy. Based on the study, the authors suggest that teachers should give students more opportunities to control their own learning as well as providing them with more support for continuing their study outside of the classroom in order to develop learner autonomy in an East Asian context.

This paper unfolds into two parts: The first part presents arguments against linguistic imperialism. The relationship between the center countries and the periphery countries is examined by giving specific examples from Turkey. The center countries are namely the USA and England. They produce both language materials and language teaching methodology. The periphery countries are those countries that are dependent on the center countries with respect to materials and methodology. The second part of the paper discusses some proposals to reduce the detrimental influence of linguistic imperialism on language education.

TESOL educators in general assume that Asian L2 students are challenged in using critical thinking for L2 academic purposes. They believe that the students’ native hierarchical and collectivistic cultural background render them less capable of expressing controversial viewpoints in their L2 writing and speech. This widespread assumption will be challenged here on the basis of studies demonstrating Asian L2 students’ unique, yet adequate critical abilities. The present paper argues that what undermines accurate understanding of Asian L2 students’ critical cues in L2 classrooms may be the Western ESL teacher’s presupposition that these students have somewhat defective critical abilities. It also probes in the differences between monological and dialogical critical thinking. Dialogical critical thinking, which, unlike the monological type, recognizes a variety of opposing viewpoints and opinions, offers students both in the East and West an equally relevant and beneficial approach to critical thinking. Similarities between such Western modes of dialogical critical thinking and Eastern modes of thought are illustrated to provide a new definition of critical thinking that is inclusive of both Eastern and Western values as a valuable option in L2 classrooms. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications.