Artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as chatbots have become an inseparable part of education with the advancements in large language models. As more studies have been conducted, researchers and practitioners may have challenges in finding the gaps in the literature and/or deciding on which tools are beneficial or not for instruction. These challenges can be addressed with bibliometric reviews that can provide a comprehensive overview of the current trends in AI use in ELT. This study addresses that need with a novel methodology by examining the ERIC and Scopus databases. Using computational data analysis tools and natural language processing, we examined 856 journal articles and provided several trends, such as keywords, the most cited papers, subject matrices, and geolocations of the articles, as well as several implications for practitioners. A key result is that the research on the use of AI tools is increasing substantially, with a clear focus on teaching methods and writing instruction. Our study offers valuable information for the researchers and practitioners who seek techniques to integrate AI tools into language instruction.

Information and communication technologies have developed rapidly; however, studies focusing on what is both pedagogical and digital are lacking. Although there are studies that focus on 21st-century digital literacies and sociolinguistic aspects individually, there are few studies that study digital literacies, such as media literacy, in relation to sociolinguistic attitudes. Accordingly, this paper examined the relationship between sociolinguistic attitudes and media literacy. The participants were 306 pre-service English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers. The data were collected via the Sociolinguistic Attitudes Test and Media Literacy Skills Scale, which were preceded by audio recordings taken from the British Library. Descriptive statistics and correlation analysis were undertaken to analyze the data. The analysis revealed that the participants had an undecided attitude towards the non-native variety of English (i.e., Pakistani English) in focus, yet they had a high level of media literacy. A lack of significant correlation between sociolinguistic attitudes and media literacy was also revealed. The findings demonstrated that digital literacies may not lend themselves to sociolinguistic phenomena directly. This implies that further research regarding potential variables, including moderating and mediating variables, may clarify the relationship between digital skills and sociolinguistic attitudes.

This special issue aims to build on and extend current intercultural and transcultural communication research that has examined issues of language, culture, and power in higher education institutions, formal and institutional policies, and classroom practices in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The special issue is timely as it provides a range of current investigations that serve as a significant resource for intercultural and transcultural communication researchers and policymakers at a time when English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) programs, particularly in the MENA region, are receiving substantial attention. As a collection of empirical studies situated in diverse national contexts, this special issue also aims to address the need for empirically grounded work in the region. Hence, the collection of articles in this issue aims to shed light on the current intercultural and transcultural communication knowledge base, views, policies, and practices in the MENA region to pave the way for reforms in institutional policies and conceptual and empirically informed research recommendations in relation to intercultural communication education.

This study aims to investigate the mode-divergent practices of pre-service teachers in an online context. Firstly, 16 h of classroom interaction is analyzed via Conversation Analysis utilizing the Classroom Interactional Competence framework. Then, the translanguaging pedagogy perspective complements this analysis by focusing on linguistic, social, and psychological aspects. The conversation-analytical findings demonstrate the failures in constructive alignment, and an inordinate amount of wasted time with no satisfying results has been observed. It is shown that translanguaging pedagogy may support the creative, critical, and strategic utilization of bilingual students' entire repertoires in classroom practices. Overall, the analysis demonstrates how translanguaging pedagogies can inform mode-divergent practices in classrooms by which teachers' interactional competence may be improved.

Living in an intensifying technological and digital environment makes people more engaged with smartphones and related internet platforms. Alongside its highly debated advantages and disadvantages, modern smartphone use is a global phenomenon which has been mainly debated within the context of cultural and technology relationships which also influence cross-cultural activities. Focusing on one of the modern factors (i.e., smartphone use) that impact human behavior, this article presents the development of a measure of the Multidimensional Smartphone Use Scale (MSUS) and tests its factor structure to offer a scale that covers smartphone-related problems from a broader perspective. Using an online survey, a total of 514 participants took part in the current study. The scale was developed to measure a multidimensional conception of smartphone use-related problems and behavioral disorders including nomophobia, ringxiety, textiety, and phubbing which were supported with exploratory and confirmatory factors analyses. The MSUS indicated good internal consistency reliability ranging from α = .75 to α = .89. This article presents the preliminary evidence regarding the reliability and validity of the MSUS which can be used in a wide range of settings to measure maladaptive modes of smartphone use and related behaviors.

