Earticle

Due to its dominant role in economic globalization, English has become a critical tool in today’s intercultural and technological era. In order to increase children’s English language proficiency, Thailand reformed its educational system in 1999 and adopted a new approach, learnercenteredness. This research study reports on the impact of this new policy on primary school teachers teaching English as a Foreign Language in Thailand. The results from the semi-structured interview with twenty-five teachers suggest that the educational reform has not yet been as constructive as was expected. Teachers have partial knowledge and some misconceptions about learner-centeredness, preventing the approach from achieving its potential. Most teachers have low selfreported language proficiency and have no prior training on the new approach. Classroom practices are quite different from the expected learner-centered and communicative classes. Factors impeding the success of the policy include teacher, learner, institutional, external, and adoption factors. The results of the study call for more rigorous and extended teacher training, changes in foreign language curricula, and further research studies to investigate teaching methods appropriate to the Thai context.

This research explores the effectiveness of lectures taught in the English language by lecturers who had originally been teaching in the Malay language which is the medium of instruction in Malaysia. Specifically the research focuses on students and lecturers’ perceptions of what good teaching behaviour constitutes. One hundred and forty one students completed questionnaires and three lecturers were observed in their respective classrooms. The questionnaires and observations focussed on the lecturers’ organization, interaction and presentation styles to determine the effectiveness of their teaching behaviours. It was found that students did like some organization in the lectures while they had varying ideas on the level of interactivity required according to the presentation style of the lecturer. The study highlights the importance of lecturers as facilitators and enablers of knowledge in class while remaining non-threatening to students.

Collocations help L2 learners to build up chunks of language and look for patterns of use, but they have not received enough attention. Given this, the present study investigates the extent to which lexical and grammatical collocations are used in high school and pre-university English textbooks, compared with the New Interchange book series. Although both instructional textbooks claim to improve EFL learners’ language and communicative skills in an integrated syllabus, the former ones are produced by the Ministry of Education, written by nonnative speakers of English and taught in public schools in Iran, whereas the latter ones are produced internationally by native speakers of English and taught in many private language institutes in Iran. Besides, to make a better judgment about the saliency of collocation use in the above textbooks, this study explores the comparative performance of groups of EFL learners studying the aforementioned textbooks in two different teaching situations in Iran to see how they perform on the collocation tests. To achieve the purposes of this study, content analysis was first carried out in the corpora obtained from the textbooks to see the frequency and proportion of lexical and grammatical collocations. Second, textbook-based collocation tests were developed and administered to the participants of this study, who consisted of 200 Iranian EFL learners, including 100 students at high and pre-university schools as well as 100 learners in English language institutes. The results showed that the frequency and proportion of collocations in the high school and pre-university English textbooks were generally lower than those in the New Interchange book series, but the frequency differences between the two types of textbooks were not statistically significant in the chi-square tests. Also, t tests indicated that the learners studying the New Interchange book series in the private language institutes had a better performance on both lexical and grammatical collocation tests. Finally, the pedagogical implications for EFL teachers and materials developers are presented.

The perspectives of native English-speaking teachers are considered with respect to teaching relatively large groups of engineering and computer science students in General English courses at a Korean university. As problems related to class size are examined from the teachers’ point of view through semi-structured interviews, it affords a rare occasion to hear what they really have to say about one issue which is continually identified as a major obstacle to teaching English as a foreign language. Considering that it may not be feasible to substantially reduce class size at most two-year colleges and four-year universities in Korea owing to financial constraints, remedies for minimizing the effect of large class size on English education are probed through the lens of the teachers. These remedies can certainly help address the problems encountered in big classes at the university in question and could possibly alleviate problems associated with large class size at other institutions in Korea and elsewhere with similar educational contexts.

The advent of multiple intelligences theory has highlighted the need for more correspondence between instructional tasks and L2 learners’ multiple intelligences. One application of this theory, albeit still underresearched, is the possible use of visual intelligence to improve L2 learners’ lexical acquisition. The objectives of this study were dual: (a) to investigate the relationship between EFL learners’ visual intelligence and their vocabulary reception and production, and (b) to determine the relationship between two visually oriented vocabulary presentation tasks (bilingual glosses and bilingual glosses accompanied by pictures) and EFL learners’ vocabulary reception and production. To this end, the visual intelligence section of the Multiple Intelligences Developmental Assessment Scales (MIDAS), a multiple intelligences test, and a test measuring receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition were administered to 91 low-proficiency EFL learners. The results revealed that there was no significant correlation between learners’ visual intelligence and their vocabulary reception and production. As to vocabulary enhancement tasks, it was found that the two tasks did not differ in enhancing learners’ vocabulary production; however, learners favored the bilingual glosses plus pictures for more gains in receptive vocabulary knowledge. These findings imply that, as a teachable construct, learners’ visual intelligence should be activated through instructional consciousness-raising procedures in order to help them draw on it to enhance their vocabulary acquisition. They also imply that lexical input enhancement through marginal glosses plus pictures can be more facilitative in improving vocabulary reception than vocabulary production as the former entails less demanding cognitive and memory operations.

