Earticle

As is now widely recognised, the role and status of the English language have changed radically over recent years: as both a cause and consequence of globalization it has become appropriated world-wide as an international lingua franca. There is, however, little corresponding recognition that this state of affairs might have implications for how the language is customarily taught. On the contrary, ways of thinking about English as a subject hardly seem to– have changed at all. In this article, I want to suggest that we need to enquire critically into taken-for-granted pedagogic assumptions about the English subject—into how far the established ways we think about the E of TEFL or TESOL are still valid. In the course of this enquiry, I shall reconsider familiar ideas about communication and competence and argue the essential relevance of the concept of capability in our understanding of how English is used, and how the language might be taught so that it most effectively activates the process of learning how to use it.

This study examines the perceptions of participants in a governmentinitiated program, TaLK (Teach and Learn in Korea), that aims to provide children in rural areas with English education opportunities with native-speaking instructors. The main goals of TaLK are 1) to lessen the English divide that exists in Korea by increasing English language proficiency among students in rural areas; 2) to offer opportunities for foreign college students to learn Korean language and culture; and 3) to offer Korean college students with opportunities to enhance their intercultural competence by interacting with foreign college students. Based on survey responses from 851 TaLK participants, 280 foreign college students, 398 Korean college students, and 173 English teachers, the analysis focused on the participants’ perceptions of how well the implemented program reached its proposed goals and whether there was a difference in the perceptions across the three groups. Results show that TaLK was perceived by all participants to be somewhat successful, although the intense focus on the needs of foreign college students left the other participants desiring more support. The findings provide significant insights for how implementation of such native-speaking English teacher recruitment programs can be further improved and extended to other Asian EFL contexts.

Cross-orthography research has thus far focused on the effect of learners’ first language (L1) reading ability in alphabetic or nonalphabetic languages on their second language (L2) reading performance, paying scant attention to the different aspects of L2 reading performance in learners of two alphabetic languages that have different writing systems or reading directionality modes. This study, however, examines the impact of L1 reading directionality on English reading fluency–represented here by a combination of reading rate, reading accuracy, and reading comprehension–in Turkish and Arab learners of English. Different reading texts from both first and second languages were employed to compare undergraduate intermediate students’ (n = 40) performance on different components of reading fluency. Students were also interviewed upon the completion of the tasks in order to obtain in-depth insights into the way they approached reading and the challenges they encountered while reading in each language. Analysis of the data indicated that in spite of significant differences in some areas, the learners’ L1 reading directionality mode did not have a significant effect on all aspects of their reading fluency in English. However, the observed differences between the mean scores of reading fluency components could have pedagogical implications for classroom practice.

The study examines the factors that shape Malaysian learners’ academic self-concept in a specific subject, academic writing (in L2). Data were generated through a mixed methods approach, with an initial survey of 170 students, followed by two semi-structured interviews with each of eight student participants. The quantitative phase of the study identified that there were different self-concepts involved in the formulation of self-concept in academic writing (e.g., self-concept in English and self-concept as a writer). The qualitative findings from four student participants (selected from the eight) further expanded on these and identified interrelated internal and external factors that shape the L2 learners’ self-concept and engagement in academic writing. The study proposed that that there is a complementary relationship between multiple internal and/or external factors that are available to students, and that this may influence the nature of their actions in the academic writing class. Overall, this study demonstrated that an L2 learner’s self-concept in academic writing is complex and multifaceted and that Malaysia’s socio-historical setting tended to have a direct impact in the formulation of this academic self-concept. In light of these findings from the study, it is recommended that institutions provide a supportive educational environment (i.e., appropriate student-teacher ratio, writing support) in order to develop a positive foundation for self-concept enhancement and student engagement in academic writing.

The growing body of research on corrective error feedback in the past two decades has been mostly carried out in the ESL context and has concluded its effectiveness, with controversy remaining regarding its effects on EFL learners. The present study was set in the college EFL context. A survey at the beginning of the study suggested that students preferred indirect error correction where instructors underline errors and indicate error types at the same time. The one-semester experiment focused on the effects of two types of indirect error correction regarding seven treatable errors. The results showed that both types of indirect error correction were effective as the number of errors per hundred words decreased significantly in the post-test. In the delayed post-test, the group that received coded error correction maintained a significant improvement in language accuracy compared with the pre-test, suggesting that underlining errors coupled with providing error codes has better delayed effects. However, some types of errors showed an increase in frequency from the pre-test to the delayed post-test, despite the significant decrease in the total number of errors.

The purpose of the present study is to explore the notion of identity in East Asian (EA) TESOL graduate student’s presentations. The research is based on a corpus of EA graduate student presentations (n = 20), focusing on their uses of the first person singular pronouns and possessive determiners I, my, and me. The analysis builds on Zareva’s (2013) methodology of investigating the genre identity roles found in English native-speaking student presentations. The results revealed that the EA students gave the greatest preference to asserting their scholarly selves in their presentations by inhabiting identity roles typically associated with the written academic genres, while still revealing different sides of their personal and social selves in relation to the topic content of their presentations. However, in most cases, their attempts to do so were significantly less frequent than those of the English native-speaking students, and their linguistic choices were more repetitive. I conclude that the individualistic identity implied in the use of the first person pronoun and its determiners in oral academic discourse may be problematic for many EA students, and thus, explicit teaching of how to utilize it strategically would be one means of raising their rhetorical awareness not only as graduate students but also as rhetorically conscious TESOL instructors.