Undergraduate Research in International Contexts

This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the challenges and opportunities afforded by undergraduate research in the context of changing English departments in international contexts. English has been witnessing unprecedented growth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region thanks to globalization, the Internet, and the internationalization of higher education. In this article, I reflect on my experience with undergraduate research in the MENA region, focusing on the challenges I had encountered and strategies for engendering a successful undergraduate research experience.

Teaching Quality Assessment of College English Department Based on Factor Analysis

The English departments in colleges and universities are the training center of professional English talents. Their teaching quality bears on the international exchanges and economic development. Through questionnaire survey, interview, and literature review, this paper designed an evaluation index system (EIS) for teaching quality assessment of English departments in colleges and universities, which consists of 19 indexes. Specifically, the collected data was computed and sorted out through factor analysis, and the common factors were extracted, forming an EIS containing 19 secondary indices and 5 primary indices. Next, a weight was assigned to each index in the EIS. Taking the English departments of 3 higher educational schools in a province for example, an empirical analysis was carried out to verify the application effect of our EIS on the teaching quality of college English education. The results demonstrated the scientific nature, reasonability, and feasibility of the proposed EIS. The research enriched the theoretical and practical evidences for the teaching quality assessment of college English education, and promotes the teaching quality assessment of college English department.

EMI and the Teaching of Cultural Studies in Higher Education: A Study Case.

This paper examines students’ perspectives on the challenges raised by their first encounter with EMI pedagogy in higher education. The research was conducted with a group of beginner students with no previous experience in monolingual instruction in English. The case studied is based on two English Cultural Studies subject courses of the English Studies Program at a Spanish university and taught in a learning environment of total linguistic immersion. By activating their metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, students were encouraged to take ownership of the stages of their learning process and assess it critically. Set at the intersection of EFL, ESP, and EAP, the specificities of these courses comprising linguistic and non-linguistic contents shed light on the teaching procedures employed in English Departments training programs, whose goals are to turn undergraduates into expert linguists and philologists and maximise their communicative proficiency in academic English.

The rise of contract cheating during the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study through the eyes of academics in Kuwait

Contract cheating has gone rampant in higher education recently. When institutions switched to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, the percentage of contract cheating students climbed to unprecedented levels. Essay mills saw the lack of face-to-face interaction and proctoring on campus as an opportunity and used aggressive marketing methods to attract students. This study asked the opinions of 20 faculty members working in the English departments of private higher education institutions in Kuwait regarding contract cheating through interviews. The data was analyzed with MAXQDA 2020. The findings show that all faculty members can recognize contract cheating easily. Most of them see contract cheating as a serious problem in the higher education system, a threat to the reliability of language assessment, triggered by laziness, the social pressure to graduate with a high GPA, and exacerbated by the cheating opportunities in online education. Academics have developed certain individual strategies in their courses to curb the number of contract cheating students; however, institutional measures differ, and in some, there are no measures or sanctions on contract cheating students.

Investigating EFL Learners’ Perceptions Towards the Difficulties in Oral Presentation at Kandahar University

This research paper examines the difficulties of oral presentation, strategies coping with difficulties used in oral presentations and the perceived role of lecturer in improving EFL learners’ oral presentation skills. The study used quantitative approach in which a survey questionnaire comprising 34 items based on four likert scales was distributed to EFL learners in a public university. The data was collected from 150 learners from two English Departments through random sampling which 109 were male and 41 were female learners. The data was analyzed and interpreted in terms of mean and standard deviation through SPSS software (22) version. The results of the study revealed that learners had a problem with oral fluency, accuracy and pronunciation during oral presentation, feel frightened when a lot of people are watching them, afraid of being assessed by their classmates in front of the class, having low self-confidence. The results also revealed some strategies coping with difficulties used in oral presentation such as, learners have to prepare themselves properly before an oral presentation, they have to build self-confidence for presentation to present very well and they have to concentrate more on phonetics and phonology of language. Furthermore, considering a crucial role of lecturer in improving oral presentation skills, the following factors such as lecturer has to design a specific course in teaching oral presentation skills for EFL learners, lecturer has to show learners videos of good speakers for enhancing their presentation skill and lecturer has to give learners freedom to choose their own topic that lowers their anxiety were discovered for more consideration.

