Professional development plays a central role in fostering teaching quality.As teaching and learning in Vietnam have embraced a digital mode, the emergence of webinars has been noted.However, little is known about its impact on primary and secondary English language teachers, especially in rural areas.This multi-perspective case study aimed to explore the beliefs and practices of a small group of mid-career teachers working at different schools in a southwestern province in Vietnam as they experienced digital professional development.After having reflected on their participation in both synchronous and asynchronous webinars, the teachers were encouraged to implement selected techniques to engage learners in their teaching contexts.Qualitative findings from teachers' interviews and observations demonstrate how this digital modality influenced their pedagogical and social cognition, impacting their classroom practices.
This 12-week research examined the effects of dictogloss on the students’ grammatical competence and motivation. Data were collected through tests, questionnaires, and observation involving twenty eight students in a maths classat a higher education institution in Vietnam. The initial data indicated that students had low grammatical competence and motivation in learning grammar. By analyzing the textbook, the researcher found out it was structured in a way where dictogloss could be applicable and then an action plan was made to better the situation. The findings demonstrated the positive impacts of using dictogloss in the class where English was taught as an EFL (English as a foreign language). Learners could not only make improvements in their grammatical competence but also express greater interest in the English class. The dicussion supports the use of dictogloss as an alternative method for grammar teaching and provides some implications for better dictogloss practice in EFL context.
Paraphrasing is an important skill in academic writing -it is a cognitive skill that requires higher order thinking and high proficiency inss both reading and writing.This research explored the paraphrasing ability of EFL learners at a tertiary institution in Vietnam and examined the challenges they face when paraphrasing.Data were collected from ten second-year English major students through (i) paraphrasing a given text and (ii) individual interviews.The findings revealed that participants frequently paraphrased using synonyms, but rarely changed syntactic structures.The interviews showed that the learners encountered several language-related difficulties when attempting to paraphrase, such as inadequate understanding of the source text and the lack of vocabulary to use when paraphrasing.This paper provides insights into EFL learners' paraphrasing abilities and suggests some implications as to what EFL teachers should focus on to help less experienced student writers improve their paraphrasing skills.
This paper explores the complexities of developing and delivering English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pre-departure programs.We reflect on experiences of co-teaching in a Lao PDR based program for students planning to undertake tertiary studies in New Zealand or Australia.Taking a sociocultural perspective, we examine the way that the Lao pre-departure program aims to attend to the particularities of both local and target contexts and to facilitate student adaptation to the chosen institution and discipline.The program takes a participatory approach to EAP and the broader acculturation processes, making space for individual student voice as part of the modeling and scaffolding of academic English.Based on this experience of transnational collaboration in development and delivery, we discuss critical issues of relevance to the planning and delivery of EAP pre-departure courses and productive international study experiences.
This paper presents an exploratory study of using the genre-based approach in teaching a writing module focusing on writing letters for first-year English majors at a university in Vietnam.The aim of the study was to collect data from questionnaires and test results with a focus on learning the students' perceptions of this approach in learning the letter genre and what they benefitted from the most from this approach.The analysis reveals that under genre-based instruction the students' awareness and understanding of the features of the letter types were noticeably enhanced.The results indicate that for low-level learners organization of ideas, awareness of context and paralinguistic features were the issues they could gain control over upon the instructions.However, linguistic resources including grammar and vocabulary still remained problems that need a longer and more focused approach to develop.The findings also highlight the value of L1 background knowledge in learning writing in a foreign language.
Numerous studies have highlighted the influence of leisure reading habits on second language proficiency. The present study investigates the relationship between students’ reading habits, vocabulary and writing performance. A reading survey, productive vocabulary test and writing test were administered to 33 university English language learners (ELLs) students in Malaysia. The results indicate that participants had not received a lot of support for reading from their English teachers at elementary schools or at secondary level and had limited access to reading resources. The university students in the study were aware of the value of reading in English, albeit spending a considerable amount of time on the Internet compared to reading off-line. More than half of the participants agreed that they would read something if it was recommended by their lecturers. In addition, the present study also found that participants had not acquired the adequate vocabulary size required for tertiary studies. The findings have important implications for English language practitioners both at school and tertiary levels.
