International Journal of Applied Linguistics最新文献

In language education, digital multimodal composing (DMC) pertains to a new literacy practice in which students use digital tools to produce texts incorporating multiple semiotic modes. Despite that many scholars advocate for implementing DMC in language classrooms, it remains marginal in mainstream classrooms, with scant attention being paid to teachers’ perceptions concerning the use of DMC. Situated in Chinese universities, this research probes into the perspectives of five English teachers on implementing DMC as a pedagogical innovation. The analysis of data collected from multiple sources reveals that the teachers perceived DMC positively due to its affordances for students, namely, cultivating digital and multimodal literacies, improving speaking and writing abilities, fostering collaboration and communication skills, and enhancing learning interest and motivation. Teachers themselves harvested benefits regarding deeper insights into students’ learning potentials, enhanced digital literacies, a novel avenue for academic research, and an innovative teaching method. Nonetheless, the teachers expressed concerns about time constraints, students’ engagement in group work, potential plagiarism, assessment of students’ videos, and the long-term effect of DMC on students’ writing performance. Based on the findings, this research provides implications for integrating curriculum innovations like DMC into conventional curricula.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is influencing different aspects of human life. An AI-powered technology, which has been recently released, is ChatGPT. It is a cutting-edge technology that influences second/foreign language (L2) education. Although there is increasing research on the benefits and misfits of this chatbot in different disciplines, L2 education lacks a thorough investigation. To fill this lacuna, this phenomenographic study examined the perceptions of research-active English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers regarding the potentials and pitfalls of ChatGPT for L2 learning, teaching, assessment, and research. To this end, a semistructured interview was held with 30 Iranian EFL teachers with varying educational backgrounds and AI integration experiences. The results of content and thematic analysis indicated that ChatGPT is a double-edged sword that can both benefit and hurt these areas of L2 education. The most notable potentials were augmenting learner autonomy, providing personalized learning, reducing teachers’ teaching workload, designing assessment rubrics, and summarizing lengthy papers and theses to save L2 researchers’ time and energy. Concerning pitfalls, it was reported that ChatGPT might kill creativity and academic integrity, encourage cheating in online exams, spread fake and misinformation into the world of research, and cherish high-tech plagiarism. Some practical suggestions are made to empower L2 educators and researchers to survive in the world of AI.

This study proposed and statistically examined a research model to understand university learners’ satisfaction with online English as a foreign language (EFL) courses during the pandemic. Variables including e-learning anxiety, positive coping, and gender were under investigation. These variables did not receive much attention in the previous literature, and yet they are considered essential to understanding satisfaction with online EFL courses. A total of 439 undergraduate EFL learners from a university in Taiwan participated in the present study. The technique of structural equation modeling was adopted to test the hypotheses in the moderated mediation model. This study discovered: (1) e-learning anxiety had a negative impact on EFL learners’ satisfaction with online EFL courses; (2) positive coping was able to reduce the negative impact of e-learning anxiety on satisfaction with online EFL courses; (3) males used more positive coping strategies than females, and they had better satisfaction scores as well. The results can enrich the current applied linguistics literature by providing an insight into the dynamics of these variables.

The present study examined the predicted effects of emotion word type and valence on emotional word recognition and explored their influence on emotion effects through an emotion categorization task. The results showed the influence of emotion word type and valence on emotional words recognition. Emotion-label words exhibited faster response and higher accuracy rates (ACC) than emotion-laden words, and positive words evoked faster response and lower ACC than negative words. Positive emotion-label words and negative emotion-laden words evoked higher ACC than negative emotion-label words and positive emotion-laden words. Besides, the findings revealed the modulation of emotion word type and valence on the emotion effects. Emotion-label words and positive words displayed larger emotion effects than emotion-laden words and negative words in reaction time, and only emotion-laden words and positive emotion-label words showed emotion effects in ACC. These findings endorsed the mediated emotion concept account, density hypothesis, and automatic vigilance hypothesis. Based on the findings, we proposed a valence cognition account to explain the interactive results.

English has, for historical reasons, risen to global prominence as the unchallenged lingua franca internationally. World Englishes (WE) has, as a result, established itself as a visible line of research, exploring localised/indigenised varieties of English from around the world (e.g. India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nigeria). However, most of the discussions so far concern English written in the Latin script as people would normally expect. Against a backdrop of globalisation and the juggernaut of English, this article points to an increasingly salient phenomenon that English especially in superdiverse and/or (post)colonial societies (e.g. India and Pakistan) may disguise in seemingly inscrutable and ‘mysterious’ local scripts (e.g. Perso-Arabic script and Devanagari script) and even ‘pass off’ as local languages in these countries’ linguistic landscapes through phonetic transliteration. This emerging trend begs the question whether these should be understood as new varieties of local languages or new kinds of world Englishes disguised in non-Roman scripts. This phenomenon is theorised in this paper conceptually. To illustrate our point, examples of authentic signs taken from the linguistic landscapes relating to South Asia and South Asian communities are discussed. As English is increasingly glocalised and becomes part of other less dominant languages, this article calls on researchers in World Englishes (WE) and (socio)linguistics in general to look beyond English written in the Latin script in a conventional/traditional sense and to expand the scope and remit of WE research to explore how English, as a dominant code, becomes indigenised using local scripts and morphs into and even ‘passes off’ as ‘local’ surreptitiously. This fundamentally calls for the crucial need for researchers from diverse and multilingual backgrounds to work together to better understand English and other non-dominant languages’ role in the 21^st century.