Problems of the mediation function of East Asian English variants for Russian communicants

Communicating with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean users in English is a challenge for Russians, even if they have a perfect command of English. This is due to the fact that while performing a global function and retaining local features, the English language, non-native to its users, has specific phonetic features revealed as an accent in oral speech, as well as certain graphic innovations, which aggravates translating proper names and culture-loaded words into Russian in a written form of communication. The challenges result from co-existence of several transliteration systems in these languages, non-traditional sound and letter correlations as compared with British and American Englishes, non-traditional translation correlations when transliterating from Roman to Cyrillic. Translation problems proper are complicated by lexico-semantic and pragmatic factors, which can be interpreted only on the cultural basis. These challenges make it necessary to integrate the World Englishes paradigm into the courses of English departments, as well as preparing special textbooks and reference sources.

Metaphysics, Universal Irony, and Richard Rorty’s “We Ironists”

Richard Rorty speaks of “we ironists” who use irony as the primary tool in their scholarly work and life. We cannot approach irony in terms of truth, simply because, due to its ironies, the context no longer is metaphysical. This is Rorty’s challenge. Rorty’s promise focuses on top English Departments: they are hegemonic, they rule over the humanities, philosophy, and some social sciences using their superior method of ironizing dialectic. I refer to Hegel, Gerald Doherty’s “pornographic” writings, and Gore Vidal’s non-academic critique of academic literary criticism. My conclusion is that extensive use of irony is costly; an ironist must regulate her relevant ideas and speech acts—Hegel makes this clear. Irony is essentially confusing and contestable. Why would we want to use irony in a way that trumps metaphysics? Metaphysics, as defined by Rorty, is a problematic field, but irony can hardly replace it. At the same time, I admit that universal irony is possible, that is, everything can be seen in ironic light, or ironized. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and criticize Rorty’s idea of irony by using his own methodology, that is, ironic redescription. We can see the shallowness of his approach to irony by contextualizing it. This also dictates the style of the essay.

Always Flipped? A Peer-Centred Cycle for Teaching and Learning in the English Literature Class

In English departments, the default literary pedagogy of ‘read and discuss’ renders student performance particularly vulnerable to shortfalls in the area of deep reading. Where students rely on online content resources before reading literary texts, they effectively flip the class, decreasing rather than increasing active learning. This article presents a blended model for mitigating this trend by means of a reciprocal peer learning feedback loop. The Peer-Centred Cycle minimises direct instruction online or in class, and uses an online-to-classroom feedback loop to shift the majority of classroom activity to reciprocal peer learning, distinguishing it from both flipped classroom pedagogies, as well as from RPL as an occasional classroom strategy.

Course review horay and critical thinking skills: the effective teaching model for students’ grammar competence in remote EFL classrooms

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, EFL lecturers need to be creative in handling their remote teaching. However, scarce studies investigated the use of course review horay (CRH) and students’ critical thinking skills (CTS) in remote EFL classrooms especially in grammar classes. The study aimed to explore whether or not CRH was more effective than explanation model to teach grammar and the students having high CTS had better grammar competence than those of low CTS. This experimental study employed a 2x2 factorial design. The population was the second semester students of non-English departments in a private university in East Java, Indonesia. The sample was four groups comprising of two groups (high and low CTS) in the experimental class and two groups (high and low CTS) in the control class. To categorize them into high and low CTS, an Indonesian argumentative essay writing test was used. After six meetings of treatment, the students did the grammar test. The grammar scores were, then, analyzed using ANOVA and TUKEY tests. The results indicated that CRH was more effective and the students with high CTS possessed better grammar competence. The present study implies that CRH and CTS created a joyful learning atmosphere in remote grammar teaching.

The Impact of English Language Proficiency on Writing Critical Literary Assessments

This research paper seeks to investigate the importance and impact of proficiency in English language, especially in contexts where English is a foreign language, in creating well-versed literary analyses produced by university students. This study theorizes that students who have not profoundly established proper proficiency in English and indispensable critical skills are most prone to demonstrate low-grade analytical quality in their literary critical evaluations. The mainstream in the field of language teaching utilizes literature only as one of the potential learning aids that offer demanding decoding challenges to the students. The overall quality, however, of language proficiency across the students’ literary critical writings is less investigated, especially in contexts where English is a foreign language and specifically among the students who study at the Department of English at University of Human Development (UHD). The present study argues that different elements that shape language proficiency coalesce, in collaboration with developed literary and critical skills, in adequately written critical assessments of literary works. Moreover, Educational workers’, at English departments, foremost priority, based on their mission ─teaching either literature or language─ is, accordingly to hone students’ critical and language skills. Notwithstanding, the very title of the BA program in English language and literature predominantly considers the vital role of language proficiency.