Among local educationists and Western-born educators teaching in Asia, there is a widely perceived belief in an Asian learning culture as one that emphasises literacy education and the limited practicality of knowledge acquisition.Often this allegedly established Asian learning culture is associated with the unquestioned authority of teachers as the purveyor of knowledge, resulting in the predominant role of rote learning, repetition and teacher-centred learning.The prevalence of this view is most evident among those who are relatively novice to language education industry, as one coming from a Western country teaching in Vietnam, for example, would generally assume more of the implementation of teacher-centred learning.But this view might indicate political naivety to the local educational context.While to some extent the traditional belief in Asian learning culture might hold true, there have been widespread contestations to the belief for its generalisation of cultures (McKay, 2002), failure in recognising differences between language classroom contexts (Kubota,
Building on a research trend that unravels the relationship between English language and employability (e.g., Erling, 2014;Hamid, 2015), this study explored 617 Vietnamese students and six lecturers' perspectives regarding university students' English as an employability skill.A mixed method was employed to collect both survey and interview data in three major universities in North Vietnam.The data investigated students' levels of confidence, in relation to both their English competency and career skills performed in English.The results indicated students' high level of uncertainty in both their English and career skills performed in English, which corresponded to their insufficient English for employability purposes.Specifically, over 80% of the students indicated their uncertainty about seeking employment that required English.The study provides recommendations for improving pedagogies, policies and practices to promote English as an employable skill for the multifaceted demands of the global job market.
This paper investigates an effective way to develop academic writing skills of 4th year students of at a university in Myanmar in using peer reviewing and a guided peer-feedback process.A comparison was made to determine the effectiveness between the instructor feedback and peer feedback implementation based on the students' revision work.Twenty students' papers became the focus of four different types of written feedback: Error Identification, Error Correction, Descriptive Comment and Critical Comment.Data on the number of feedback on the students' final assignments and final paper were collected to study the feedback implementation rate and types of feedback students incorporated into their revision work.It was found that peer feedback effect had greater on error identification than instructor feedback.This is despite a significantly higher revision rate of instructor feedback on error correction.This study outlines some implications for second language writing on providing effective peer feedback in Myanmar and other contexts in the ASEAN region.
Extensive Reading (ER) is most commonly used in TEFL/TESL practices to improve a variety of specific specialized reading skills, and sometimes even writing skills; however, ER is seldom associated with enhancing speaking skills. This paper explains a classroom practice where Oral Book Reports were designed and used as an additional component to standard ER work with the intent to strengthen students’ spoken output performance, speaking confidence, and oral fluency. Discussion of mid-course and post-course student selfreflective open-ended questionnaires reveals that incorporating Oral Book Report components into ER work not only increases enjoyment and improvement of L2 reading, but also successfully enhances students’ selfidentified improvements in spoken output performance, speaking confidence, and oral fluency. Adding oral components to non-speaking based ER practices can benefit L2 learners in Asia since EFL classes and courses throughout Asia often lack adequate focus on developing L2 oral fluency.
Although dictation is seen as being a useful exercise for assessment and progress in language learning, there has been little research into the use of spaced dictation.The focus of this research was assessing the effect of limiting cognitive burden with spaced dictation exercises as classroom activities.Participants attended pre-and post-tests to evaluate gains in listening ability from a four-week intervention activity of spaced dictation exercises.Results were measured by using the number of content words, function words, and affective state of participants at the beginning and end of the intervention.The results demonstrated that spaced dictation was efficacious for improving listening ability, motivation, and participant feeling of achievement.The authors concluded that spaced dictation was effective in increasing student ability to decode and identify linguistic features due to the decrease of cognitive burden, which allowed greater processing of aural input.Contrary to the perception of dictation activities as a grueling task for learners, a large majority of participants reported being greatly satisfied with the tasks that were conducted.These findings aid educators and researchers interested in the efficacy and results of dictation exercises in second language acquisition (SLA).
Education does not occur in a vacuum -it is the product of the context in which it takes place.Language education is of no exception.In the context of Asia, a common discourse relating to English language education is its presumed relationship with Asian learning culture.As a general term, Asian learning culture has come to mean the pervasive traditional view on the importance of literary education and the little value placed on knowledge acquisition for practical purposes.The authority of teachers as the purveyor of knowledge is usually unquestioned, as is the role of students as the mere recipients of knowledge.Corollaries of this perspective are the focus on literacy and the prevalence of teacher-centred learning.Rote learning, repetition and focus on the instruction given by the teacher are by way of implications important features of this allegedly established Asian cultural learning perspective.