Given the scarcity of research focusing on pre-service teachers' research engagement, this paper embarks on a qualitative descriptive study about how a group of Turkish English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) pre-service teachers (PSTs) understand and conceptualize teacher research. Notably, this study addresses a significant gap in the existing literature, for it explores this issue using metaphor analysis, a method that has not been previously employed. Considering the potency of the use of metaphor analysis in revealing underlying beliefs, this study attempts to explore PSTs' perceived conceptions of reading and conducting research on their future engagement in and with teacher research through conceptual metaphors. The participants were Turkish EFL PSTs (N= 41) who had previously completed an undergraduate research methodology course and carried out small-scale research projects prior to data collection. Data were triangulated via three instruments: A survey, a metaphor completion task, and interviews. "Research" and "teacher research" metaphors were elicited via two metaphor prompts, namely "Research is like...because..." and "Teacher research is like...because...". Responses to closed -ended survey questions were analyzed by descriptive statistics whilst data coming from open-ended survey questions and interviews underwent inductive content analysis. Additionally, the metaphorical conceptions were analyzed by metaphor analysis. Findings illustrated that although PSTs considered research engagement valuable in terms of improving their pedagogical and content knowledge, they did not appear to focus much on personal or intellectual gains. Hence, these findings provide insights into how PSTs conceptualize teacher research following their exposure to research experiences. The implications are discussed focusing on providing implications for pre-service teacher training, and suggestions are made for further research in this field. (c) Association of Applied Linguistics. All rights reserved

Despite an increasing number of studies on pre-service teachers' digital literacy, there are few studies on pre-service English teachers, especially regarding samples, methodology, and including variables. Hence, this study recruits more participants from different institutions and studies the effects of 5 variables. The participants were 186 pre-service teachers. The quantitative data were collected via the Digital Literacy Scale and analyzed by Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 25.0 via independent samples t-test and one-way variance analysis. The qualitative data were collected via semi-structured interviews and analyzed by Descriptive Analysis. The findings showed that the participants had a medium to high level of digital literacy, while they reported higher levels in the interviews. The analysis of the survey indicated that the most used device and year of digital platform use had a significant effect on the participants’ digital literacy levels. The interview results combined with the survey implied that the vital point in digital literacy training is to ensure "learning how to exploit digital skills" rather than learning all the available tools, applications, and resources.

Distance education, also called distance learning, e-learning, and online learning, is a practice of teaching and learning in which teachers and learners are not in a closed class or room in person, but where education takes place through various new-media technologies and all parties (student–teacher, teacher-teacher, student–student) are able to communicate, interact and exchange information and emotions. Being on the agenda of educational science for a long time now and gaining further importance during COVID-19 lockdowns, both advantages (e.g., reducing social anxiety, and a flexible schedule) and disadvantages (lack of social interactivity, and miscommunication) of distance education are highly debated in the related literature. Therefore, this study, through a qualitative method (i.e., a case study design and semi-structured interviews), aims to analyse the opinions and experiences of academics regarding distance education and its applications. The participants consist of 36 lecturers working at 16 different Turkish universities selected by the purposeful sampling method (i.e., typical case sampling). The results suggest that the participants still have doubts about online distance education, and they mention both ups (ease of connection, and cost-effectiveness) and downs (lack of self-motivation, socialization, and the sense of isolation) of it. Nonetheless, none of the academics thinks distance education will replace an in-person learning environment in the near future. Thus, this study presents a general illustration of distance education activities through the views of Turkish academics and gives recommendations for future digital/distance/online learning activities and functionalities.

