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The study, conducted in a mountainous province in Vietnam, explored how teaching methods of critical literacy (CL) were effective with high school students and their perceptions about these approaches. The study employed engaged ethnography (e.g., Phyak & Bui, 2014; Davis & Phyak, 2015) in which the researcher worked collectively with 27 students in understanding current pedagogical issues and applying CL in a real classroom. In particular, students were provided an opportunity to learn English through CL which was embedded in two vignettes on listening and project-based learning. The findings indicated CL pedagogies significantly improved students’ English language competency and multiple skills such as leadership, presentation, and collaboration. Moreover, the students’ responses strongly indicated CL is a meaningful, applicable, and critical approach for their English language improvement, socio-cultural awareness, and agentive development. The study offered some recommendations for applying CL pedagogies in language teaching, paying special attention to students’ agencies while providing them with ample CL methods, and opportunities to enrich their academic English competency for effective language learning and ideological and academic transformations.

The focus on EFL listening has increased in Taiwan. Although previous studies have confirmed the effectiveness of language learners’ knowledge of discourse markers (DMs) in facilitating their listening comprehension, the time spent on DM instruction is relatively short. Hence, the researcher conducted a corpus-based analysis of the DMs used in junior high school English textbooks, listening workbooks, and the English test in the Comprehensive Assessment Program for Junior High School Students (CAP). The study explored the types of exposure to DMs learners received and sought to determine whether textbook and test writers placed adequate emphasis on DMs. The results revealed that the English textbook and CAP English test corpora had higher frequencies of DMs than the listening workbook corpus. The DMs identified in the three corpora were multi-functional and involved using the senses most common to native speakers’ speech. They demonstrated a clear distinction between spoken and written English. However, the DM distributions were mainly limited to the sentence-initial position. Therefore, textbook writers were suggested to focus more on DM distribution and context. Teachers and learners should be aware of the role of DMs in EFL listening comprehension, familiarize themselves with DMs displayed in textbooks, and use authentic listening materials to compensate for textbook deficiencies.

The current study sought to examine the influence of Korean college students’ initial motivation on their English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing development, as well as the relationships among EFL writing performance, self-efficacy, communicative interest, and instrumental interest. A total of 187 Korean college students completed questionnaires at repeated intervals during one semester of an EFL writing course. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the longitudinal data. The findings showed that the students’ performance and self-efficacy developed significantly, whereas their interest decreased over the semester. The results of growth curve modeling with longitudinal data from three time points suggested that the students’ motivational orientation significantly predicted their EFL writing performance at the beginning of the semester. However, the influence of initial motivation on the growth rate of EFL writing proficiency, specifically EFL writing performance, was negative. The conclusion of this study is that the contribution of motivational constructs to EFL writing performance depends on time.

In many countries concerns have been raised about the proficiency levels of teachers of English and various proposals have been made to address them. This study explores one possible solution to this problem by integrating language skills development with an awareness of pedagogical approaches. The participants in this study, pre-service teachers who were preparing to teach in Singapore primary schools, attended a short intensive course that helped develop and support their own English language skills while modelling approaches they would be expected to use in their own classrooms. Data were collected using a pre-course survey, reflective tasks during and after the course, and a post-course task based on practical school experience. The findings demonstrate how the participants became more aware of their own language skills and noted improvements. At the same time experiencing and reflecting on the pedagogical approaches used in the course helped shape their perceptions and beliefs, and had potential and real impacts on their subsequent teaching. Clarke and Hollingsworth’s (2002) Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth (IMTPG) was used to analyze the data and highlighted the individuality of the process of teacher professional growth, while at the same time revealing some common patterns.

