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This study attempted to delve into out-of-class self-regulated learning processes of students with different English proficiency levels, focusing on their goal-setting and self-evaluation processes as well as their motivational beliefs. Four Japanese university students, two higher and two lower proficiency learners engaged in English self-study outside the classroom for 15 weeks. Their selfregulated learning processes were examined through a weekly English language learning journal kept by the participants. Goal-setting and self-reflection sheets were collected as supplemental data to gain insights into the descriptions in the journal. The textual data were analyzed using systematic content analysis procedures. Students’ English proficiency levels and learning progress were measured by the TOEIC Listening and Reading test. Their motivational beliefs (i.e., goal orientations) were investigated through their statements reported on the goal setting sheet. The analyses revealed that the two higher proficiency students, who had both instrumental and international orientations, were more metacognitively aware of their self-regulated learning processes and more actively engaged in selfregulatory processes than the two lower proficiency students, who had only instrumental orientations. In particular, the higher proficiency student showing the most learning progress exhibited effective self-regulatory cycles. Finally, pedagogical implications are discussed based on these findings.

Despite the growing body of research evidence validating the Simple View of Reading (SVR) which highlights decoding and listening comprehension abilities as the prominent contributors of reading comprehension, there have been concerns regarding the need to augment it to consider other relevant variables. For advanced readers whose decoding skills are fully developed, an alternate code-related skill such as reading fluency needs to be considered. This is especially pertinent for second language readers whose phonics skills tend to be superior to their language abilities. Another concern has not only been with the need to consider vocabulary knowledge as an independent predictor, but also with the need to discern the contribution of both quantity and quality of vocabulary knowledge. Although there have been numerous studies showing the significant relationship between reading comprehension and both vocabulary breadth and depth, these have been rarely looked at discretely in the SVR framework. This study investigated the relative contribution of vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, and reading fluency to secondary Korean EFL learners’ reading comprehension within an augmented SVR model. The findings indicated that although all of the considered predictors were significantly related to their reading comprehension, only listening comprehension and vocabulary depth demonstrated significant unique contribution.

This study explored the effects of the instructional strategies on technical vocabulary among 36 English majors in a TESOL course in a teacher education program in a university in northern Taiwan. The analysis of document, questionnaire, and participants’ final writing projects revealed that participants regarded “the instructor’s explanations and use of technical vocabulary” as the most useful instructional strategies. The instruction on technical vocabulary influenced the participants’ vocabulary use, particularly in memory recall and their final writing projects. The most frequent technical vocabulary used in the final writing projects was related to participants’ research topic interest. Suggestions on effective instruction in technical vocabulary are provided.

As communicative competence has become a primary goal of English education in many Asian contexts, EFL curricula increasingly focus on students’ speaking performance. Considering the demands of cultivating competent L2 speakers, this study investigates factors associated with L2 speaking performance in a Korean EFL college classroom setting. Fifty-one students enrolled in a basic English speaking course participated. They completed five tasks measuring two linguistic variables (i.e., learners’ perception of segmental and suprasegmental features), a cognitive variable (i.e., short-term memory), and two language ability variables (i.e., listening comprehension ability and vocabulary size). They also completed a production task (i.e., picture narration). The results indicate that sensitivity to suprasegmental features (e.g., pause, stress, and intonation) and listening ability are associated with the quality of the learners’ spontaneous speech production, while sensitivity to segmental information (e.g., minimal pairs), short-term memory, and vocabulary size are not. These findings suggest the importance of explicit instruction in suprasegmental features to improve L2 production as well as perception ability, and that integrating listening and speaking instruction in L2 curricula may be the most effective means of improving learners’ speech.

The current study explored the usefulness of mobile-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) pronunciation practice by investigating a) its effects on the production of four English vowels, and b) learners’ perception of ASR as a learning tool. A total of 19 Korean university students produced 28 minimal pair sentences containing the English vowel contrasts /i/-/ɪ/ and /ɛ/-/æ/ (e.g., I said beat, I said bit) at pretest and posttest, and completed six sessions of ASR practice outside of class that involved voice-typing a short text, minimal pairs in sentences, and decontextualized minimal pairs. Results of acoustic analysis of F1 and F2 formant frequencies showed a meaningful improvement in frontness for the vowel /i/, but no changes for the other vowels. Overall, the majority of the participants perceived ASR as useful for pronunciation practice, but some showed skepticism and frustration regarding the current state of the technology. Further discussed are the problems and limitations that EFL learners experienced during the ASR training.

