The quest for inclusive and contextually relevant English Language Teaching (ELT) curricula is a priority for higher education globally. This phenomenological study examines the lived experiences of expert teachers involved in ELT curriculum design and implementation policies in Nepal. Through unstructured interviews, participants revealed dissatisfaction with top-down curriculum processes, insufficient teacher involvement, and unclear guidelines. The study underscores challenges such as curricula heavily focused on global competitiveness, limited integration of local cultures and extracurricular activities, and inadequate support for technology driven courses. Key issues include balancing cultural relevance with global competency, resource constraints, and outdated infrastructure. Findings highlight the necessity of a context driven approach, involving educators in decision-making, comprehensive needs analyses, and innovative teaching and evaluation methods. These reforms are critical for transforming ELT curricula to address local needs while preparing students for global challenges. Insights from this study offer implications for similar EFL contexts worldwide seeking culturally rooted, globally adaptable educational policies.
This study investigates how speaking demotivation is experienced and interpreted by Iranian English as a Foreign Language learners and teachers through the lens of Self-Determination Theory (SDT), with particular attention to autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Thirty participants (15 learners and 15 teachers) from two private language institutes in Iran took part in semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using theory-informed thematic analysis. The findings indicate that speaking demotivation emerges as a contextually mediated process shaped by the interaction between learners’ psychological experiences and instructional conditions. Learners primarily emphasised affective and relational factors, including lack of social support, negative classroom climate, and limited agency, whereas teachers foregrounded structural constraints such as proficiency gaps, exam-oriented practices, and limited opportunities for authentic language use. Notable divergences between teacher and learner perspectives suggest misalignment in how demotivating experiences are recognised and addressed in classroom practice. The study contributes to the literature by providing a theoretically grounded account of speaking demotivation that connects psychological needs with classroom conditions. It also highlights the importance of designing need-supportive speaking environments and increasing teacher awareness of the affective and agentic dimensions of learner engagement.
Teachers’ beliefs play a critical role in shaping how AI tools are interpreted and used in instruction, yet these beliefs have rarely been systematically assessed in university language teaching. This study aims to develop and validate a measurement instrument for assessing teachers’ beliefs about AI-assisted instruction, grounded in the Intelligent-Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge framework. A sequential, two-wave quantitative design was employed, with data from 508 teachers used for exploratory factor analysis (EFA), followed by confirmatory validation using an independent sample of 487 teachers. Data analyses were conducted using SPSS for EFA, AMOS for confirmatory factor analysis and Mplus for measurement invariance testing. The results supported a reliable five-factor belief structure: AI knowledge beliefs, AI content beliefs, AI pedagogy beliefs, AI integration beliefs and AI ethics beliefs. The scale demonstrated satisfactory reliability, construct validity and stability. Additionally, measurement invariance results indicated that the scale functioned equivalently across gender, teaching experience and educational background. This study provides a psychometrically robust tool for future empirical inquiry and enhances understanding of language teacher beliefs in AI-assisted instruction.
Studies on oral corrective feedback (OCF) have been lately tilted toward examining preferences for correction motivated by the belief that they are connected to emotional comfort, learning motivation and outcomes. Some have compared teachers’ preferences with learners’ expectations to find the mismatches between the two. Others have compared teachers’ beliefs with their practice to see how beliefs are reflected in practice. Despite the numerous studies, there seem to exist considerable gaps in the literature that merit consideration. Given the significance of studying OCF preferences, the present study presents a critical systematic review of the studies on corrective preferences to uncover the gaps. For this purpose, scientific databases, including Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect and JSTOR with 16 related journals, were searched to identify the related studies in the date range of 1995 to 2025. This was to ensure inclusion of the most relevant and high-quality research studies published in well-established scientific databases and journals. After screening the identified studies based on the inclusion criteria, they were subjected to MMAT quality appraisal analysis; 34 studies were finally selected and subjected to thematic analysis to identify the major trend of the studies and their conceptual and methodological limitations. Methodologically, the results pointed to heterogeneous definitions and interchangeable use of different terms and a need to present unified definitions. The results also highlighted the need for a more dynamic approach to examining preferences and their reflection in practice. Conceptually, the findings revealed a lack of conclusive evidence for the value (to be) assigned by teachers to learners’ preferences and under-investigated misconceptions/unawareness about learners’ preferences. The results also point to the need for building a connection between research and practice to help develop more refined corrective beliefs and, consequently, practice. Implications for language teaching practitioners, researchers and teacher education programs are finally discussed.
