Language Teaching最新文献

This review on English language teaching (ELT) in Singapore examines 159 empirical research studies published between 2017 and 2023 in both internationally recognised peer-reviewed journals and less well-known regional journals. With this comprehensive review, we aim to raise awareness of ELT research in Singapore for international, regional, and local readership. This will also serve as a starting point for educators, scholars, and researchers to investigate ELT in Singapore. The review yielded five themes: teaching the language skills; multiliteracies and technology; bi/multilingualism/bidialectalism and English; English as an academic language; and teacher education for ELT. While there is continuity from the last two reviews of research from Singapore in 2009 and 2021, reflected in the single theme of teaching language skills, the other themes represent new directions.

In our critical review, we explore the progress of second language (L2) teaching research in Japan from 2019 to 2023, focusing particularly on English Language Teaching (ELT) and Japanese Language Teaching (JLT). After scrutinising numerous publications from over 50 academic journals, as well as academic books and chapters, we selected around 40 studies for analysis. These studies met our screening criteria of articles published in Japan, which were written in English or Japanese, peer-reviewed, presented original findings or insights, and focused on the Japanese context. We highlighted six key areas: grammar, language testing, teachers’ professional development, the realities and influences of foreign residents and immigration, the identity of language learners/users and language education policy. Through our review, we provide notable characteristics, developments, and challenges in L2 teaching research in Japan for a global readership. This contribution furthers the ongoing conversation and sets directions for future research in this field.

Previous research has investigated the effect of planning time (PT) on L2 learners’ production regarding fluency, complexity, and accuracy, but its influence at the discourse level has been overlooked. Thus, this study explores the influence of PT on learners’ written performance regarding anaphora resolution (AR) and their pragmatically (in)felicitous choices of referring expressions (REs) in discourse since PT may reduce learners’ cognitive load and facilitate the production of pragmatically felicitous REs.

Two film-retelling tasks were completed by intermediate L1 Spanish–L2 English learners and English natives, further divided into a planning and a non-planning subgroup. Their compositions were analysed focusing on the REs produced, taking into consideration the pragmatic context. Results showed a PT effect on learners’ RE choices, although not all pragmatic contexts were equally affected. Planning time exerted a positive influence on topic continuity contexts, where learners produced more economical forms, but no effect was observed in topic shift scenarios.

The present contribution proposes a low-threshold action plan for research into what we consider critical areas in multilingualism where we see an urgent need for more empirical studies and research-based classroom interventions and a stronger commitment to multilingual standards both in research and teaching. Reaching out to a wide audience of researchers, educationalists and decision makers, we first stake out the conceptual frame for our discussion and delineate the theoretical base that informs our thinking. This is followed by a perforce perfunctory overview of the current state of things. Next, we outline three research tasks with concrete practical suggestions and guidance on how to operationalise and implement the respective projects. Each task is contextualised in terms of its broader socio-educational embedding and prospective practical-theoretical relevance. The overall aim is to challenge traditional monolingual-grounded notions of language development, promote a dynamic and inclusive multilingual perspective in language learning, teaching and assessment, and contribute to a more informed understanding of multilingualism.

Investigating speech fluency has, for a long time, been at the core of second language (L2) studies, as fluency is believed to epitomise successful acquisition of L2, characterise effective communication, elucidate the complex process of acquisition, and predict L2 speakers' proficiency. The significance attributed to fluency in these areas explicates the research attention paid to it over the past decades. An important area of development in this regard is L2 assessment in which fluency is recognised as a key underlying construct of spoken language ability by international language tests (e.g., IELTS, TEEP, APTIS) and language benchmarks (e.g., CEFR). Many high-stakes tests of English and other languages include fluency in their rating scales, with the earliest on record tracing back to the 1930s – the College Board's English Competence Examination (1930) in America. Including fluency as a fundamental aspect of speaking ability in the rating scales, rating descriptors, and rater training materials, either as an independent criterion or combined with others (e.g., delivery), has become common practice in language testing over the past decades. What has made assessment of fluency even more appealing to researchers and test providers in recent years is the objectivity and reliability of its measurement and its compatibility with the technological developments in automated assessment of speaking. Fluency is now largely recognised as a construct that can be efficiently and reliably assessed in automated assessment of spoken language ability and used to predict proficiency (de Jong, 2018*; Ginther et al., 2010*; Kang & Johnson, 2021*; Tavakoli et al., 2023).

Decades before educators were forced to confront the disruption posed by widely accessible generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, language learners, instructors, and researchers began dealing with its game-changing predecessor: machine translation (MT). Researchers began assessing MT systems and proposing language teaching applications for them as soon as universities and schools gained access to them in the mid-1980s (*Anderson, 1995*; Ball, 1989*; Corness, 1985; French 1991; Lewis, 1997; Richmond, 1994*). These inquiries accelerated in the early 2000s, when internet-enabled computer labs and increasingly smarter devices put free online MT services such as Babel Fish and Google Translate (GT) at students' fingertips, triggering concerns over output quality, academic dishonesty, and the short-circuiting of actual learning. In recent years, there has been a veritable explosion of research on MT's role in and impact on language teaching and learning, with many dozens of peer-reviewed articles published in the past five years alone, as documented in a handful of comprehensive literatures reviews (Gokgoz-Kurt, 2023; Jiang et al., 2024; Jolley & Maimone, 2022; Klimova et al., 2023; Lee, 2023). The present article provides a timeline of this rapidly expanding research domain.