Drawing upon Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and integrating corpus-based approaches, this study constructs a corpus consisting of English diplomatic speeches delivered by representatives of China to the United Nations between 2012 and 2025. Through frequency analysis, keyword analysis, and lexical bundle analysis, the study investigates the linguistic features, discursive strategies, and socio-political motivations underlying the construction of China’s major-power image within the UN discourse framework. The findings indicate that at the textual level, high-frequency lexical choices and recurring discourse patterns reveal three dominant themes: global development and cooperation, international peace and security, and multilateral governance. At the discourse practice level, China legitimizes its international identity through institutional authority, intertextual references to UN norms, and audience-oriented communication strategies. At the level of social practice, the construction of China’s major-power image is closely associated with China’s foreign policy principles, development strategies, and cultural values. This study contributes to research on national image construction by extending CDA-based analyses beyond external representations and demonstrating how an emerging power constructs its international identity through institutional diplomatic discourse. It also highlights the value of combining corpus linguistics with critical discourse analysis in examining the relationship between language, power, and global governance.
This study empirically investigated whether students’ satisfaction with and perceptions of credibility toward English teachers are higher when the contextual fitness of English teachers’ transformational leadership is high. The key contextual variable examined in this study was students’ English self-efficacy. In this research, the relationships of the students’ satisfaction and credibility with students’ intrinsic motivation to learn English were also investigated. A questionnaire survey was administered to first- and second-year high school students across seven districts in Daegu city, Korea. A total of 192 valid responses were collected. Cluster analysis was employed to examine the degree of fit between the levels of students’ English self-efficacy and the forms of English teachers’ transformational leadership. The results indicated that under the high levels of students’ English self-efficacy, students’ satisfaction with and credibility toward English teachers were also high when all dimensions of transformational leadership (i.e., individualized consideration, idealized influence, inspirational motivation, and intellectual stimulation) were strongly enacted as well as intellectual stimulation was emphasized more than the other dimensions. In contrast, when the degrees of students’ English self-efficacy were low, students’ satisfaction with and perceptions of teacher credibility were relatively high when individualized consideration, idealized influence, and inspirational motivation were emphasized more strongly than intellectual stimulation. The positive associations of the students’ satisfaction and credibility with students’ intrinsic motivation to learn English were also empirically confirmed. Finally, in the conclusion section of this paper, various implications for educational leadership and English learning were concretely summarized and proposed.
This descriptive phenomenological study investigates how Non-Native English-Speaking (NNES) subject teachers (n = 9) who implemented English Medium Instruction (EMI) in their teaching across the English Program (EP), the Intensive English Program (IEP), and the Science-Mathematics Bilingual Program (SMBP) experienced their work. While existing EMI research has largely focused on language outcomes, policy implementation, and higher education settings, this study addresses a significant gap by exploring the subjective realities and professional vulnerabilities of secondary-level teachers in a Southeast Asian context. Grounded in Husserl’s philosophical framework, this research uses in-depth phenomenological interviews and classroom observations to examine the essence of teaching content through a non-native language. Data were analyzed through horizontalization, clustering of meaning units, and the development of textural and structural descriptions. The findings revealed that EMI implementation is a complex professional journey for NNES subject teachers, involving linguistic-pedagogical dissonance, impact on teacher identity and practice, emotional and cognitive load, and the adoption of adaptive teaching practices. However, this experience also provides NNES subject teachers with professional growth in adaptive pedagogical expertise, multimodal and translanguaging strategies, and teacher resilience. This study is original in its systematic phenomenological documentation of how NNES secondary teachers reconstruct their professional identities. It reveals their transition from content specialists to multilingual mediators through reflective meaning-making, a process largely invisible in policy-oriented and higher-education-focused EMI research. Implications include designing contextually responsive professional development and translanguaging-informed policy support for EMI teachers across Southeast Asian secondary education.
This paper provides a narrative pedagogical review of intentional and incidental vocabulary learning, focusing on Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms. It integrates foundational pedagogical literature with recent empirical research on the breadth and depth of vocabulary, intentional and incidental learning, repetition, contextualized exposure, learner autonomy, and classroom-based vocabulary instruction. It addresses a gap in the literature by examining how these research strands can be integrated into a coherent pedagogical framework for an input-limited EFL context such as Japan, where learners often have limited exposure to English beyond the classroom. Rather than treating intentional or incidental learning as independently sufficient, the paper argues that these methods’ effectiveness depends on learner proficiency, the quantity of available exposure, and the quality of instructional support. Further, it contends that vocabulary development is most effective when explicit vocabulary instruction is integrated with repeated contextualized encounters, productive use, and sustained strategy development. The paper concludes by proposing a practical pedagogical model to sequence explicit vocabulary instruction, planned recycling, contextualized re-encounters, and learner-directed review in Japanese university EFL classrooms and also identifies areas warranting further empirical research.