Productive vocabulary is widely recognized as an essential component of second language proficiency, yet it remains one of the most challenging aspects of lexical development. This study investigated whether continuation writing could enhance learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge. In a longitudinal experiment, 75 Chinese EFL learners were assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. The experimental group completed a continuation writing practice every 2 weeks, followed by a free writing post-test 1 week later; the control group completed independent writing practices and took the same post-tests. A total of 525 essays were collected. Indices of lexical density, diversity, and sophistication were extracted using TAALED and TAALES, and analyzed through linear mixed-effects models and repeated-measures correlation analyses. Results showed that while both task types improved learners’ lexical density and diversity, continuation writing had distinct advantages in promoting lexical sophistication. Compared with the control group, learners in the experimental group used more advanced words, with significant gains observed across successive practice sessions. Moreover, repeated-measures correlation analyses revealed stronger interrelations among the lexical measures in the experimental group. Overall, continuation writing, as a novel reading-to-write task, proved effective in fostering rapid and coordinated growth across multiple dimensions of productive vocabulary.
Web-based peer learning (WPL) is widely recognized as effectively complementing students’ learning activities. However, its role in students’ textbook use, which is an important aspect of students’ knowledge construction, is still unknown, particularly with respect to pre-class textbook use. To fill this knowledge gap, this qualitative case study explored WPL’s role in pre-class textbook use (i.e., textbooks used before in-class instruction of a new text) of 15 students enrolled in an English-as-a-foreign-language reading course at a university in China. A thematic analysis of multiple data resources (e.g., interviews with students and students’ web-based activities) collected over a semester was conducted. The results showed that in addition to improving their reading literacy, the students’ WPL helped them retain the content learned from their pre-class textbook use, contributing to their continued motivation for consuming and re-consuming new texts. WPL also helped the students gain an in-depth, comprehensive understanding of the text, overcoming individual knowledge limitations. WPL’s positive role was found to be specifically a result of its technological affordances, which assisted the students in synchronously/asynchronously and collaboratively conducting the multidimensional deconstruction of texts on the web platform, motivating them to visit and revisit the textbook content. However, the results showed that the students’ use of WPL as a follow-up during their pre-class textbook use was initially constrained, although this became negligible as their knowledge increased through using the platform as well as through teacher assistance. The results indicated that WPL was useful in promoting positive experiences in constructing knowledge from pre-class textbook use and reuse, which increased as the students became accustomed to peer and teacher support. These results have implications for textbook research and materials development, especially in language teaching contexts.
Practicum is an integral part of initial teacher education, functioning as a bridge between theory and practice. In today’s globalized context, practicums have extended beyond national boundaries into transnational settings. This study examined the experiences of 12 Vietnamese pre-service TESOL teachers during their transnational practicum at a university in Thailand. Data were collected through four focus group interviews (pre-practicum and post-practicum) with the pre-service teachers. Findings reveal that the practicum catalyzed professional development and intercultural learning. Participants encountered tensions between theory and practice as well as imagination and reality, but addressed these through contextual adaptation and pedagogical flexibility. Their transnational experiences also contributed to the initial shaping of their language teacher identity. The paper concludes with implications for research and practice in the design and implementation of transnational practicums in second language teacher education.
This study examined the components of writing strategies employed in the story continuation writing task (SCWT) and investigated how these strategies related to different aspects of writing performance. Specifically, it adopted factor analyses to validate the strategy subscale of Ye et al.’s (2021) writing performance questionnaire and used structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore the relationship between strategy use and writing performance, as measured by the holistic writing scores and 11 textual indices. The data comprised 330 questionnaire responses and 330 SCWT essays produced by the same group of high school English as a Foreign Language learners selected through convenience sampling. Factor analyses identified three task-specific strategy components: reading_to_select , reading_to_organize , and content_developing . These components represent learners’ alignment with the reading passage at the linguistic, discoursal, and situational levels and correspond to the processes of imitation, extension, and creation as conceptualized in the xu -argument. SEM results indicated that content_developing was the only strategy that exerted a significant positive effect on writing scores and enhanced semantic alignment. These findings suggest that the SCWT entails the skill of alignment, particularly with respect to learners’ ability to creatively extend the storyline presented in the reading passage. The pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) provides widely used proficiency labels, but these labels do not specify how grammar is materially distributed, sustained, or reweighted across school textbooks. This study profiles vertical grammar salience in Taiwan's CEFR-referencing K-12 English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbook ecology by examining the relationship between English Grammar Profile (EGP) benchmark placement and textbook distributional salience. The corpus consisted of 57 ministry-approved student books from multiple textbook series across primary, junior-secondary, and senior-secondary stages, comprising 234,134 cleaned English tokens. An EGP-derived inventory of A1-B2 grammar points (GPs; N = 602) was consolidated, operationalized as corpus-queryable patterns, and searched in the textbook corpus. Frequencies were normalized as frequencies per million words, transformed as ln(FPM + 1), and standardized as z scores to estimate distributional input intensity. Two complementary clustering analyses were conducted. Level-based clustering identified within-level salience bands for A1, A2, B1, and B2 GPs, whereas stage-based clustering examined how the attested inventory was redistributed within each school stage. Dispersion across books and persistence across stages were used as interpretive complements to frequency-based intensity. The results showed that 12.9% of the benchmarked A1-B2 inventory was unattested in the corpus, that all four CEFR levels contained internal salience stratification, and that senior-secondary materials displayed a compressed distribution in which the largest group of A1-B2 items fell into the lowest salience band. This senior-stage pattern is interpreted cautiously as possible selective recycling of lower-level grammar, while also allowing for the alternative possibility that A1-B2 items recede within more advanced textual input beyond the study's inventory. The study contributes a transparent, distribution-sensitive framework for diagnostic review of CEFR-referencing textbook systems. Its findings index materials-based availability and distributional prominence, not instructional salience, classroom enactment, or learner acquisition.
