RELC Journal

The paper proposes a new conceptual perspective for understanding students’ engagement in L2 learning, in particular the concept of interest development in learning English. It investigates situational features that trigger interest in learning English, employing data from interviews with non-native English speaking students studying in TESOL programmes. Students were invited to reflect on critical moments which triggered their interest in learning English. These events were discussed in terms of three temporal stages: sources of interest in early years (primary), in teenaged years (secondary) and in adulthood (university and work). The findings show that what triggers interest is not just the ability to imagine and predict the vision of the future but the reimagining or revisioning of the past or one’s ability to postdict the past event in accordance with the present experience. It is not just the value of English (i.e. a property of topic or topic interest) per se that triggers interest but how its value is presented and experienced. For interest to be triggered, English must be presented or experienced in such a way that it creates surprise, unexpectedness, and encourages post-hoc understanding of the importance of English and one’s past interaction with English.

English language teaching (ELT) has been investigated from various angles including how English language teachers perceive what happens in an ELT classroom. How primary school English language learners perceive their experiences of ELT is rarely reported in the published literature, particularly from developing countries such as Bangladesh. This article reports on a study that examined Bangladeshi primary school learners’ experience of English language classroom practices in which technology-enhanced communicative language teaching activities were promoted through a project called English in Action (EIA). EIA is a large-scale 9-year long international English language development project in Bangladesh, funded by the UK government. A semi-structured group interview was conducted with 600 Grade 3 students from different regions of Bangladesh. The findings showed that the learners found communicative language learning activities such as dialogue and role play more effective than translation and memorizing grammar rules for learning English, although they enjoyed reciting and drills. The results also showed that these learners’ English teachers tended to mix both traditional and communicative approaches in their lessons. The paper critiques EIA and argues that any major language development project needs to consider the local context and learners’ views on language learning for its success.

This paper presents a case study that investigated and compared the stated beliefs and observed classroom practices relating to language teaching of one experienced and one novice English language teacher. Areas where observed practices converged with or diverged from stated beliefs are explored and discussed with reference to factors which might have influenced particular practices with respect to grammar teaching. Throughout this study, the novice and experienced teachers are compared with one another. The findings indicate that teachers indeed possess a set of complex beliefs that are not always realized in their classroom practices for a variety of potential reasons: some of these might be directly related to the context of teaching. Further, findings from this study show some similarities with previous studies that have compared experienced teachers with novice teachers.

Curriculum development research on nursing English in Taiwan has tended to end at needs analysis, offering little guidance on how to design and implement a course. Our objective was to examine how a course on workplace communication in English for nursing students in Taiwan would emerge in the classroom if teachers and students collaboratively generated language needs analysis and a syllabus of communicative performances. An action research approach was used to guide and document the teaching/learning and research process, and content analysis was used to examine and thematize the data. The research setting was an elective, one-semester nursing English course for students in a Bachelor of Science in nursing program in Taiwan. The participants were 16 third-year students whose first language is Mandarin Chinese, during their first semester of nursing practicum courses. Four types of interactional language (empirical, existential, transactional, discussion) and eight learning strategies emerged during weekly performance development. This study provides an innovative approach to course development in nursing English for foreign and second language users. Collaboratively developing an emergent syllabus of communicative performances in an action research framework can be a productive way to build an English health communication repertoire that is engaging, memorable, and adaptable.

This article provides an examination of the literature on issues surrounding the problems Japanese university students face in learning critical argument in their English academic writing courses. Japanese students’ critical thinking skills are criticized as not fostered in their university education, perhaps due to Confucian education ideals, Japanese ‘reader-responsible’ rhetorical structures, or misinterpretations by Western instructors. The article is presented in four sections providing first, an examination of English L2 in the Japanese context, second, an analysis of Japanese to English contrastive rhetoric, and third, a discussion of the debate on Japanese university students’ critical thinking in EFL writing. The article finishes with several suggestions to provide ways of dealing with the key challenges and fostering more positive development of critical thinking in Japanese students’ EFL academic writing.

Academic vocabulary, as the most challenging aspect of language learning in EAP and ESP contexts, has received much attention in the last few decades (e.g. Laufer, 1988; Sutarsyah, et al., 1994; Laufer and Nation, 1999; Coxhead, 2000; Nation, 2001a, 2001b; Wang et al., 2008; Martinez et al., 2009). The major attainments of these studies were identifying the academic vocabularies in the form of some wordlists called for all (Coxhead, 2000), or for some specific fields of study (Wang et al., 2008). Along with these studies and because of the paucity of studies in the field of Applied Linguistics, this study tries to establish an academic wordlist specific for the field of Applied Linguistics. Using frequency and range as the criteria for word form selection, this study identified 773 academic word types. A total of 573 (74.12%) academic words found in the corpus overlapped with the words in Coxhead’s AWL (2000). Therefore, Applied Linguistics teachers and students should pay special attention to this wordlist. From these findings it is concluded that (1) academic words play an important role in academic texts; therefore, acquisition of them seems to be essential for language learners and users; (2) material and syllabus designers and teachers’ direct attention to these words can lead to a better understanding of these words; hence, students’ development in their writing and reading.

L1 habits often tend to interfere with the process of learning a second language. The vowel habits of Arab learners of English are one such interference. Arabic orthography is such that certain vowels indicated by diacritics are often omitted, since an experienced reader of Arabic knows, by habit, the exact vowel sound in each phonetic environment. As a result of their non-dependence on the writings of vowels explicitly, Arab learners tend to ignore writing the vowel letters in their English writings, too. Research scholars name this interference ‘vowel blindness’. This paper is a report on an investigation of the presence of this feature in a group of 20 learners of English, registered for the Foundation Program in King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. However, this report aims to show that, this vowel blindness could only be a ‘temporary blindness’, and that remedial measures significantly helped these learners overcome this interference.