This study explores how English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) university students develop the ability to construct connections across poems in a literature classroom. Conducted as a classroom-based study, the research draws on students’ written responses, concept maps, and survey data collected during an eight-week poetry unit. The findings indicate a developmental progression from isolated interpretation toward more connected and integrative forms of reading. Students reported that cross-poem comparison tasks supported deeper understanding, interpretive engagement, and retention of literary meaning, although they also experienced difficulties in identifying meaningful relationships and expressing interpretations in English. The study suggests that scaffolded comparison activities and collaborative meaning-making may support the development of intertextual reading practices in EFL contexts. The findings also offer pedagogical implications for poetry instruction and literature teaching in higher education.
Against the background of China’s increasing cooperation with South Asian countries and the strong demand for multilingual talents, less commonly taught language education has been increasingly valued in higher education. This study focuses on three Chinese Sinhalese majors during their study‑abroad period, aiming to explore how they develop Sinhalese language proficiency in Sri Lanka. The study finds that Chinese students are confronted with significant communication challenges in the multilingual context in Sri Lanka, where colloquial forms, dialectal variations, and frequent mixing of Sinhalese and English constitute daily and academic interactions. To overcome these communication barriers and enhance their practical language skills, Chinese students actively draw on diverse resources and strategies, using English as a resource, participating in volunteer and social activities, learning collaboratively with peers, and employing digital tools and flexible multimodal communication. Despite the supportive role of English in facilitating basic daily communication, it poses noticeable constraints on in-depth interaction, since local English is marked by heavy accents and uneven proficiency, accompanied by clear social stratification in use, and fails to fully convey culture-loaded meanings in cross-cultural communication. This study contributes to a better understanding of less commonly taught language learning in study-abroad contexts. It emphasizes the importance of multilingual and multimodal resources and provides implications for curriculum design, pre-departure training, and cross-cultural support.
Social support is an important part of second-language learning, but many existing instruments and empirical models have been developed mainly for school-age learners. Postgraduate English majors study in a more independent, research-oriented, and feedback-intensive environment, so it remains unclear whether a multidimensional social support scale works in the same way for this group. This preliminary pilot study adapted the Social Support for English Learning Scale (SSELS) to Chinese postgraduate English education and examined it with 31 students from five Chinese universities. The questionnaire measured teacher/supervisor support, family academic support, family autonomy support, peer support, English learning self-efficacy, and self-rated academic achievement. The adapted subscales showed high internal consistency. A preliminary exploratory component inspection produced four components, explaining 79.44% of the variance, but the loading pattern did not clearly reproduce the original four-factor model. Because of the small sample size and low KMO value, factor validity remains undetermined. Exploratory regression models showed that family autonomy support reached statistical significance in relation to self-efficacy, whereas peer support reached statistical significance in relation to self-rated achievement. These findings should be read as feasibility evidence and as hypotheses for larger studies, not as confirmatory validation evidence. Overall, this study provides initial evidence and methodological directions for future research on social support in advanced EFL education.
Against the backdrop of increasingly frequent cross-border mobility, language plays an important role in catering to the needs of foreign migrants who come to China for various purposes. This study selected a supermarket in Hekou, a China-Vietnam border town, as a research site for examining how different languages are displayed across different areas of the supermarket and what functions these languages serve. Based on the content analysis of 127 multilingual signs and semi-structured interviews with seven bilingual employees, the study reveals three major findings. First, the supermarket’s linguistic landscape is dominated by bilingual signs. Specifically, Chinese-Vietnamese signs serve practical communicative functions, while Chinese-English signs mainly appear on electronic products and imported goods. Second, Chinese-Vietnamese bilingual signs perform important informative functions such as directional guidance, price transparency, usage instructions, and rule communication. However, interview data show that multilingual signs alone cannot fully meet the needs of Vietnamese customers, who prefer interpersonal communication for product details and promotional information. Third, English serves symbolic rather than practical communicative functions in that English signs create a fashionable atmosphere for young Vietnamese customers, signal high-end product quality, project a formal and professional institutional image, and position the supermarket as an internationally oriented venue for cross-border shoppers. The study concludes that the multilingual signs in the border supermarket serve both informative and symbolic functions. Practical suggestions are provided for offering Vietnamese language training for border service workers so as to facilitate cross-border trade and people-to-people connectivity between China and Vietnam.
