RELC Journal

The development of critical sensibilities in English Language Teaching (ELT) in recent years has seen challenges to assumptions and methodologies in the field, placing an explicit focus on the manifestation of structures and relations of power. The critical stance affords a growing acceptance of English Language Teaching as a complex situated social practice, recognizing the issue of power in teacher-learner relationships. As such, the practice of minimizing learners’ first language use in classrooms has been questioned from both pedagogical and political directions. This study critically examines attitudes, practices and policies surrounding the role of Arabic in English Language Teaching at an English medium institution in the United Arab Emirates. Findings reveal that teachers, students and college administration both resist and comply with instructions to minimize Arabic, and that individuals intervene in institutional methodological structure with often contradictory positions emerging. A secondary aspect portrays managerial policing of teachers for methodological rigour with implications for teachers’ professional autonomy and development. I argue that such responses reflect English Language Teaching methodology’s position as an aspect of the global pattern of deployment of cultural and economic power.

In this paper I describe and analyse learner task-based interactions from a multimodal perspective with the aim of better understanding how learners’ interpersonal relationships might affect task performance. Task-based pedagogy is focused on classroom interaction between learners, yet analysis of tasks has often neglected the analysis of this interaction. The empirical studies that have occurred have mostly looked at the relationship between task-design and task-performance, ignoring other aspects of context, such as friendship groupings. Friendship groupings among learners are argued to impact upon classroom interaction and affect what we do as teachers and, as such, require attention. In the project reported on here I undertook a multimodal analysis of the interactions of one class of Japanese EFL learners, focusing in this paper on one particular learner performing a task in two different groups. The discussion suggests that his interpersonal relationships with the other learners do affect his task performance and success in engaging with the aims of the task.

This study investigates the occurrence of corrective feedback and uptake in child ESOL classes. Transcripts of 8.1 hours of lessons in 6 ESOL classes in a New Zealand primary school were analysed to explore the relationship between errors, feedback, and uptake. The results revealed that there was a clear preference for recasts and explicit correction, and there was a lack of prompts. The two most frequent feedback types yielded relatively high uptake rates, which was ascribed to the fact that a high percentage of the recasts were corrective (as opposed to supportive) and many cases of explicit correction subsumed multiple, hybrid (input-providing as well as output-prompting) corrective moves. Phonological errors led to a high repair rate regardless of feedback types, and grammatical errors mainly received recasts, most of which were not followed by repairs. Overall, there are differences in the patterns of feedback and uptake between this study and previous studies, which were interpreted with reference to the unique characteristics of this instructional context. This study demonstrates a need for an interactive, situated approach to the study of corrective feedback.

The aim of this pioneering study was to define and describe motivation for the acquisition of interlanguage pragmatic competence. Interlanguage pragmatic motivation was investigated from two perspectives: (1) general pragmatic motivation, displaying L2 learners’ motivation to acquire pragmatic strategies, pragmatic routines, politeness strategies, turn-taking patterns, and cultural familiarity; and (2) speech-act-specific motivation, representing learners’ motivation to acquire the pragmalinguistic forms and sociopragmatic norms of performing speech acts. Seventy-five EFL learners were studied using two pragmatic motivation questionnaires and a discourse completion task. The relationships among the general pragmatic motivation, speech-act-specific motivation, and pragmatic production were then investigated. The findings showed that EFL learners are highly motivated to learn English language pragmatic features from both motivational perspectives. Further analyses revealed that the learners fell short of having satisfactory L2 pragmatic production. Regression equations revealed that speech-act-specific motivation has the explanatory power of predicting pragmatic production in EFL learners but general pragmatic motivation does not manifest such an influence on L2 learners’ production. It is concluded that high general pragmatic motivation does not necessarily correlate with better pragmatic production.

Growing concerns have been voiced about strategies employed in L2 reading in general and dealing with unknown words in particular. Among other strategies, lexical inferencing has received attention in the literature. However, more research is needed to further clarify how different levels of L2 reading proficiency may affect the readers’ inferencing behavior with respect to the level of success they achieve as well as the types, combinations, and frequencies of knowledge sources they use when inferring meanings of unknown words. Taking up the legacy left by the pioneering works in lexical inferencing, the present study is an attempt to shed more light on the role of reading proficiency in the Iranian EFL learners’ use of knowledge sources in second language lexical inferencing and their level of success in guessing the meanings of unfamiliar target words. To this end, a total of 86 Persian-speaking EFL learners inferred the meanings of unknown words in three authentic expository texts. The findings adduce the argument that differences in L2 reading proficiency have a profound impact on inferencing success. Further analysis of the protocols demonstrates that the contribution of the knowledge sources used by the participants to inferencing success is partial and restricted.

An increasing number of researchers rely on genre to analyse academic and professional communication and to see how members of a discourse community use language. Since Swales’ (1990) seminal genre analysis of research article introductions, many researchers have carried out genre analysis of various types of professional and academic documents including job application letters. Subscribing to the view that genre is dynamic and socially constructed (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995), the present study explores if genre conventions in job letters written in Pakistan have undergone any change since Bhatia’s (1989) genre analysis of job letters in South Asian context. It was found that the job applicants no longer use the self-degradation moves as noted by Bhatia (1989). However, they still resort to glorifying the employer as a move and use old-fashioned courtly expressions to appeal to the sentiments of compassion of the employer. Although making good use of the typical formulaic expressions of the genre, most of the candidates fail to use language creatively and elaborately to present themselves as individuals with unique abilities and achievements.