This qualitative study used an activity system analysis from Cultural Historical Activity Theory to examine the contradictions in conventional language use in Taiwan's nursing professional practices in an EFL context. To capture diverse perspectives, the study employs semi-structured interviews with three key stakeholder groups: nurses, doctors, and foreign patients who use English as a lingua franca in Taiwan. As revealed by the current study, several forms of contradictions were evident as factors that impeded nurses from meeting the intended goals of clinical English use. These dilemmas, manifested as tensions between the object and various components of nurses' activity settings, included nurses' overreliance on machine translation (object vs. tools), conflicting use of clinical English (object vs. rule), hierarchical power asymmetry in the nursing community (object vs. division of labor), and lack of institutional support (object vs. community). Furthermore, a contradiction was also found between the central activity system (nurses' clinical English use) and its neighboring activity system (doctors' clinical English use). Drawing on the findings, implications for ENP (English for Nursing Purposes) pedagogy are discussed in this study.
Teacher-led questions are paramount when teachers seek to impart knowledge and ensure students understand the subject. They help teachers to guide meaningful interactions, make their students more active and influence their thinking, reasoning and participation. Surprisingly, however, there has been little research on analysing teacher questioning in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms in Asian EFL contexts at the secondary level. Therefore, our study aimed to analyse the frequency and types of questions used by CLIL teachers in Taiwanese classrooms, believing that this would help us understand teacher-student interaction and scaffold our teaching, students' learning and content learning. A corpus of 1,405 minutes from 39 CLIL lessons was collected and analysed. The results show that teachers use display, referential and confirmation checks in CLIL classrooms, raising doubts about achieving intended pedagogical goals and challenging learners' cognitive development. Teacher gender, learner level and course duration also significantly influence the questions used in the classroom. The pedagogical implications of the research are to raise CLIL teachers' awareness of the importance of questioning, translanguaging, L1/L2 translation and multimodalities to support better interactive discourse in CLIL classrooms and to provide adequate professional development for CLIL practitioners on classroom questioning skills to facilitate interaction, participation and deeper learning.
This research investigates how foreign language learners enhance their selfregulated learning through peer feedback within a computer-mediated study included twelve participants: six studying English as a foreign language (EFL) and six studying Japanese as a foreign language (JFL), with each group majoring in their respective languages. Data were collected through semi-structured and stimulated recall interviews and analyzed qualitatively. Three main themes: 1. Peer scaffolding for collaborative learning through CMC: The findings underscored the collaborative dynamics of peer feedback via CMC, where learners asynchronously exchanged insights and provided constructive critiques, promoting collective knowledge construction and deeper linguistic understanding; 2. Audienceaware stance feedback: Learners demonstrated strategic decision-making in feedback provision by considering their peers' perspectives, thereby enhancing the feedback's effectiveness; and 3. Engagement in cognitive processes: Participants actively engaged in various feedback strategies, adeptly distinguishing between global and local aspects of the compositions, such as content and grammar, thereby fostering comprehensive improvement in writing skills; these results suggest that learners can effectively utilize peer feedback to advance their self-regulated learning and enhance writing competencies in foreign languages within a CMC framework.
This study explores how Japanese female nursing students' mindset beliefs influence their learning and effort regulation in both nursing and English, identifying key differences and similarities with implications for both TESOL and international nursing education. Using a mixed-methods design, the study incorporated semi-structured interviews with 10 participants, which included both closed-ended quantitative and open-ended qualitative questions to gain a comprehensive understanding of their perceptions and strategies. The findings revealed that most participants attributed success in both nursing and English to effort rather than innate talent. Thematic analysis highlighted the importance of consistent effort and communication skills, with clearer goals and more role models in nursing, and occasional instances of being overwhelmed due to academic demands. The study offers insights into balancing nursing-specific content and foreign language learning, recommending structured learning plans, mentoring systems, and a focus on the transferability of soft skills between domains to support nursing students in managing interdisciplinary challenges.
Artificial intelligence is being introduced into language teaching at a fast rate and is likely to change the face of educational approaches, especially in the EFL context. The present study investigates the readiness of EFL teachers to adopt AI tools, specifically ChatGPT, into their teaching practices, attitudes, benefits, and challenges. A mixed-methods design was utilized to investigate the attitudes, knowledge, and experiences of 150 EFL teachers regarding AI use in the classroom with questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Results indicate that educators are relatively well-prepared for the introduction of AI, which they perceive as the most influential element affecting educators' confidence and competence in using new technologies. Educators who have been trained in AI tend to understand the potential that AI can bring into classrooms in terms of personalization of learning by AI, immediate feedback, and gamification of education that results in greater engagement by students. On the other hand, general concerns regard ethical issues: data privacy and algorithmic bias. Besides, financial and infrastructural barriers, especially in resource-poor settings, were major obstacles to AI adoption. The study underlines the serious lack of knowledge in AI research and techniques in instructors, thus calling for targeted professional development that is urgent. These findings call for comprehensive regulations, ethical frameworks, and investments to be put into place to ensure the use of AI in an equitable manner. The research provides significant insights into the intricacies of incorporating AI into language instruction, promoting a hybrid paradigm that utilizes AI's advantages while preserving the fundamental function of educators. This research provides a framework for stakeholders to overcome obstacles and enhance AI's revolutionary capabilities in EFL training.