The role of native-speaker interaction in English language learning has long been debated in applied linguistics. Traditional second language acquisition theories have frequently positioned native-speaker input as the most authentic model of language exposure. However, the global expansion of English as a lingua franca, together with the rapid development of AI-mediated communication, increasingly challenges this assumption. Drawing on recent scholarship, this article critically examines three complementary interactional pathways: non-native teacher scaffolding, peer interaction, and AI-mediated communication. Rather than presenting original empirical findings, the paper is positioned as a conceptual framework study that synthesizes existing research in order to propose an interactional ecology framework for English language learning. The analysis suggests that effective language development depends less on interlocutor nativeness than on the quality, diversity, and pedagogical design of interactional experiences across learning contexts.
Critical reading has consistently been documented in the literature as a central competency in post-secondary education, with university instructors expecting students to demonstrate higher-order reading skills—such as analysing, evaluating, synthesising, and identifying authorial bias—upon entry into tertiary contexts. Despite widespread agreement among faculty and institutions regarding the importance of critical reading for academic success, many students struggle to engage with texts at a critical level. The present study investigates the use of anaphoric resolution as a pedagogical strategy to enhance university students’ critical engagement with academic texts in India. Adopting a mixed-methods design, the study employed a pre- and post-test to measure quantitative gains, followed by semi-structured interviews to capture qualitative insights into learners’ experiences. The findings indicate that explicit instruction in anaphoric resolution contributed positively to the development of students’ critical reading abilities. The qualitative responses indicate that learners’ awareness of anaphoric resolution as a strategy for understanding complex expository texts was particularly beneficial. The study highlights the relevance of using anaphoric resolution as a pedagogical tool to support learners’ critical engagement with texts.
Teaching competitions have become an important mechanism for improving the quality of vocational education and supporting teachers’ professional development. Drawing on national curriculum standards for higher vocational English as well as sustained teaching practice, this study proposes a systematic framework for constructing the “STAR” classroom, which integrates Situation-based, Task-driven, Assessment-motivated, and Result-oriented principles. Centered on student learning, the STAR classroom is aligned with the principles of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) and the Production-Oriented Approach (POA), thereby forming an integrated instructional model that supports meaningful learning and holistic student development. To enhance its practical relevance, a classroom implementation example is included to illustrate how the four components operate in an authentic teaching context. The study contributes a practice-oriented pedagogical framework for higher vocational English teaching under the background of educational transformation.
This study investigates the multiple sources of foreign language teaching anxiety (FLTA) among Saudi instructors teaching English in a Saudi university. Understanding teachers’ FLTA is crucial since it influences their confidence, teaching practices, and their students’ learning experiences. The study explores the roles of gender, years of teaching experience, and highest educational qualification on the level of perceived self-reported FLTA. The 56 participants (42 females and 14 males) were Saudi university instructors teaching English as a foreign language, with varying years of experience and educational qualifications. Data collection was through a closed and open‑ended questionnaire. The closed items were an adapted version of Ipek’s (2006) FLTA scale (FLTAS). This was followed by the semi-structured interviews, ten participants were randomly selected from the study sample, comprising five males and five female instructors. The findings revealed a statistically significant gender difference, with male instructors reporting significantly higher mean FLTA scores than female instructors. However, no significant differences were found between FLTA according to years of teaching experience or highest educational qualification. The study also reports on the sources that triggered instructors’ FLTA, for example, lack of self-confidence, fear of being judged, working environment and students. The findings highlight the need for teacher training programmes and institutional support to help instructors manage their FLTA in addition to providing directions for further research in this area.
This study investigates the reading strategies employed by Saudi learners of foreign languages when engaging with political texts and examines the influence of selected variables on strategy use. Adopting a descriptive survey design, the researcher collected data from a sample of 103 Saudi learners studying English, French, Spanish, and Chinese at three higher education institutions. The study utilized a questionnaire adapted from the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory, which measures three categories of strategies: global, problem-solving, and support. The findings revealed that learners use reading strategies at a generally high level, with problem-solving strategies ranking first, followed by global strategies and support strategies. This indicates that learners rely heavily on higher-order cognitive processes such as inference, analysis, and evaluation when dealing with the complexity of political texts. The results also showed no statistically significant differences in strategy usage based on language major, gender, or language proficiency level. However, a significant effect was found for learners’ level of familiarity with global political events, with higher familiarity associated with greater use of reading strategies. The study highlights the importance of background knowledge in facilitating comprehension and enhancing strategic reading behavior. It also underscores the need for explicit instruction in metacognitive and problem-solving strategies, as well as the integration of authentic political content in foreign language curricula. The findings contribute to the limited research on reading political texts in foreign language contexts and offer pedagogical implications for improving learners’ reading comprehension and strategic awareness.