COPYRIGHT © 2023 Elyas, Atar, Curle and Rafi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Editorial: English medium instruction in the Middle East and North Africa

The professionalization of teachers has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, leading to increased interest in the training, working conditions, and status of educators. This study addresses this interest by examining the in-service education and training (INSET) needs of English as a foreign language teachers in Türkiye. Despite recognizing the importance of in-service interventions for teacher development, educators often express concerns about the shortcomings of existing INSET programs. Key themes and patterns are identified through a meta-synthesis of ten relevant studies conducted between 2010-2021, including methodology, language skills, technology use, instructional practices, classroom environment, and material development. The analysis employs content and thematic analysis methods, enhancing the understanding of effective in-service training for English as a foreign language teachers and contributing to broader discussions on educators' training, working conditions, and status. The findings underscore the significance of designing INSET programs that address specific teacher needs, promote the practical application of new methods, and foster collaboration between the Ministry of National Education and teacher educators for successful implementation.

This study aims to analyse the misconceptions, knowledge, and knowledge gaps of 176 Turkish pre-service English as a foreign language teachers about dyslexia which is a prevalent developmental disorder. The data were collected at eight different universities in Turkiye and analysed by SPSS 25.0 via descriptive statistics and the Kruskal Wallis Test, considering the participants’ scores on the Knowledge and Beliefs about Developmental Dyslexia scale. In addition to studying the knowledge base about dyslexia, the effect of the variables grade and gender was analysed. The results showed that most of the participants had flawed information about dyslexia, and lack of information was common. On the other hand, gender and grade did not have any significant effects. These findings indicate a need for wider awareness and formal education about dyslexia for pre-service English as foreign language teachers to create more inclusive classrooms.

This study aims to investigate the interactional organization of English teachers ' acknowledgment followed by type-specific questions. Shaping learners' contributions via acknowledgment and type-specific questions is argued to be a part of Classroom Interactional Competence as the 5th skill in language teaching. Hence, this two-step move is studied to achieve a broader understanding of teachers'interactional repertoire. This study has a qualitative design utilizing Conversation Analysis. Eighteen hours of classroom data from Newcastle University Corpus of Academic Spoken English make up the data. The findings suggest that teachers' acknowledgment followed by type -specific questions is an indicator of Classroom Interactional Competence, and it is highly dependent upon the task goal (i.e., a pedagogic repair). Contrary to the previous studies, the joint use of acknowledgment is found to shape students' previous turns by foregrounding achievement rather than closing a topic or indicating a transition. Then, this joint use allows teachers to acknowledge or approve a learner's utterance on one level while carrying out repair work on another level enabling them to operate on different levels in the complex realm of the classroom.

Media literacy is a critical component for digital citizenship; however, the nature of this relationship and the role of other mediating variables such as digital literacy in this relationship are not empirically tested in various contexts. This paper examined the effect of media literacy on digital citizenship and tested the mediating role of digital literacy in this relationship. Mediation model was applied to analyze the relationships between the variables, based on data from 555 pre-service teachers in Turkey. This study revealed a direct relationship between media literacy and digital citizenship. In addition, digital literacy partially mediated the effect of pre-service teachers’ media literacy levels on their digital citizenship. Results are discussed and implications for practitioners and recommendations for future research are offered.

Humour is a complex and dynamic phenomenon prevalent in social interaction in various settings, such as mundane talk and institutional contexts. It has been a focus of interest in social interaction research for decades. To date, scholars have sought to gain insights regarding what counts as humorous and why we find certain utterances funny (e.g., Carroll, 2014; Bell & Pomerantz, 2016). As such, scholars from various fields ranging from philosophy, sociology, psychology, pragmatics, and linguistics, to name a few, have adopted different approaches in the examination of humour. One of the new perspectives that offers unique insights into humour scholarship is Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology. CA is a method and a research field in itself deriving from ethnomethodology, and it provides valuable opportunities for researchers to investigate humour in interaction. Thus, the main aim of this study is to present Conversation Analysis as a candidate methodology to be used for analysing humour in interaction. It also provides a critical discussion of how CA approaches ‘humour’.