This study investigated the effects of online extensive reading in a syntactically parsed text format compared to regular block format on speed, retention, and proficiency in English reading among Japanese learners of English.A syntactically parsed text format breaks sentences of a text into smaller groups of words or chunks with the intention of increasing the ease of reading.For one academic year, 289 participants at a public university in Japan read English texts of their choosing online in either a parsed format or regular block format.The results showed no significant differences between formats on any of the variables of interest.This suggests that reading in a parsed text format neither hinders nor enhances reading ability or proficiency growth among EFL learners whose first language is linguistically distant from English.Evidence emerged, however, that the reading itself had promoted a significant increase in reading proficiency for both groups.Extensive reading, or the reading of a large quantity of freely chosen texts at or below one's current reading proficiency level, is an effective means of improving English reading proficiency for learners of English as second or foreign language (Nakanishi, 2015).Unfortunately, traditional paper-based extensive reading programs have been difficult to implement in most EFL contexts due to the vast number and variety of reading materials such programs require (Davis, 1995).However, with the steady rise of smartphone and internet use in emerging economies across Asia (Poushter, 2016), extensive reading can now be done online at little or no cost (Lin, 2014), making it a more viable option for a widening range of EFL contexts.At the same time, viewing texts through a browser rather than off of a printed page allows readers to change the font size, page width and other aspects of the text's format.This new level of control over how a text is displayed raises the question of whether texts could be made more readable through systematically altering their format in some way.Indeed, basic changes in font size, white space, and positioning of a digital text can affect reading performance for both native and non-native readers (Bernard, Chaparro, Mills, & Halcomb, 2003;Chaparro, Baker, Shaikh, Hull, & Brady, 2004;Soleimani & Mohammadi, 2012).Going beyond conventional format considerations, a number of applications have appeared online which attempt to enhance the readability of digital texts by dramatically altering the way those texts are displayed.One such application is LiveInk.com'sWebClipRead (Walker Reading Technologies, Inc., 2016), which uses natural language processing algorithms to display English texts in a syntactically parsed format where sentences are broken into smaller syntactic groups or chunks to improve the ease of reading (Warschauer, Park, & Walker, 2011).
Language Education in Asia (LEiA) exists to offer regional authors a place to participate in the English language education research community and share their research, teaching practices, and commentaries.However, each year, the LEiA Editorial Board
This study provides an insight into how EFL students in a specific English learning context design their responsive turns in discussion tasks from a conversation analysis (CA) perspective.It aims to contribute to the body of knowledge on student talk in in-class interactions in the ASEAN region and to that on English language teaching pedagogies for developing interactional competence in general and classroom interactional competence in particular.Four emerging themes in responsive turns are analysed: the repetition of lexical and structural resources between a task-guided question turn and its responsive turn; the dominant pattern of opinionreasons in responsive turns; gaze disengagement for independent word-search; and wordsearch through thinking aloud in the L1 -Vietnamese.
This study explores the effectiveness of communication strategies (CSs) through pro-active listening (PAL) comprehension activities for students to actively negotiate and co-construct meaning in an English as a lingua franca (ELF)informed pedagogy.Data was collected from fifty-three Japanese students in classes at the Center for English as a Lingua Franca (CELF) at Tamagawa University.Quantitative and qualitative methods were employed.Responses to a pre-and post-questionnaire on the perceived effectiveness of CS use, transcribed speech collected during PAL comprehension activities, and written reflections by students were analyzed.The findings suggest that an ELFinformed pedagogy of explicit teaching of CSs increases students' perceived ability to use CSs effectively in PAL activities.ELF pedagogy should incorporate opportunities for students to explicitly learn and use CSs independently to become competent international communicators among other ELF speakers.The number of non-native users of English worldwide vastly exceeds that of native speakers (Graddol, 2003).This discrepancy is expected to grow, resulting in 1.2 billion non-native users (p.163) and 433 million native speakers (p.156) by 2050.Given this context, it is important for educators to realize that their non-native English speaking (NNES) students may find themselves in various work or social situations requiring communication with people from other countries who are not native speakers of English.English language educators should steer their approach in the direction of English as a lingua franca (ELF), defined by Seidlhofer (2011) as the "use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice, and often the only option" (p. 7).Tamagawa University's Center for English as a Lingua Franca (CELF), the first such center in Japan, designed its program to promote an ELF setting, as it recognizes the potential future need Language Education in Asia, 2016, 7(2), 67-87.https://doi.org/10.5746/LEiA/16/V7/I2/A02/Dimoski_Yujobo_ImaiResearch Dimoski, Yujobo, and Imai -Page 68for students to use ELF and interact with a variety of English users.The CELF also employs NNES teachers with multilingual and multicultural backgrounds to promote an ELF setting.CELF Program students have rich opportunities to interact with these teachers in formal classroom settings and informal one-on-one tutoring sessions.The CELF's goal for ELF