Idioms tend to present difficulties for L2 learners because their meaning is often not transparent, and the choice of vocabulary seems to be unsystematic. Recent studies in cognitive linguistics, however, suggest that although the words in idiomatic phrases frequently do not retain their original meaning, idiomatic usage is semantically motivated. Idioms can be viewed as instances of conceptual metaphors (CM) which are grounded in physical and social experience. The present study explored whether raising the learners’ awareness of the underlying CMs would help them retain the meaning and the form of the idiomatic expressions. Four different learning conditions were compared: 1) idioms grouped by CM with definitions and example sentences provided in English; 2) idioms grouped by CM with definitions and example sentences translated into Japanese, the students’ L1; 3) semantically unrelated idioms with definitions and example sentences provided in English); and 4) semantically unrelated idioms with definitions and example sentences translated into Japanese. The results of the study suggest that the conceptual grouping of idiomatic expressions facilitates understanding, and that students are more likely to benefit from CMmotivated instruction when underlying concepts are introduced in their first language. In order to help learners develop a productive knowledge of L2 idiomatic expressions, form-focused activities may be necessary.

This article reports on the development and validation of a measurement survey tool, the Listening Comprehension Problem Scale (LCPS). LCPS is intended to help identify and evaluate second language (L2) learners’ listening comprehension problems while they are listening to oral texts in order to enhance their metacognitive awareness of L2 listening processes. An exploratory factor analysis was performed with a primary sample (N = 360), followed by a subsequent confirmatory factor analysis with a secondary sample (N = 326), resulting in a 15-item survey instrument with robust psychometric properties. The reliability and factorial validity of the instrument are presented along with evidence for a statistically significant correlation between students’ responses to the items on the instrument and their L2 listening performance. Future uses for the instrument are also discussed in relation to its potentials in verifying the effectiveness of pedagogies designed to develop L2 learners’ listening comprehension skills.

This paper reports findings of a study that investigated the vocabulary depth knowledge of 87 postsecondary Chinese EFL learners from the perspective of L1 influence. By means of a set of self-designed Vocabulary Depth Knowledge Test, L1 influence was respectively examined on the meaning sense and collocation aspect of vocabulary depth. Results showed that as vocabulary breadth increased, the meaning sense knowledge also increased, whereas collocation knowledge tended to stabilize. Learners’ L1 was found to exert asymmetrical influence upon meaning senses and collocations, and the participants appeared more vulnerable to L1 congruence effect on the collocation aspect. Their collocation knowledge also tended to stabilize, and their cross-linguistic awareness did not improve as the vocabulary breadth or depth knowledge increased. The paper concludes with several pedagogical implications for EFL vocabulary teaching.

The effects of single glossing have been identified in some studies, but research on the effects of bilingual glossing and multiple-choice glossing on incidental vocabulary learning is rather scarce. Furthermore, the role of glossing is often examined in the process of mere reading, and little is known as to how effective it can be in reading-plus activities like reading and retelling. This study investigated the effects of bilingual glossing and bilingual multiple-choice glossing on incidental vocabulary learning through reading-based oral tasks—reading and retelling— by two groups of non-English major college students in China. The independent-samples T-test for the immediate posttest indicated that multiple-choice glossing group outperformed the bilingual glossing group, but the difference is not significant. Nevertheless, multiplechoice glossing has yielded significant long lasting effects in the delayed posttest.

This paper reports on a qualitative study that examined the perceptions of eight preservice English language teachers from mainland China about their English language learning experiences within an undergraduate teacher education program in Hong Kong. Based upon a framework of identity construction, and using in-depth interviews conducted at regular intervals during their freshman year, the study explored how the participants’ constructed identities as English language learners as they crossed geographical and educational boundaries to pursue higher education in Hong Kong. The study illustrates that the participants’ experienced challenges in realizing the multiple language learner identities they sought to attain and that this may have resulted in conflicts and antagonism between different identities positions. Implications for providing language learning opportunities to mainland Chinese learners enrolled in higher education institutions in English speaking environments are discussed and suggestions for future research considered.