This research surveys students and professors on the perceived capabilities of Chinese students communicating English-mediated critical thinking skills while taking English medium of instruction (EMI) university courses. English-mediated critical thinking (ECT) is defined in this study as the ability to articulate, justify, evaluate, and refine one’s reasoning through English while engaging in EMI academic tasks. This research examines student and teacher perceptions regarding the relationship between English-mediated critical thinking (ECT) and performance in EMI classes, noting positive influences that can originate from learning to communicate critical thinking in a foreign language. The resulting data indicate that both students and professors consider a higher ECT ability to be connected to higher in-class performance, and students specifically consider ECT to be a vital skill for pursuing English-taught degrees, whether overseas or domestically. In addition, the professors report a predominantly low student confidence rate and overall general expertise in ECT, leading to reduced foreign teacher-student communication and increased simplified expression in class assignments. However, many students supported the use of in-class activities such as debates, group discussions, etc., to encourage ECT practice and increased confidence. According to the students and professors surveyed, participants perceived ECT as being associated with stronger reasoning, information-processing, and research-related capabilities. These results suggest that students and faculty perceive that promoting critical thinking practice in ESL/EFL classes could support student development later on in their EMI classes.
Linguists have traditionally classified words into syntactic categories using morphological and syntactic evidence, often treating phonology as a separate domain concerned only with sound patterns. This article argues for an integrated phono-morphosyntactic approach to category classification in English, positing that suprasegmental features such as stress and intonation can serve as evidence for determining syntactic categories and that ambiguity in written form is often resolvable through phonological representation. The study also challenges the classical assumption that reflexive pronouns are a straightforward diagnostic for syntactic relations by demonstrating that anaphors occurring in prepositional phrase distributions behave differently from canonical reflexives. A questionnaire administered to five native English speakers at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh examined gender assignment patterns, revealing that English speakers show no systematic agreement in pronoun choice for occupational nouns, in contrast to Arabic speakers who operate under a more rigid grammatical gender system. The findings support the view that category classification must account for phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic evidence in an integrated manner.
The study explored the impact of gender on the use of oral communication strategies (OCS) among 60 first-year university English as a Second Language (ESL) students in Fiji. The OCSI (Oral Communication Strategy Inventory) was administered following an in-class oral presentation. Semi-structured interviews were then conducted with a subgroup of the participants (n = 10) to discuss why they had selected the strategies. Findings suggest that fluency, accuracy, and non-verbal strategies were the most used by students to meet academic expectations. Significant gender differences were found in four categories: female students used social-affective strategies and negotiation for meaning more frequently than male students, and male students dropped messages more frequently than did females. These differences appeared to be related to two types of anxiety-management orientations indicated by the qualitative data in the study: female students managed a sense of distress through message clarity and the speaker-audience relationship, whereas males saw face-saving as exiting the message as a strategy against public errors. These results may have a bearing on ESL instruction in the South Pacific, as they suggest that oral communication programmes need to factor in gender. For example, teachers can prompt male students to develop more robust negotiation strategies rather than withdrawing, and all students can transition from translator-based processing to a direct thinking process in the target language.
Story continuation writing tasks (CWT) have emerged as a prominent pedagogical and assessment innovation in English as a second and foreign language (ESL/EFL) contexts, particularly in China. Requiring learners to read an incomplete narrative and compose a coherent continuation, CWT integrates reading comprehension with written production, fostering a psycholinguistic process of alignment where learners reuse and adapt lexical, syntactic, and semantic structures from the input text. This distinctive mechanism positions CWT as a powerful tool for both learning-to-write and writing-to-learn. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, this systematic review synthesizes 32 peer-reviewed empirical studies (2012-2025) from databases including Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). The analysis traces the developmental trajectory of CWT research across cognitive, affective, technological, and literacy dimensions. Findings reveal its effectiveness in promoting linguistic development (e.g., vocabulary, syntactic complexity, accuracy, cohesion), enhancing affective factors (e.g., reducing anxiety, fostering flow), and facilitating alignment-driven learning. Key moderators such as task design (e.g., input modality, planning conditions, genre), technological integration (e.g., digital tools, AI feedback), and learner variables (e.g., proficiency, working memory) are identified. The discussion situates these findings within broader theoretical frameworks (Interactive Alignment Model, sociocultural theory) and highlights persistent tensions, such as the alignment-originality paradox in assessment. The review concludes by outlining future research directions, including the need for more longitudinal studies, cross-contextual replications, and ethical frameworks for AI integration, while offering evidence-based guidance for practitioners aiming to optimize CWT implementation in diverse ESL/EFL settings.