proficiency of students is not to reach native English norms, but rather, to achieve "competence in a repertoire of English varieties" (Canagarajah, 2006, p. 229).The CELF finds ELF-informed pedagogy a preferred method to develop an ELF-oriented curriculum which involves raising an awareness of the use of language and the negotiation and accommodation of linguistic form and meaning.This may include, according to ELF researchers (Björkman, 2014;Kaur, 2014;Wen, 2012), incorporating communication strategies (CSs).Few formal studies have been done on ELF pedagogy.Choi and Jeon (2016) claimed that thus far, "ELF pedagogy has been mostly discussed at only a conceptual level and pedagogical research is scarce" (p. 1).Therefore, the authors were motivated to research the effectiveness of explicit teaching of CSs through pro-active listening (PAL) comprehension activities.Data was collected by a questionnaire administered pre-and post-CS training, analysis of transcribed dialogic speech, and written student reflections to determine the effect explicit teaching of CSs through PAL activities had on student perceptions of improvement in their communication skills.This paper consists of five main parts: the literature review and research questions, methodology, major findings, discussion, and conclusion. Literature Review ELF and CSsSeidlhofer (2011) claimed that in ELF interactions, the primary focus is on communicative efficiency and what people actually do with the language they have learned.Of importance is how one communicates in English as an additional language, rather than setting native speaker competence as the target, and analyzes ELF interactions of high functional load around, for instance, pronunciation, through various strategies and processes to achieve mutual understanding to co-construct meaning.One of the ways to co-construct meaning is through the use of CSs.Examples of CSs discussed in ELF literature include, but are not limited to, accommodation, repetition, nonverbal strategies, hypothesis forming (Cogo & Dewey, 2012), seeking clarification, checking for understanding, paraphrasing, and being explicit (Kaur, 2014).Although there is much alignment between CSs in ELF and non-ELF interactions, achievement or compensatory strategies (e.g., using circumlocution, approximation, or gestures) are more prevalent in ELF settings (Björkman, 2014).Björkman, who categorized CSs into self-initiated and other-initiated types, found that in ELF settings, the most frequently occurring self-initiated CSs were explicitness strategies and comprehension checks, while in other-initiated CSs, confirmation checks and clarification requests were the most common.This suggests "speakers in ELF settings do pro-active work for communicative effectiveness" (p.129).However, discussion of CSs in the literature has focused, in large part, on ELF users (see
Learner autonomy is one of the keys to successful language learning.Although Asian learners have been described as rather less autonomous compared with their Western counterparts, any learner can be autonomous if adequate support is provided.This study investigated the perceptions of Japanese university EFL learners in developing learner autonomy and explored how teachers can guide their learners to be more autonomous.An online questionnaire and semistructured interviews were conducted with both lower and higher proficiency learners.The study results show that learners of different proficiency levels have varying needs to enhance their learner autonomy.However, regardless of their current proficiency and autonomy levels, the participants expressed the need for teacher support to increase their autonomy levels.Based on their needs, this study offers possible autonomy enhancing classroom practices that are level appropriate.Since its contribution to successful language has been widely accepted, for some decades now enhancing learner autonomy (LA) has been a major theme in language education.However, what is frequently said is that LA is rather a Western concept, and not suitable for Asian contexts (Sakai, Takagi, & Chu, 2010).Nevertheless, Asian students can demonstrate levels of LA as high as those of their Western counterparts if adequate LA training is provided (Ahmadi & Mahdavi-Zafarghandi, 2013;Littlewood, 1999).Nunan (2003) supports this view, stating that autonomy and dependence exist on a continuum and are not completely distinct constructs; degrees and levels of autonomy exist.Bearing this idea in mind, regardless of the cultural contexts in which learners learn, teachers can play a significant role in guiding learners to be more autonomous (Chan, Spratt, & Humphreys, 2002).Although a large body of literature exists regarding LA, research that focuses on LA and proficiency levels in a Japanese university EFL context is still scarce.Based on the premise that Asian learners can be autonomous, this study focuses on examining the LA perceptions of Japanese university EFL learners and aims at exploring ways through which teachers can encourage learners to attain higher levels of LA.In this paper, the perceptions of lower and higher proficiency learners in developing autonomy will be explored, and then practical ideas for promoting LA will be outlined so that teachers can encourage both lower and higher
About nine years ago, I was working on a textbook project with a colleague when he asked me to proofread a few papers as a favor.I proofread
As more attention is given to the subject of global Englishes, consideration of the different methods by which English is taught has become more important.Across Asia, increasingly teachers have turned to culturally specific textbook design, yet few scholars have conducted studies that demonstrate the practical effectiveness of such texts in Asian contexts.To bridge this research gap, we conducted a study wherein students in two English reading classes at a Japanese university were given the same readings, with passages reflecting either Japanese or foreign cultural contexts.Through pre-and post-lesson tests, we gauged the effectiveness of culturally familiar proper nouns on vocabulary recall and content comprehension.Overall, we demonstrate that culturally familiar contexts in EFL study might have a positive impact on language learning for students.