This study aims to examine the significant difference in reading comprehension performance after explicit instruction in morphology. This quasi-experimental study investigated specifically the effect of explicit teaching on compounding, inflectional and derivational morphological awareness upon Malaysian primary school learners’ reading comprehension in the ESL context. Convenience sampling was applied in recruiting 125 pupils from two government primary schools in a suburb area. The experimental group was given the explicit instruction in morphology during their reading lessons for 12 consecutive weeks, and the control group had been taught without this intervention. After controlling for learners’ pre-test scores, ANCOVA statistical result concluded that the experimental group could achieve higher scores in their post-tests, which indicated a significant difference in reading comprehension performance. Therefore, it is essential for curriculum developers to give recognition of the importance of morphology. Educational practitioners and academics should explore further the teaching of morphology in order to improve their learners’ reading comprehension skill.

Metaphor offers a lens through which language teachers present their thinking about teaching and learning English as a second/foreign language. This study examined the changes of 25 middle school Chinese EFL teachers’ belief in listening teaching through the use of metaphor analysis. Multiple sources of data were collected, including elicited metaphors, questionnaires, reflection journals and workshop observations. Fifteen metaphors before and 21 after the workshop were identified. By comparing these conceptual metaphors before and after the workshop, this study found that the teachers’ negative attitude toward listening teaching was vanished and their view of listening teaching was broadened in terms of enhancing teacher-students ties and raising awareness of teaching design with holistic-multi-dimension understanding.

Although commonly thought of as a monolingual nation, South Korea, under the influence of globalization, is in the midst of a change that could see this dominant monolingual discourse challenged. To reveal and understand this potential challenge, the current study uses the constructs of investment, capital, ideologies and identity to see how the ideology of neoliberalism has influenced the language learning identities of university students studying English in a single South Korean vocational university. This is done by taking into account the perspectives of both university instructors and university students. By employing narrative frame data collection methods, coupled with asynchronous interviewing techniques, the qualitative study reveals that the symbolic capital that English embodies for students is potentially changing how the language identities of these students should be understood. Such a change has a number of implications for English education within South Korea in terms of generalized designations such as EFL and non-native identity markers.

Despite the recent expansion of English-medium instruction (EMI) in a non-English speaking educational context, few studies have investigated teaching methodology for EMI. Using a mixed method, this study examines the effects of teacher feedback on college students’ their perspectives of learning a business subject through EMI. The quantitative part of the study investigated questionnaire responses of two groups of students enrolled in a course on entrepreneurship: the control group of the lecture-style class offering little teacher feedback (n = 158) versus the experimental group featuring extensive feedback (n = 153). For the cross-examination of these quantitative results, a semistructured interview with four respondents followed. The analysis showed that the students’ disciplinary backgrounds (general studies, business, and engineering) create differences in their perspectives of EMI and learning the business subject. Among the three major groups, the business major students ranked English proficiency as the most important for their career purposes. The feedback-concentrated instruction contributed not only to learning the subject, but it also moderated the differences between the disciplines. Notably, the participants’ comprehension of the subject significantly correlated with their evaluation of EMI. These findings highlight the crucial effect of teacher feedback on acquiring discipline-specific knowledge and cultivating new perspectives of EMI.

This research explored L2 English article substitutions by L1 learners. The participants were two groups of advanced L2 learners from different L1 backgrounds, i.e., French and Thai, the former a language with articles, and the latter an articleless language. The tasks were a perception task, i.e., a grammaticality judgment task, and a production task, i.e., a forced-choice elicitation task. The results confirmed the hypotheses in that correct English article use in the Thai group was significantly lower than that in the French group in both perception and production (p < .001). Moreover, while appropriate L2 English article use in both perception and production in the L1 Thai group was rather low, that in the L1 French group was at high rates. The findings confirmed the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (Hawkins, 2000, 2003) and contradicted the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (White, 2003, 2017) in that, unlike the French learners, as definiteness was not grammaticalized in Thai, the Thai learners’ representation was non-target-like and English articles were therefore unattainable.