While e-learning has gained prominence globally over the past several years, little is known about the successes English language teachers (ELTs) experience in e-learning environments in non-WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) contexts where teacher support is limited or unavailable. This two-stage, primarily qualitative multi-method study specifically aimed to examine the extent to which ELTs found success through e-learning in Afghanistan and Egypt. Survey (N = 82) and interview (N = 15) data showed that the teachers reported daunting challenges, including institutional malfunctioning, ineffective policies, absence of facilities and technical knowledge, large heterogeneous classes, students' low emotional investment, negative perceptions, and absence of rigorous and systematic assessment. The teachers also narrated their effective coping strategies to resolve the existing tensions, described how they incorporated the success elements, and how they improved student engagement and learning outcomes. The study provides surprising insights about how the move to emergency online teaching in under-resourced non-WEIRD contexts has changed and can inform teaching delivery. We conclude with implications for teachers to develop more effective e-learning environments in such contexts.

Oral corrective feedback, a key aspect of second language teaching, has received extensive research attention. However, little is known about whether and how professional development (PD) activities influence teachers' beliefs and classroom practices regarding oral corrective feedback. This case study investigates the effects of a targeted PD program on one experienced teacher's feedback beliefs and practices. The program comprised a workshop facilitating the teacher to discuss recent research findings regarding corrective feedback in language classrooms and experiential learning and reflective activities for 8 weeks. The data included semistructured interviews, three sources of written reflections, and classroom observations conducted over 17 weeks. The findings showed that although the teacher had already been positive about the importance of corrective feedback in teaching and learning, she underwent several considerable changes in her beliefs regarding the types and timing of feedback. The findings also showed some considerable changes in her actual feedback practices. Implications for teacher PD programs are discussed.

During the COVID-19 epidemic, the effect of mask wearing on communication has been questioned and explored. However, the study on the impact of face mask wearing on L2 speech is still limited. The main goal of the present study was to explore the extent to which face masks affect interlocutors’ L2 speech perception. Factors that varied were face mask (no mask, transparent mask, and disposable face mask), presentation mode (audio only vs. audiovisual), and speaking style (conversational vs. clear). The relationship between these three variables on the L2 processing was also investigated. Fifty-three Thai undergraduates who were L2 learners of English participated in an Internet-based perceptual task. They listened to 60 English sentences and typed the sentences they heard over an online form. The results showed that the participants did well when the L2 communication was in clear speech regardless of type of face mask and presentation mode. The improvement of the L2 perception of clear speech occurred even when the speaker produced sentences with disposable face mask as opposed to conversational speech suggesting that clear speech could enhance intelligibility in communication. As expected, the perceptual score was the lowest when the speech was in audio-only mode with conversational style and disposable face mask. These results suggest that in L2 classroom contexts, speaking clearly could lessen the negative effects of the face mask and unavailability of visual information of the speaker.

This study investigated the effect of pronominal reference on the integration of syntactic and semantic information in second language (L2) processing. We conducted a self-paced reading task involving 60 adult Korean-speaking learners of English and 44 native English speakers. The experiment manipulated the semantic congruity between a subject and its adjectival predicate, as well as the reference type (pronoun vs. full noun) within the intervening relative clause. The results showed that the native speaker group consistently displayed sensitivity to the incongruity between the subject and the predicate, regardless of the reference type. Similarly, the nonnative speakers exhibited sensitivity to the mismatch in the critical region. However, this effect did not persist in subsequent regions including the spill-over and wrap-up regions. Instead, in the wrap-up region, the L2 learners’ processing patterns were affected by the reference type, with sensitivity exclusively observed in the pronoun condition. The L2 learners’ processing pattern remained consistent across varying levels of English proficiency. These findings provide insights into the role of pronominal reference in L2 sentence processing.

This study serves as an attempt to validate an in-house oral proficiency test (hereafter referred to as OPT) with a particular focus on prompt effects on assessment of interactional competence, an issue that has attracted burgeoning interest but not been adequately investigated yet. Prompts employed in the parallel versions of the group discussion task, which were supposed to be comparable, were found to differ in two dimensions, that is, topical domain and syntactic structure. The transcribed interactions from 136 sophomore test takers (34 groups) sitting in the first administration of the OPT were coded through a rigorous procedure and examined using conversation analysis. Five patterns of interaction were identified with distinct features based on two dimensions, mutuality and equality. Marked differences in distribution of patterns of interaction were detected in discourse elicited by different prompts, which should be mainly attributed to the syntactic structure of the prompts. The open-question prompts were found more likely to elicit “conversation-like” interaction with higher mutuality, characterized by the collaborative and unbalanced-collaborative patterns, while the closed-question prompts tended to elicit more “solo versus solo” interaction with lower mutuality, featured by the parallel and unbalanced-parallel patterns. The influence of topic domain, however, was minimal. The results thereby constitute rebuttals that weaken meaningfulness and impartiality of the claim of interpretations about the construct within Bachman and Palmer's assessment use argument framework and suggest close attention from the test developers. The implications for prompt design, and development and validation of the group oral test are further provided.