This study investigates the effectiveness of multisensory learning (MSL) compared to traditional (TRD) teaching methods in enhancing English vocabulary acquisition among English as a foreign language (EFL) kindergarten-aged learners in Amman, Jordan. A total of 49 children were divided equally into two groups: one receiving traditional instruction and the other exposed to multisensory techniques, including visual aids, auditory input, specific activities, and experiences. Pre- and post-tests were used to assess vocabulary retrieval through two tasks. Descriptive statistics revealed that the MSL group outperformed the TRD group in both tasks, with higher mean scores and reduced variability, indicating more consistent learning outcomes. An independent sample t -test confirmed that these differences were statistically significant. The findings indicate that multisensory instruction not only enhances vocabulary acquisition but also promotes enthusiasm in learning among young EFL learners. In light of Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory (DCT), learning is enhanced when information is presented in both verbal and non-verbal forms, activating the brain’s dual cognitive subsystems through visual aids, physical activities, and tactile experiences. The study highlights the value of incorporating multisensory approaches in early EFL education to facilitate equitable vocabulary development. The study concludes with pedagogical implications and recommendations for further research.
Second language (L2) classroom is a dynamic and evolving space shaped by ongoing interactions between teachers and students. Understanding how these dynamic interactions unfold from a psychological perspective is critical for advancing L2 learning and teaching. This study contributes to this endeavour by examining the reciprocal relationship between teacher enthusiasm and L2 student classroom engagement as well as the mediating role of perceived learning value in this reciprocal relationship. Data were collected from 317 English as a foreign language learners in Vietnam at three time points across an academic semester and analysed by means of random-intercept cross-lagged panel modelling. Results revealed that teacher enthusiasm and L2 student engagement were reciprocally related over time, and this reciprocity was mediated by students’ perceived value of L2 learning tasks. These mediated reciprocal relations remained robust even after controlling for prior levels of each construct. The findings highlight the co-regulated and cyclical nature of L2 classroom affective-motivational climate and offer practical implications for L2 pedagogy.
This study investigates the impact of an extensive reading program on the English learning motivation of young middle-school learners of English as a foreign language, utilizing the self-determination theory framework. Eighty-one Grade 7 students participated in a semester-long extensive reading program designed to provide supportive conditions by allowing students to select reading materials that matched their proficiency levels and personal interests. Employing a mixed-methods approach, quantitative data were collected through pre- and post-motivation questionnaires measuring intrinsic motivation, external regulation, introjected regulation, and identified regulation, whereas qualitative data were obtained from student interviews and teacher focus groups. This study identified a multi-factor structure of motivation. It also revealed a significant increase in overall motivation, with intrinsic motivation, identified regulation, introjection regulation, and external regulation notably enhanced. Qualitative findings identified key factors contributing to motivational changes, including heightened interest in English classes, English subject, and English language; a greater sense of achievement; improved academic performance; and increased social interactions during reading activities. The study confirms extensive reading as an effective approach for fostering motivation of learning English and suggests its broader implementation among middle school learners of English as a foreign language.
