Am I getting my point across? Microstructure of English classroom discourses by Acehnese teachers

For English teaching practice, productive talks that spur students’ comprehension, creativity, and problem-solving ability are vital. This research aimed at finding out the spoken discourse based on six phases of microstructure in English classrooms. The data were obtained recordings and observations of two English teachers, chosen through purposive sampling, from Islamic senior high schools in Aceh. The data were concerned with the lexical density or the ratio of content to grammatical or function words within a clause. They were analyzed through thematic analysis which consists of five steps: data familiarization, code generation, theme search, themes revision, and theme definition. It was found that the total lexical density obtained by the first teacher in Class A was 63.66% and in class, B was 66.52%, while the second teacher in Class A was 71. 74% and in Class B was 68.12%. The second teacher 2 in Class A had a higher lexical density than the first teacher even though both of them are considered to produce a high lexical density of around 60-70%. The formality of spoken discourse of the two teachers shows that the first teacher produced 172.5 while the second teacher produced 184. It means that the second teacher's spoken discourse was more formal than the first teacher’s discourse. To analyze the utterances of teachers and to find the density of language used in the classrooms during the teaching and learning process is important because they implicitly inform whether the language used is understandable for the students or not.

Language Proficiency and Knowledge in Adjective-Noun Collocations: A Case Study of Vietnamese Learners of English

Collocational development is of great significance to second language acquisition. Among different types of collocations, adjective-noun collocations are notoriously difficult to EFL learners, but there has been limited research, especially in Vietnam, on this type of collocations in the field of teaching and learning English. To address this issue, the current study, employing the quantitative approach, investigates Vietnamese university students’ receptive and productive knowledge of adjective-noun collocations and the relationship between their language proficiency and their collocational knowledge. Results reveal that the difference between the students’ receptive and productive knowledge was more significant when they reached higher levels of English, and even those at an advanced level had great difficulties in identifying erroneous collocations and using them correctly. The number of collocational errors appeared to increase with rising proficiency. Results also indicate a close relationship between language ability and collocational knowledge, thereby emphasizing the importance of teaching collocations explicitly in English classrooms.

A Study on the Application of Teacher Feedback Language in Middle School English Class

Teacher feedback language has a very significant impact on students' learning. Appropriate feedback language will promote students' learning motivation, arouse students' interest in learning, and have a positive role in promoting students' language ability development. However, in middle school English classrooms, many teachers do not pay attention to the role of feedback language, ignore the positive feedback to students or lack the application skills of feedback and students do not participate in classroom communication, and lose interest in English. This article proposes corresponding improvement measures in response to the current problems in the application of teacher feedback in middle school English classrooms.

Non-English Major Students ‘Motivation in English Classrooms: Evidence from a University Setting

In learning and teaching English as a foreign language, motivation is crucial to success. The purpose of this study is to discover whether non-English-majored students are motivated in learning English and to find out what factors can help motivate them to learn English. The study mainly employed a questionnaire which is developed and administered base on Khau and Thach (2021)’s framework to collect the data. It was delivered to 54 non-English-majored students who are at their third year of study at a public university in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The results highlighted various researches that have been conducted on the elements that influence motivation. The data showed that the participants’ motivation level is at medium rank. It could be inferred that these participants were motivated to learn English at university. The current study also found that students’ motivation was mainly affected by four factors which are teacher’s personality, teacher’s methodology, facilities for studying and classmates. The results of the study contribute to the field of motivation research in EFL setting.

Students and Teachers' Perceptions on English Online Teaching-Learning in Sumbawa Island during Covid-19: Challenges and Strategies

This study aims at examining students and teachers’ perceptions on problems and solutions in online English classrooms during Covid-19 outbreak. This qualitative study reports of four students and four teachers purposefully selected in five junior high schools in Sumbawa Island, West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. The data are collected through semi-formal interview. Open coding technique is used for analyzing the text data manually. The findings showed that both the students and the teachers mostly faced internet data and connectivity issues. The teachers also experienced challenges in technology utility and pedagogical aspects such as teaching method and time management, while the students have also struggled in processing the learning input and sometimes were less motivated. All of the participants utilized some ways to deal with internet and connectivity problems, such as finding WI-FI, conducting a blended-learning classroom, and seeking help and support from friends and colleagues. Moreover, most of the teachers recommended that the school principal or educational stakeholders take initiatives to train them in instructional technology and competency in teaching. Thus, the implementation of the online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially in rural area, caused various problems for teachers and students, as well as triggered them to seek for the solutions and put their constructive wishes on the schools and educational stakeholder.

