Earticle

In South Korea, many senior high school English teachers consider Korean as a helpful medium of instruction for their subject, although many also feel that they need to develop students’ practical command of spoken English, and, therefore, they also see the need to use English as a medium for teaching. This article provides an account of an exploratory study of how Korean, the students’ first language (L1), and English, a foreign language (L2), are used as communication and pedagogic resources in English lessons taught by an experienced teacher. We will focus on the ways in which the two languages are used to manage classroom interactions and to facilitate teaching and learning activities. Drawing on concepts and analytic frameworks from the fields of formative assessment, code-switching/translanguaging and classroom discourse analysis, this paper aims at making a contribution to the renewed debate on the use of L1 in L2 learning and teaching.

This study attempts to measure the possible impact that flipped teaching has had on the improvement of learners’ academic performance, as well as their satisfaction in a cross-cultural communication course. A total of 90 students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) were assigned to three conditions: a structured flipped classroom using a WebQuest active learning strategy, a semi-structured flipped classroom, and a traditional classroom. Results showed that the structured flip lessons were the most effective instructional intervention in improving participants’ academic performance, followed by the semi-structured flip lessons and the traditional lessons. Data collected from the questionnaire and interviews indicated that learners were more satisfied with the structured flip lessons than the semi-structured flip lessons. Given the positive results, the present study argues that the flipped classroom model could be a useful and promising pedagogical approach in EFL teaching. However, additional research is needed to contribute to the knowledge base of this approach across disciplines.

This video study examines teachers’ questioning practices in English language classrooms in Malaysia, and how different types of questions, wait time, and reaction moves influence classroom interaction. The study found that although there was an overarching monologicality across all classrooms, teachers’ questioning practices were not limited to the typical, monologic mixture of display questions, non-existent or short wait time, and/or reaction moves which could obstruct student talk. There were also opportunities for dialogicality initiated through teachers’ employment of referential questions, longer wait time, and/or reaction moves which could facilitate advanced student talk, but monologicality in classroom interaction persisted. Such observation directs our attention to the understanding and further contemplation that nurturing dialogicality is not a mere issue of strategy use.

The present study examined the effects of speech rate and background noise on EFL learners’ listening comprehension of film and textbook materials. The participants listened to eight different types of dialogues with different conditions in the speech rate, the background noise, and the types of learning materials, and their listening comprehensibility was measured. For the speech rate factor, either a fast or a slow speech rate was used. The background noise effect was executed by adding crowd talking noise to the dialogue. The script was adapted from either textbook materials or film materials. The results showed that each factor had an influence on learners’ listening comprehension. Though the readability, word levels, and the number of words were at the same level, the scores when textbook materials were used were significantly higher than that of the film materials. Regarding the textbook materials, they had higher scores with the slow speech than the fast speech, and also the scores in the silent condition were higher than that of the noise condition. The students’ listening comprehension score was the lowest where there was background noise and a fast speech rate.

In educational settings, teacher-student relationships are considered significant for their influences on students’ learning and academic lives. Interpersonal skills, social persuasion, and stroking behavior, the recognition, attention or responsiveness that one person gives another (McKenna, 1974), can promote such a relationship and affect teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. This study attempted to investigate the relationship and interaction between the frequency of strokes and the perceived selfefficacy of EFL teachers, considering their gender and level of experience. In order to collect data, 180 EFL teachers, both male and female with different years of experience, completed a booklet questionnaire consisting of demographic information, the Teacher Self-efficacy scale (Bandura, 2006; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2007; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001), and the Stroking Profile (McKenna, 1974). The results of the analysis, using a Spearman rho correlation, indicated a significantly strong positive correlation between the frequency of receiving and accepting positive strokes and the participants’ self-efficacy. There was also a strong negative correlation between frequency of receiving and accepting negative strokes and self-efficacy. However, the frequency of requesting strokes and self-efficacy was weak but significant for positive strokes but non-significant for negative ones. Overall, no difference was found for teachers’ self-efficacy with regard to stroke frequency across gender and years of experience. Further, the results of a factorial ANOVA demonstrated that no interaction existed among frequency of strokes, self-efficacy, gender, and EFL teachers’ experience levels. Hence, the more EFL teachers were provided with positive strokes, the higher their sense of self-efficacy would be. The findings imply that strokes, particularly positive strokes as a source of self-efficacy for EFL teachers, should be seriously taken into account.

This paper reports on the introduction of in-class self-directed learning in an intensive English program at a woman’s university in Japan. This self-directed learning was organized around can do descriptors, and supported by a portfolio and formative assessment. This new curriculum emerged from our use of the CEFR. A second reason for this change stemmed from an increased lack of student engagement during teacher-directed instruction. For self-directed learning, a student determined what can do’s she wanted to learn, and what activities she would study to learn these skills. This student control also involved deciding what can do’s to be individually tested on and when. At the end of the academic year, students (n = 37) completed a 12-item Likert scale survey to assess the curriculum changes. The results revealed that students had mixed support for self-directed planning. Specifically, students indicated a lack of confidence in making study plans. Students did like the use of can do’s, but wanted more language guidance for them. Students also strongly favored the use of the portfolio and formative assessment. An analysis of student can do test results for the year revealed that students made greater gains than were possible with the prior teacher-directed curriculum.