This study examines how instructional design shapes the development of oral communication strategies in an 18-week English-as-a-foreign-language speaking course, at a time when generative artificial intelligence is often assumed to enhance speaking performance. All three classes worked with the same curriculum and speaking tasks. One class learned through a BOPPPS (Bridge-In, Objective, Pre-Assessment, Participatory Learning, Post-Assessment, and Summary) based sequence in which students prepared ideas, participated in guided speaking activities, and reviewed their performance, with each cycle including a stage where they generated their own content before using ChatGPT to refine it. A second class received regular teacher guidance and completed the same tasks, but their use of ChatGPT was self-directed and not part of a fixed sequence (the artificial intelligence-flex condition). A third class covered the same material through teacher-supported face-to-face interaction without artificial intelligence (the traditional condition). Learners completed the Oral Communication Strategy Inventory at the beginning and end of the semester and provided reflections on how their course format influenced their speaking. The findings show a clear hierarchy in strategic development. The BOPPPS based class demonstrated the strongest gains, especially in negotiation for meaning, fluency regulation, and accuracy monitoring. The traditional class showed moderate improvements, particularly in nonverbal and social-affective strategies. The artificial intelligence-flex class displayed the smallest increases, a pattern reflected in learners’ descriptions of artificial intelligence-driven exchanges involving fewer occasions to plan, clarify, or monitor meaning. Overall, the results indicate that strategic growth is driven primarily by instructional design, with artificial intelligence contributing meaningfully only when situated within a structured pedagogical frame.
This study examined the use of artificial intelligence tools, which have garnered significant attention in recent years, in the assessment and evaluation processes of language education. For this purpose, student essays were scored by Turkish middle school teachers and artificial intelligence tools both with and without the use of a rubric, and the findings were evaluated based on generalizability theory. Additionally, the research findings were shared with participants to gather qualitative data, which were analysed using the inductive thematic analysis method to support the research results. The findings revealed that in evaluations conducted without a rubric, teachers were limited in their ability to distinguish individual differences and demonstrated low scoring consistency. In contrast, artificial intelligence tools were more effective in distinguishing individual differences and exhibited high consistency. In evaluations conducted using a rubric, scoring consistency increased in both groups, although, as in the first evaluation, artificial intelligence tools demonstrated a higher level of consistency. Regarding the research findings, teachers expressed that individual biases, mood, and professional experiences influenced their scoring processes and emphasized the potential of rubrics and artificial intelligence-supported feedback systems for achieving more consistent results. Artificial intelligence tools, on the other hand, highlighted their independence from subjective factors but stressed the need for more diverse and generalizable datasets to further enhance their evaluation capacities.
Shadowing is a technique that has been shown to significantly improve English language learners’ (ELLs) oral fluency and comprehensibility. However, previous research showing dramatic gains over time for ELLs has varied in design, with some studies including control groups and others not, thus complicating interpretations of efficacy. These studies have also been conducted in English and other languages with attention to advanced-level ELLs and beginning-level ELLs. Additional research is needed to provide insight into the effect of shadowing on intermediate learners, as well as using treatment and control groups to get a more accurate picture of identified changes in fluency, comprehensibility, accentedness, and imitative ability. A ten-week quasi-experimental study of text shadowing practice was conducted with intermediate-level adult ELLs studying in a large western university’s intensive English program (IEP). Speech samples from the pretest and posttest were rated by non-expert native English-speaking raters for fluency, comprehensibility, accentedness, and the quality of imitative speech on nine-point Likert scales, as has been used in other pronunciation studies. A repeated-measures ANOVA showed that all participants improved significantly from the pretest to posttest in fluency and comprehensibility, with a reduction in their accentedness. While raw gain scores tended to be higher in the treatment group than the control group, the analysis showed no statistical difference between the groups in any of the four measures. The treatment group participants did share positive qualitative feedback regarding shadowing, emphasizing the value of this dynamic activity in an oral communication curriculum.
Globalization has revolutionized translation training, and English education policies have encouraged more practical, innovative, and, in this regard, oriented teaching approaches. This study investigates the multi-level effects of English education policies on translation training at the national (macro), institutional (meso), and classroom (micro) levels, with particular attention to how policy influences the adoption of innovative instructional models and students’ perceived learning-related outcomes. Using a mixed-methods design, qualitative data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 78 respondents, including policymakers, administrators, instructors, and students, whereas quantitative data were collected through a survey of 436 translation students (undergraduate and postgraduate). Qualitative data were analyzed using NVivo, and SPSS and SmartPLS were used to analyze quantitative data. The results indicate that translation training (β = .373, p < .001) is significantly associated with English education policies. Moreover, translation training is positively related to innovative training models (β = .302), career readiness (β = .268), perceived training quality (β = .318), practical skill acquisition (β = .292), and intercultural competence (β = .285), all at p < .001. These findings illustrate the focal point of translation training as one of the critical mechanisms through which policy is connected to various perceived academic and professional outcomes. University cooperation and pedagogical development at the institutional and classroom levels are also associated with perceived quality and applicability of translation training programs. Its uniqueness lies in that it combines several dimensions of outcomes in one analytical framework and provides a clear understanding of policy–practice alignment. The results suggest that translating students need effective policy–practice integration to be associated with students’ perceived preparedness for global professional contexts.