Elbow’s freewriting (1989, 1998, 2011) is an exercise where a participant writes for a set period of time without stopping or editing. Data obtained from 102 Korean university EFL students were analyzed to explore the use of freewriting to enhance adult learners’ overall English proficiency. Participants were divided into freewriting and non-freewriting groups. Results show that the students in the freewriting group made significantly greater improvement than their counterparts in English speaking, writing, listening, and reading. Further evidence is found that qualitative improvement in the students’ freewriting implied a parallel increase in their overall English proficiency. This study suggests that freewriting could provide a safe outlet for Korean EFL learners to practice English, and enhance their capacity to think in the target language. The study supports the use of freewriting exercises as a contextsensitive pedagogical strategy to promote adult EFL learners’ linguistic development of English.

Motivated by the paradigm shift from top-down, institution-centered teacher training to bottom-up, learner-centered professional development in teacher education, this study involved the design and implementation of SMART Teaching 3.0, an online, open-learning course for EFL teacher professional development. This program was designed to be self-directed, motivating, applicable, rich, and technologysupported. It was further distributed to 149 English teachers for five months for testing. Data were collected from various sources such as website statistics, comments, weekly journals and interviews. Overall, the results confirmed the effectiveness of the five key features but to different degrees. The participants joined and participated in the program without any requirement or incentives. They perceived the needs-based content as being motivating, although they still wanted updates and an expansion of the content. Some of them applied what they learned in the program to their own classes. Finally, the mobilebased program enabled teachers to use the program without time and place constraints. However, the issue of the sustainability of self-directed learning was raised in the process of implementation. Several suggestions were made to solve the issue.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether and to what extent the intelligibility of Korean EFL learners’ speech at the text level is affected by their English proficiency, text type, and text length. Various speech materials produced by native English speakers and two Korean EFL speaker groups (high vs. low proficiency) were presented to native English listeners and two Korean EFL listener groups, respectively, for comparison of intelligibility scores. The results showed that the listeners’ overall proficiency played the most critical role in determining the level of speech intelligibility for all speaker groups, regardless of the type and length of speech materials. The speakers’ proficiency level in terms of pronunciation, however, had no significant effect. As for the text type, dialogue texts were consistently more intelligible than monologues to all listener groups while the effect of text length varied depending on the text type. These results suggest that L2 learners’ speech intelligibility needs to be examined within the context of natural L2 text beyond word- and sentence-level utterances in consideration of the interaction of text-related features and other learner variables. Some pedagogical implications are also discussed.

Student success in learning a second or a foreign language and its link to motivation have been widely acknowledged (Crookes & Schmidt, 1991; Dörnyei, 1994). However, in contrast, the association between student learning and teacher motivation has received significantly less attention from the research community. In order to better understand this relationship from a socio-cultural perspective, this article focuses on the intrinsic link between teacher identity and beliefs about self and learners’ motivation in those contexts where English is taught as a second language (L2). To achieve this, this study draws upon research into teacher professional identity, which identifies the interrelationship between teaching practices and learner motivation. Our starting point is the work of Dörnyei (1998), who has long argued that the link between teacher and learner motivation has been neglected and under-developed as a research topic. Consequently, the focus of our article is not on motivation in general terms; rather it focuses on the nature of teacher and learner motivation with respect to learning within socio-cultural settings such as L2 classrooms. According to Dörnyei’s (2009) theory of L2 Motivational Self System, there are three main sources of motivation in second language learning. These are: the Ideal L2 Self, or learners’ image of themselves as effective learners; the Ought-to L2 Self, such as learner desires and social environment satisfaction; and the positive L2 Learning Experience (Hadfield & Dörnyei, 2013, p.2-3). This ‘motivational Self’ System defines the L2 learner self through three reflective ‘visions’, which are: • What we might become • What we would like to become • What we are afraid of becoming (Hadfield & Dörnyei, 2013, p. 2) All three ‘vision’ statements relate to an individual’s identity, and it is this aspect which provides the link to our work on the development of teacher identity and teachers’ envisioned present and future selves. These selves, which are seen crucial in the formation and development of teacher identity (Kelchtermans, 1993), enable the exploration of teacher’s self-image, and through that, its relationship with both teacher and learner motivation.