AbstractThis study aims to investigate the interactional organization of English teachers’ acknowledgment followed by type-specific questions. Shaping learners’ contributions via acknowledgment and type-specific questions is argued to be a part of Classroom Interactional Competence as the 5th skill in language teaching. Hence, this two-step move is studied to achieve a broader understanding of teachers’ interactional repertoire. This study has a qualitative design utilizing Conversation Analysis. Eighteen hours of classroom data from Newcastle University Corpus of Academic Spoken English make up the data. The findings suggest that teachers’ acknowledgment followed by type-specific questions is an indicator of Classroom Interactional Competence, and it is highly dependent upon the task goal (i.e., a pedagogic repair). Contrary to the previous studies, the joint use of acknowledgment is found to shape students’ previous turns by foregrounding achievement rather than closing a topic or indicating a transition. Then, this joint use allows teachers to acknowledge or approve a learner’s utterance on one level while carrying out repair work on another level enabling them to operate on different levels in the complex realm of the classroom.---SažetakCilj je ovoga istraživanja proučiti interakcijsku organizaciju potvrde odgovora koju nastavnici engleskoga jezika daju učenicima, a iza koje slijede specifična pitanja. Oblikovanje učeničkih odgovora pomoću potvrde i specifičnih pitanja smatra se dijelom interakcijske kompetencije u razredu i petom vještinom u poučavanju engleskoga jezika. Stoga je ova dvokomponentna taktika analizirana kako bi se došlo do boljega razumijevanja interakcijskoga repertoara nastavnika. U ovome istraživanju primijenjen je kvalitativni nacrt s primjenom konverzacijske analize. Podatke koji su proučavani sačinjava osamnaest sati primjera iz nastave iz Korpusa akademskoga govornog engleskog jezika Sveučilišta u Newcastleu. Rezultati upućuju na činjenicu da je način na koji nastavnici potvrđuju odgovore učenika i postavljaju im specifična pitanja pokazatelj interakcijske kompetencije u razredu te da on uvelike ovisi o cilju zadatka (tj. pedagoškom ispravku). Za razliku od ranije provedenih istraživanja, utvrđeno je da kombinirana potvrda oblikuje prethodne odgovore učenika tako što u prvi plan stavlja njihova postignuća, a ne zatvara temu niti naznačava prelazak na drugu temu. Takva kombinirana potvrda daje nastavnicima priliku da potvrde ili odobre ono što je učenik rekao na jednoj razini, dok na drugoj razini provode ispravak istoga. To im omogućava rad na različitim razinama u složenom razrednom okružju.

The aim of this study is to discuss whether explicit teaching of English pronunciation in second language (L2) and English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms is helpful for learners or not. This study aims to review the studies on pronunciation teaching to synthesize the literature. In this way, connections between research and practice will be formed and the implications for language teaching will be mentioned. In this study, a literature review (of around 40 articles, books and book chapters) has been done first and then, in accordance with the findings, the emerging themes (e.g. intelligibility, Lingua Franca Core and students’ background) from the review were further reviewed and a synthesis is provided taking the findings regarding different perspectives into consideration. The results suggest that recently pronunciation teaching has shown great improvements and the aims of it have changed from attaining a native-like proficiency to being intelligible. The review suggests that the aim of pronunciation teaching should be to teach for functional and meaningful contexts and it should be a part of communicative approaches to provide students with a fluent speech. The findings also suggest that the focus in explicit pronunciation teaching should be on not only perception, but also production and only the relevant and useful parts of phonology should be taught to learners.

