Earticle

Language teacher identity is an emerging subject of interest in research on language teacher education and teacher development due to the recognized reciprocal relationships between professional identity and professional knowledge and action. While a number of studies have been reported on the (re)construction of non-native English language teachers’ professional identity, relatively little attention has been paid to the professional identity of expatriate native-English-speaking teachers (NESTs). This paper reports on a qualitative study that explored the discursive construction of the professional identity of a small group of native-English-speaking teachers (n=5) working in an English Department of a Vietnamese university. Drawing on Wenger’s (1998) three modes of belonging – engagement, imagination, and alignment – the study examined the lived experiences of these NESTs in their new sociocultural context through in-depth interviews with each participant. The study indicates that NESTs’ limited socialization and non-participation into the local community of practices due to lack of collaboration with the local teachers constitute the major obstacle to the reconstruction of their professional identity. The findings of the study, therefore, could have implications in relatable contexts for better and more collaboration and cooperation between expatriate NESTs and local non-native-Englishspeaking teachers (NNESTs) given the growing interest in hiring NESTs in Asian countries.

The objective of this article is to explore, in a Japanese EFL context, the ideal L2 self with some hypothesized relationships among motivated learning behaviour, self-efficacy, L2 anxiety, and the perceived amount of information related to learners’ future self-guides by performing structural equation modelling on the data of 126 Japanese first-year university students. Moreover, the present study examines the possibility of postulating two levels of the ideal L2 self to confirm whether a theoretical model better than Dörnyei’s original one can be attained by doing so. The SEM analysis showed that we can postulate two levels of the ideal L2 self, indeed resulting in a better theoretical model. The proposed model revealed that self-efficacy and the perceived amount of information had a positive influence on learners’ formation of a better ideal L2 self. Furthermore, the model indicated that the ideal L2 self and self-efficacy positively affected motivated learning behaviour, while the ideal L2 self negatively affected anxiety. Based on these findings, the authors argue that the L2 motivational self system (with the two levels of the ideal L2 self) can be developed into a framework that explains not only L2 motivation but also other affective variables, all in one system.

Attitude is an important issue in second/foreign language learning which may act as a facilitator or deterrent. This study investigated the Iranian writers’ attitudes towards reading-to-write and writing-only tasks. Applying a qualitative research design, 20 EFL writers were selected based on purposive sampling and were assigned the two task types. After each task, they were interviewed about their attitudes towards the tasks. The interviews were carefully transcribed and the transcriptions were judiciously read and coded. Their attitudes were explored regarding the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of attitude. The results showed that there were some differences in their attitudes towards these two tasks. For the reading-to-write task, cognitive component included their beliefs towards text, reader, and grammatical knowledge, whereas for writing-only task, it was comprised of task, reader, and content. In both tasks, there were some negative and positive affective components. The writers’ behaviors related to the cognitive and affective components changed according to the type of task. As positive attitude leads to more investment on the task, it is recommended that teachers try to create a favorable atmosphere to change the learners’ attitude to a positive one to help them deal with these tasks.

This study explores the differential role of creativity in Iranian EFL learners’ performance on argumentative and narrative written tasks. The study involved the measurement of learners’ (N=70) creativity using the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA) in terms of features of fluency, elaboration, flexibility and originality as well as the elicitation of the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of their performance on written narrative and argumentative tasks. Whereas the argumentative task required that learners wrote an argumentative essay giving their opinions concerning the effect of technology on human’s life, the narrative task involved learners in narrating a story based on a picture as a visual cue. With regards to the argumentative task, the results shows negative relationships between two measures of argumentative task fluency and students’ creative originality score. However, the syntactic complexity of argumentations was affected by creative elaboration. Concerning the narrative task, significant positive correlations were observed between creative fluency and the three fluency measures of narrations. Besides, all three fluency measures correlated positively with the total creativity score. Yet the number of words was found to be negatively correlated with the creative originality. The findings are discussed in the context of language teaching and learning.

This paper reports a study that examined the perceptions and experiences of foreign language students and teachers about sources and effects of foreign language anxiety (FLA). A preliminary investigation of the status of FLA in a Vietnamese tertiary EFL context using a sample of 419 non-English major students confirmed the existence of FLA in the research context. Sources and effects of FLA were then examined from the perspectives of 67 students and eight teachers, using interviews and autobiographies. The findings indicate that FLA mainly originated from learner-related factors. Although FLA had both positive and negative impacts, the students reported suffering from anxiety more than benefiting from it. The teachers were found to be aware of potential sources and effects of FLA, but they were not aware of the actual situation of their students. The factors that affected the impact of FLA were also identified. The study suggests that teachers should pay more attention to understanding student FLA, and that the approach to management of FLA should focus on students, and should be a dual-task approach involving minimising negative effects and optimising positive effects of FLA.