RELC Journal

Despite the fact that Singaporean students consistently perform well in literacy tests such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, employers have reported that Singaporean employees in general lack confidence in articulating their views in the workplace. This may be attributed to the practice of teacher-fronted and monologic classroom discourse, which does not allow opportunities for teachers and students to construct knowledge and understanding together during curriculum time. The article reports on one classroom-based research conducted on a Secondary Three (age 15) class in one Singaporean government school. The purpose of this article is to show how classroom talk could be made more dialogic, through an intervention, to enhance students’ talk opportunities and to build up literacy skills. The article argues that over time, the habitual practice of a dialogic form of teacher-student talk would help to open up the space of learning for students. To do that, it would be necessary to begin with raising teachers’ awareness of the benefits of dialogic talk.

Despite the high frequency of occurrences of wh-interrogatives in daily use, there are repeated negative comments about the poor mastery of the wh-interrogative structure among Hong Kong students. However, so far little attention has been paid to their difficulties in the acquisition of the structure. There is a strong need to understand what linguistic knowledge they possess, and identify the learning difficulties in order to seek ways to address them. This study obtained its quantitative data from three classes of Hong Kong Secondary 3 students through a written test and an oral test. The major learning difficulties found include the word order transfer from the Chinese language, failure to use correct verb phrase structures, and erroneous use of some wh-words (whose, which, and how) and wh-phrases (e.g. how far, whose bag). The findings also reveal learning difficulties related to learner variables. Students of different English proficiency levels showed wide variation in their understanding of interrogative structures. The pedagogical implications are discussed.

English has been referred to as a lingua franca for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). As the region moves towards establishing the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), the diversity of pronunciation of the ASEAN member states is seen as a forefront issue for English language teaching (ELT). From a sociocultural perspective, this study explored teachers’ cognitions about pronunciation instruction and their classroom practice. The findings were based on qualitative data collected from three pre-service non-native English teachers. All the findings were based on these multicultural and multilingual context. Data were obtained from interviews and practicum-teaching observations and were coded and analysed thematically to understand the teachers’ emic perspectives of pronunciation instruction. Four themes emerged from the data and were discussed in relation to the 2015 AEC, based on which I challenge the current status of English as a foreign language in the Cambodian ELT mindset. Briefly, these themes include the teachers’ self-acknowledgement of their own pronunciation, the perceived goal of pronunciation instruction, their approaches to teaching pronunciation and their attitudes towards ASEAN English as a lingua franca (ELF). The article concludes with implications for English language teacher education in Cambodia and beyond and calls for more research to expand the ASEAN ELF literature.

Developing English for communicative purposes is a key objective of language classes in many parts of the world. As a logical prerequisite to communication practice, learners need to have Willingness to Communicate (WTC) before they will engage in L2 interaction (Macintyre et al., 1998). Teachers can play an important role in helping learners to develop WTC (Dörnyei, 2007), however, since research into this topic is relatively recent, not much is known about how teachers go about this process. For this reason, the present study investigated teachers’ perceptions of their role in fostering WTC through interviews and questionnaires and compared these with observations of their classroom practices. The research was conducted in New Zealand ESOL class that focused predominantly on communicative skills, catering mostly to Asian learners. The results showed that teachers believed they play a key role in helping learners to develop WTC and identified a range of strategies they used in class. Classroom observations confirmed the use of some strategies although no explicit encouragement of language practice outside the classroom was made. This paper identifies some possible reasons for this mismatch and concludes with practical recommendations for ESOL teachers who wish to support learners’ WTC.

This study investigates the effects on developing L2 listening fluency through doing extended listening-focused activities after reading and listening to audio graded readers. Seventy-six EFL university students read and listened to a total of 15 graded readers in a 15-week extensive listening programme. They were divided into three groups (Group 5, n = 30; Group 10, n = 20; Group 15, n =26) according to the number of post-listening-focused activities they completed. Another group who did not receive extensive listening served as the control group (Group 0, n =39). All participants were given a pre-test containing teacher-developed tests and a full-length simulated Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) listening test. Similar tests were repeated at the end of the programme. The study addresses the effect size of improvement that students made from listening to audio graded readers and doing post-listening-focused activities, the degree to which students progressed on their TOEIC listening test, and the transferring effect from narrative-type input to conversational-type listening. Results show that the effect size was very small, medium, and very large on the listening improvement for Group 5, Group 10 and Group 15 respectively. On their post-TOEIC tests, Groups 5, 10 and 15 made approximately 2, 9 and 16 points out of 100 respectively. Finally, only Group 15 demonstrated some transfer effect from narrative to conversational input type of listening. This study also discussed the reasons low-level learners need to read many more texts to see more significant improvement.

Test takers’ beliefs or experiences have been overlooked in most validation studies in language education. Meanwhile, a mutual exclusion has been observed in the literature, with little or no dialogue between validation studies and studies concerning the uses and consequences of testing. To help fill these research gaps, a group of Senior III students in Guangdong Province, mainland China, were interviewed concerning their views of the high-stakes Computer-based English Listening and Speaking Test (CELST) and their experiences of preparing for and taking the test. The data analysis indicated that the students had a distinct understanding of the CELST validity and also tentatively suggested a relationship between the students’ views of the CELST design, their test preparation practice and their test taking process. These findings provided information useful for sharpening a computer-based English listening and speaking test and for generating positive washback on English learning.

This article describes an innovation in the teaching and learning of vocabulary in English as a Foreign Language classes. Whereas vocabulary coverage in classrooms and textbooks traditionally focuses on lists of target words in printed form, this article promotes the notion of ‘aural vocabulary’ as an important part of ‘knowing’ words. It describes a set of activities used to improve learners’ academic listening abilities and illustrates the activities by using the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000).

This article reports on perceptions and practices in relation to integrating culture into EFL teaching and how course material was designed within the Thai curriculum framework. Thai teachers’ understanding of what constitutes culture, the role it plays in language learning and how such understanding is being translated into pedagogical practices are under investigation. The practice demonstrated an attempt to adapt the Byram’s model to fit local circumstances, policies and needs. The knowledge of everyday cultures of native speakers was promoted, whilst cultures in the prior curriculum merely constituted high cultures such as literature. Potential materials, including newspapers and magazine articles, nonfiction, TV programmes and films were suggested to encourage an ethnographic frame of mind in students. The discussion of a few practical ways in which these materials can be used to promote cultural awareness and how they could be used to facilitate opportunities for language skills practice were provided. Feedback from students include the novelty of the experience, changing perspectives, facilitating better communication, practical and useful knowledge, fun, autonomous learning, critical thinking and empathy towards other cultures.