Language is a magical key that human beings hold in their hands to open the door of communication. To succeed in communication, formal links are one of the aspects of language that need to be known and used in discourse in addition to the contextual factors (Cook, 1992). Hence, systematic exposure to them is essential for satisfactory language acquisition, and assessment should be in line with this as well. Consequently, this study aimed to reveal whether a national exam English as a foreign language (EFL) learners take include these links. Based on this purpose, English texts taking place in the last five years’ national high school exams (LGS) held in Turkey annually were analyzed by the discourse analytical framework of formal links suggested by Cook (1992) as a part of the qualitative design. The analysis indicated that the types of formal links included in majority of the exams were found to be verb forms, parallelism, referring expressions, repetition, ellipsis, and conjunction. Moreover, outnumbering uses of referring expressions and the infrequency of substitution were revealed. In the light of these findings, high school EFL teachers and the material developers in the ministry were suggested to include different types of formal links in their lessons/materials more frequently so that students could internalize such aspects of language at early stages of their EFL learning process and be one step closer to a balanced acquisition process.

This study aims to investigate wait-time, more specifically student reaction wait-time, in high school English as a foreign language classrooms with specific regard to two classroom micro-context modes (the classroom context mode and material mode). The data was collected via audio-recordings of classroom interaction in its natural context. The audio-recordings were analyzed using the principles of Conversation Analysis. The analysis of the data demonstrated that the effectiveness of student reaction wait-time is highly related to the current pedagogical goal; if the purpose is to increase learners’ involvement in classroom discourse or if it requires analytical thinking, an extended wait-time of three to five seconds is likely to enhance the learning opportunity. However, as a social process, opportunities for learning are likely to be missed if the purpose is to monitor understanding or display answers which are explicitly given in the material that is being used. In this sense, this study has implications for studies on wait-time, foreign language classroom interaction, teachers’ interactional competence, and foreign language learning contexts in general.

The Processability Theory suggests that teacha bility and learn ability of a language is constrained by what learners are ready to acquire. This means that what is presented to the learners should be in line with their level and readiness. Textbooks are one of the fundamental resources of language learning and teaching, and in this sense, analyzing them is very significant for ensuring that they are appropriate for the target learner group. Accordingly, this study aims to find out whether the stages of different morphosyntactic structuresin 5 English textbooks are sequenced according to the developmental stages offered bythe Processability Theory and whether these 5 textbooks complement each other from the 2nd grade to 4th grade. The 5 English textbooks that are currently being used in public schools in Turkey at primary school level were selected. Textbook Analysis as a part of Document Analysis was undertaken, and the morphosyntactic structures provided in the units of these textbooks were analyzed. The findings suggest that the textbooks follow the stages suggested by the Processability Theory in general; however, there are some incompatibilities as well. The sequential development from the 2nd grade to the 4th grade is in a complementary fashion in that they tend to focus on later stages of morphological development as grade increases except for Primary School Just Fun English 3 (Tıraş, 2018) which was found to present a few morphosyntactic structures that are slightly from higher stages for the expected developmental stage while most of the structures of this textbook conforms to the developmental stages of the Processability Theory as well.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the views of the participants of European Union Erasmus+ Youth Exchange project regarding its effect on foreign language motivation and speaking fluency development. Foreign language motivation and speaking are two significant aspects of learning English as a foreign language. There are some studies on the effects of Erasmus+ projects; however, there are very few studies on the effect of Erasmus+ Youth Exchange projects in the literature. Having a qualitative design, this study utilizes purposive sampling method, and participants are those who attended the Erasmus+ Youth Exchange projects implemented between 2014 and 2020. The data were collected via a standardized open-ended interview. The interviews were transcribed and qualitatively analyzed by Content Analysis method via MAXQDA 2018 Qualitative Data Analysis Software. The findings of the research revealed that according to the views of the participants, EU Erasmus+ Youth Exchange Project provided several benefits to participants in terms of improving foreign language level, and the project contributed to their English-speaking fluency and foreign language learning motivation. More specifically, points such as opportunities to do practice, negative comments on Turkish Education System, educational equality provided by Erasmus+ projects and follow-up activities carried out after projects were mentioned by the participants. These findings have implications for learning and teaching English as a foreign language.