Teaching English as a Foreign Language Journal

Ways of making online teaching more successful: An autoethnographic study

Dat Bao — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article is the author’s professional reflectivity as a TESOL lecturer at an Australian University over the past sixteen years. Observing and responding to students’ interests, concerns, and challenges has allowed this work to take shape. It signifies a range of issues that shape student learning with a strong focus on problematic features of online education practices. These issues include the absence of non-verbal cues, responsive latency, the pressure of teacher multiple-roles, and digital learning boredom. Thanks to collected data from student feedback, conversation with colleagues, and field notes, the author has put together a set of principles and strategies for making teaching and learning in the virtual space a more rewarding experience for both teachers and students. The strategies inclkude making learning content interesting and useful, personalised communication, clear participation protocols, mediation of student workload and participation, scaffolding online learning, organising choices, diversifying approaches to tasks, encouraging student voices, and collaboration with non-teaching staff.

Creating English learning media using Canva: EFL students’ perspective

Mariska Intan Sari, Septiya Dwi Utari, Puput Arfiandhani — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Learning media are important parts of the teaching and learning process. Using Canva as a tool for creating English learning media is one of the ways EFL students can do when preparing their teaching and learning practices. This study investigates EFL students’ perceptions of the kinds of English learning media created by the EFL students using Canva and the benefits of using Canva as a tool for creating English learning media as perceived by these students. The researchers employed a descriptive qualitative design to achieve the objectives of this study. This study was conducted at a large private university in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The participants in this study were six EFL students from the 2019 batch. The researchers conducted interviews to gather in-depth experiences of the participants. The findings of this study indicate that EFL students have created seven different types of English learning media using Canva. The English learning media created by EFL students were presentation slides, textbooks, flashcards, video learning, Instagram content, Infographics, and Twibbons. The findings also elaborate on several benefits of using Canva to create English learning media as perceived by the EFL students. The benefits are that Canva is easy to use, provides various templates for various learning media, caters to EFL students’ creativity, saves time for the EFL students in creating teaching media, and allows EFL students to create fun multimodal learning media.

Code-switching in students’ group discussions in EFL classroom at a university level

Gendroyono Gendroyono, Hazleena Baharun — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Code-switching is an activity when a person switches their language in a speech. Some research have been conducted in the field of code switching, however, very little was done in looking both the types and the reasons of doing it in the group discussion context. This research focuses on exploring the types of code-switching used by the students in EFL classroom during group discussion and the reasons why the students used code-switching during group discussion in EFL classroom. The methodology used in this research was a descriptive qualitative. There were three participants in this research, two females and one male aged 21 to 24-year-old which was done in a private university of Yogyakarta. In collecting the data, the researcher used interview and follow-up questions. And the finding of this research found that there were three types of code-switching used by the EFL student, the first one is tag switching, inter-sentential switching, and the last one is intra-sentential switching. Furthermore there were three reasons why the participants used code-switching. The first one is feeling comfortable in using their mother tongue, lacking the target language proficiency, and the last one is holding the floor.

Exploring the use of ICT by language instructors at a university in Kazakhstan: Expectations, realities, and factors influencing adoption

Akmarzhan Nogaibayeva — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The field of English Language Teaching (ELT) is undergoing a revolutionary shift in response to the spread of English as a lingua franca around the world, aligning itself with the needs of English as a tool for international communication (Cameron & Galloway, 2019). This change calls for a closer look at how teachers use information and communication technology (ICT) in ELT and how they view the changing environment. Research on educators’ attitudes about the use of ICT is crucial to examine before adopting such changes to ICT use practices, since this offers invaluable insights into the viability of curriculum innovation in language teaching and learning. There have been more studies addressing language attitudes on ICT use, but there remains a scarcity of studies that look at instructors’ views regarding ICT use beliefs from the perspective of multilingualism. Even though the body of knowledge about language instructors’ attitudes has grown, few studies have looked at teachers’ attitudes about ICT use from the perspective of their multilingualism (Dalvit, 2010). By filling this important gap, the current study aims to clarify how instructors’ perceptions of English, Russian and Kazakh in Kazakhstan’s higher education context interact with micro (personal beliefs), meso (colleagues in the department) and macro (wider environment). These attitudes have the potential to have a substantial impact on how successfully ICT use approaches are incorporated into a multilingual educational environment. Our understanding of how teachers’ ICT use attitudes manifest within the Kazakh multilingual context.

Curriculum development for translingual orientation: Teaching poetry writing in first-year Composition Courses

Fang-Yu Liao — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This study offers insights on developing poetry writing assignment in first-year composition courses for translingual orientation. Through a close examination of semi-structured interviews and students’ poems, the study aims to evaluatethe effectiveness of the teaching of poetry writing as translingual pedagogy in college English composition courses for both monolingual and multilingual students. Five monolingual and five multilingual students in this project experienced a three-week curriculum design to compose their poetry project in two different sections. The interview data shows that both monolingual and multilingual students acknowledge positive traits about the translingual pedagogy through a poetry writing assignment toward the end of the semester. The data also demonstrates that five monolingual students in this study value this poetry writing assignment with its invitation for being free and self-expressive, while the five multilingual students stress the practical outcomes, such as a personal breakthrough, poetry book as a concrete record of their life, or negotiation experiences. Furthermore, the study provides implications for developing curriculum design to enact translingual pedagogy based on students’ perceived difficulties and struggles.

A study on auditory perception of tense and lax vowels of English as a FL by learners with Spanish as L1

Jose Bustos, Francisca Vignolo, Gerald Vyhmeister — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Different studies in the field of perception of second-language sounds (L2) suggest that English learners with Spanish as their mother tongue language (L1) are influenced by the sounds of their L1 to perceive the sounds in the L2. As a result, learners are not able to perceive speech sounds as they are in English, because they assimilate the sounds of the foreign language (FL) based on their L1 (Best & Tyler, 2007; Gibson & Gibson, 1955). The objective of this research is to explore the capacity of perception of tense and lax vowels of English (Standard British accent) in 8 high school students from two subsidised schools in Chillán and San Carlos, Chile. The age of the participants range from 15 to 18 years old. One auditory perception test was used: An Identification Test was applied to measure the capacity of the participants to perceive lax and tense vowels: /i:/, /ɪ/, /æ/ and /^/.