Japanese English Learners’ Perceptions of Filipino Teachers’ Online English Lessons: Implications for Global Englishes Research

Situated in the domain of Global Englishes research, this study explores a question of how far the issue of the English model for Japanese learners is complicated by the hierarchical coexistence of regular English courses taught by Anglophone English teachers and extracurricular online English lessons taught by non-Anglophone instructors. A questionnaire survey was administered to 100 Japanese English learners aged 18–34 who have taken such lessons. This study provides both hopeful and challenging suggestions for Global Englishes research and practice, that is, Japanese English learners’ favourable perceptions of Filipino teachers’ affordable and flexible lessons that, they believe, would not interfere with their subsequent or concurrent study of ‘real’ English taught by native Anglophone teachers. This study indicates future directions of research and practice regarding the legitimate positioning of in-class or online English classes taught by Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other non-native English-speaking teachers in East Asian English classrooms that remain bound by native English norms.

Technology-Based Language Learning: Investigation of Digital Technology and Digital Literacy

The use of digital technologies in developing the four language skills in English classrooms has not been sufficiently researched. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of digital technology and digital literacy in teaching and learning English. This study aims to firstly investigate the applications of digital technology and the level of digital literacy in learning and teaching English. Secondly, to measure the significant differences between EFL teachers and students in their usage of technology and digital literacies in English classrooms. Two questionnaires were distributed to 150 students and 40 teachers. The data were analyzed descriptively using SPSS 23.0. The findings show that students’ use of digital technology was the highest in learning vocabularies and lowest in reading skills, while teachers’ highest use was for general teaching practices and lowest for reading skills. Participants have high digital literacies. The findings supported the null hypotheses related to the significant difference between usage of digital technology for language pedagogy. These findings offer implications for policymakers towards designing plans to integrate digital technologies in the language classrooms of marginalized societies such as B40 in Malaysia.

“A Lot of Students Are Already There”: Repositioning Language-Minoritized Students as “Writers in Residence” in English Classrooms

This article centers on Faith, a Latinx bilingual student who, because of her failure to pass a standardized exam in English language arts, had to repeat 11th-grade English. Despite this stigma of being a “repeater,” during the year-long ethnographic study I conducted in her classroom, Faith proved to be an insightful and critical reader and self-described poet who shared her writing with her peers as well as with other poets in online forums. Drawing from that more expansive classroom study, this article features Faith’s metacommentary on language and her own writing process and explores how her insights (1) disrupt monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies by highlighting the disconnect between her sophisticated understandings of language and the writing process and her status as a “struggling” student; (2) draw attention her wayfinding, which chronicles her navigation of those ideologies that complicate her search for a writerly identity and obscure the translingual nature of all texts and all writers; and (3) can move teachers and researchers of writing to reimagine the writing classroom so that it (re)positions students like Faith as “writers in residence,” whose existing translingual writing practices and wayfinding can serve as mentors and guides for others.

Foreign Language Teachers’ Emotion Recognition in College Oral English Classroom Teaching

One of the significant courses in Chinese universities is English. This course is usually taught by a foreign language instructor. There will, however, necessarily be some communication hurdles between “foreign language teachers” and “native students.” This research presents an emotion recognition method for foreign language teachers in order to eliminate communication barriers between teachers and students and improve student learning efficiency. We discovered four factors of emotion recognition through literature analysis: smile, eye contact, gesture, and tone. We believe that differences in foreign language teachers’ performance in these four areas will have an impact on students’ emotion recognition and, as a result, on their learning efficiency. The influence of the foreign language teacher’s eye contact and gestures is larger (the weight of a single variable accounted for 30% or more) in the decision whether can improve the students’ classroom learning efficiency, according to 43 of the questionnaire data analysis. The second is the tone and smile (the weight of a single variable accounted for between 10 and 20%). Our research contributes to the body of knowledge on emotion recognition in university foreign language teachers by presenting a practical method for recognizing emotion in foreign language teachers. We recommend that college foreign language teachers pay attention to eye and gesture communication with students in English classrooms based on the findings. By enriching the style of emotional expression in class, college language teachers, particularly foreign language teachers, can improve communication, and connection with students.

Gender Representation in The English Textbook for Grade Ninth in Indonesia

This study aims to examine how different genders are represented in Indonesia's grade eight English textbooks. The primary goal of this research is to ascertain the various gender representations and how language and images are used in the English textbook "Think Globally Act Locally." The study employs Fairclough's (1989) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) frameworks, specifically the description, interpretation, and explanation. Analyses are divided into five categories: Authors' genders, character genders, issues centered on men or women pictures and visibility, and linguistic traits. Additionally, the images have been subjected to a critical image analysis using the Critical Image Analysis program. The investigation's findings reveal that gender prejudice or stereotypes persist in the English textbooks used in Indonesian schools, despite the government's efforts to promote equality and fairness in education through the country's educational policy. Lastly, the study offers some pedagogical implications and recommendations for resolving gender inequality in the educational materials used in English classrooms.