This study aims to investigate the text difficulty of the reading materials of Korean middle school English textbooks with Coh-Metrix, a software developed by the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis to analyze the linguistic and psycholinguistic features of English text and textbooks with a wide range of indices on cohesion and language. In this study, the textbook corpus consisted of the text files extracted from 13 English textbooks. These files were used for analyzing the text difficulty among grades with Coh-Metrix. The Coh-Metrix indices selected for this study contained basic counts, word frequency, word features, lexical diversity, pronouns, connectives, readability, syntax complexity, syntax similarity, reference cohesion, semantic cohesion, and situation model measures. The results showed that there were significant differences among grades for basic counts, word features, first pronouns, causal and temporal connectives, readability, reference and semantic cohesion, the number of words before main verbs, syntactic similarity, and situation model measures. The differences among grades, however, were not significant for word frequency, lexical diversity, second and third person pronouns, additive connectives, and NP density measures. The findings have educational implications for textbook design and language learning for English learners.

This study aims to examine the degree of syntactic complexity in Korean L2 college students’ writing of four different genres. Using 14 syntactic complexity measures as indices of L2 language development of writing, this study investigates how syntactic patterns are different among four different genres and English proficiency levels. Sixty-one participants in A university in South Korea participated in this study, and their writings were scored by two raters. All 244 essays including four different genres were collected, and these data were analyzed by using the computer program of syntactic complexity analyzer. The results have shown that genre difference has an impact on syntactic complexity in Korean students’ English written products. Details of results showed strong evidence of genre-specific features among narrative, expository (comparison and cause-effect essays), and argumentative genres. Based on the overall findings of the study, syntactic complexity showed significant genre differences, but there were not significant group differences of syntactic complexity among L2 proficiency levels.

Most task-based research examined the effects of task complexity on various aspects of L2 production, and this study aims to perform an in-depth analysis of task complexity effects on error patterns observed in L2 writing in terms of morphological, lexical, syntactic, and mechanical errors. 39 learners of English carried out one written task with three levels of task complexity, operationalized as the number of elements. Results of a series of repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed that greater task complexity led to significant increases in the amount of all four error types and the numbers of morphological, lexical, and local syntactic errors per T-unit. It was also found that learners are more likely to make errors in terms of plurality, word choice, and article use when they need to mention more elements when carrying out complex tasks.

Despite the growing interest in using online quizzes with Student Response System (SRS) for assessment, knowledge and empirical evidence about learner acceptance and risk of cheating are still limited in the literature. Hence, to address such gaps, this study explored Thai EFL learner acceptance and perceived risk of cheating of using Socrative for vocabulary tests. The participants (N = 461, 77.4% female, 22.6% male) attended a General English (GE) course that required them to learn fifty English words every week. The vocabulary tests took place in the first ten minutes of the class for ten weeks delivered by using Socrative. At the end of the course, this study investigated learner acceptance and perceived risk of cheating using a set of survey constructed based on Davis (1989) and collected the data of vocabulary learning outcomes and proficiency levels. The data were, then, analysed by using independent t-test, correlation, and multiple regression analyses. The results indicated Thai EFL learner acceptance of Socrative with the risk of cheating during vocabulary tests. Learner acceptance was influenced by proficiency level and predicted a small amount of learning outcomes. These results have some implications for instructional course designs adopting online quizzes for testing.

This reflective essay examines writing assessment as perceived within the three paradigms of Standard English (SE), World Englishes (WEs) and English as an International Language (EIL). In each of the perspectives, the way construct of writing is theorized and then informs the assessment practice are critically investigated. Upon reviewing the three stances on writing assessment, the author argues that in the today's post-colonial and post-modern globalized world with drastically new communicative needs, the Standard English perspective which promotes the educated native speaker as the only accepted norm does not fit the realities of the writing assessment. Also, WEs perspective assessment proposal which advocate the inclusion of a variety of local norms in the theory and practice of writing assessment seems impossible in practice. Finally, drawing on EIL view it is discussed that to meet the new demands of written communication in the present globalized world with no border between the native and non-native speakers, rating scales should be modified to address new communicative needs by including the pragmatic skills of negotiation strategies, sociolinguistic awareness, accommodation strategies, etc. However, it is argued that at present due to the absence of practical tests that realize these claims, the existing International proficiency tests continue to work.