Typically, variability among raters in scoring and their bias is mediated through rater training. However, questions still remain about whether training can affect raters’ severity or leniency. Furthermore, few studies have looked at the differences between trained and untrained raters in oral assessment. Oral test scores of 200 test takers rated by 20 raters and were analyzed before and after a training program using the multifaceted Rasch measurement (MFRM). The results demonstrated the constructive impact of training programs in reducing raters’ biases and increasing their consistency measures. This study indicated that inexperienced raters benefited more from a training program than experienced raters and thus achieved higher measures of consistency afterward. It also demonstrated a higher biased interaction for test takers on the extreme ends of the oral ability continuum. The findings demonstrated that it is almost impossible to completely eradicate rater variability even through rater training. Therefore, rater training should be viewed as a procedure to establish within-rater consistency rather than between-rater consistency. Since this study showed that inexperienced raters can rate even more reliably than experienced ones after training, there is no evidence whereby decision makers can exclude inexperienced raters solely because of their lack of adequate experience. Consequently, decision makers need to use their budgets for establishing rater training programs for inexperienced raters instead.

Although the idea of collocation has been the core of the Firthian linguistic approach, only recently did language researchers and practitioners pay close attention to recurrent multi-word combinations or lexical bundles. Unlike the studies of roles of collocation in a language, the research of lexical bundles has shown that they are crucial building blocks of discourse and register in academic disciplines. Given the fact that the role of lexical bundles in the writings of academic community has become a subject of ESL/EFL, the current study investigates the functional distribution of lexical bundles between the argumentative writing corpora contributed by Korean and American college students. The functional lexical bundle types and tokens are compared regarding the distribution and frequency. A series of statistical analyses demonstrated that, in the Korean students’ argumentative writing, stance lexical bundle and discourse organizers are more frequently used. On the other hand, the American students’ writing includes more referential expressions. These findings suggest that, when aiming for a proficient and advanced writing level, Korean college students need to be frequently exposed to lexical bundles and explicitly taught with the discourse functions in the academic writing genre. This paper also introduces and discusses pedagogical implications and future research suggestions.

This study examined the comparability of three L2 oral test tasks (topic discussion, information gap, and semi-direct speaking) in the measurement of the four oral traits (pronunciation, fluency, grammar, and vocabulary). In examining the comparability, a CFA approach to a correlated traits/correlated methods design was employed, and evidence of convergent and discriminant validity was tested in the measurement of the traits by the methods. Through the model comparison approach (Byrne, 2006; Wideman, 1985), the hypothesized model was compared against a series of more restrictive models using χ2 difference tests, and the information from the path coefficients was examined to check the equivalence further. The findings revealed that the method effect in the measurement model was so strong that the trait was not fully reflected in the measurement process. Also, the effect of method on trait was not consistent in that topic discussion produced most trait-related information among the test tasks. Moreover, methods were found discriminant although traits were not. Thus, the three methods cannot be considered comparable in measuring the L2 oral traits, and such incomparability was particularly evident between the two methods of group oral and semi-direct speaking.

First, this investigation – inspired by Robinson’s (2001a, 2001b, 2003, 2011) Cognition Hypothesis and Skehan’s (1998, 2003) Trade-Off Hypothesis – intends to explore how second language writing can improve language learning through manipulating cognitive task complexity dimensions. Second, it attempts to examine if task complexity factors and cognitive learner-related variables have interaction effects on linguistic production. It focuses on planning time and intentional reasoning demands, language learning aptitude, and measures of lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, and accuracy. The participants were 226 intermediate Iranian EFL learners. In a between-subjects design, the participants were first assigned to three experimental groups randomly, each group receiving a task with different level of reasoning demands. Then, within each group, we did a stratified random sampling and assigned an equal number of learners with higher and lower aptitude levels to planned and unplanned groups. The results revealed that (a) planning time availability led to significantly more syntactic complexity, (b) increasing task complexity with regard to reasoning demands resulted in higher gains of lexical and syntactic complexity, whereas no significant effect was detected on accuracy, (c) a significant interaction effect between planning and reasoning demands was found only on accuracy, and (d) a three-way interaction among planning, reasoning demands, and language learning aptitude was observed on accuracy. Generally, the findings are discussed with regard to the predictions of the Cognition Hypothesis and the Trade-Off Hypothesis.

Recent research on students’ multiple intelligences, self-efficacy, and language learning strategies has provided evidence for the development of crucial constructs and generalizations which have direct applications to language classrooms. The present study examined the interrelationships between the strategies language learners take, their level of self-efficacy, and the types of their intelligences (based on Gardner’s (1983) Theory of Multiple Intelligences). To do so, Nation’s (1990) 50-item multiple - choice vocabulary test was administered by a university department to form homogeneous groups across all the majors of the department. Then, three surveys were adapted to explore the links between (1) Self-efficacy in Reading (SER) (Prat-Sala & Redford, 2010), (2) a Multiple Intelligence Scale (Armstrong, 1993), and (3) Oxford’s (1990) Language Learning Strategies. The most striking observation to emerge from the data comparison was that self-efficacy had no significant correlation with multiple intelligences. However, as expected, there was a significant correlation between language learners’ perceptions of their self-efficacy and their language leaning strategies. Additionally, a multiple regression analysis indicated notable results on the use of self-efficacy and multiple intelligences to predict language learning strategies.