Action research has enjoyed phenomenal growth in the field of education as a catalyst for teacher professional learning with a view to school improvement, but it is commonly remodelled across various local settings. Adopting a Schatzkian perspective, this study investigates the experiences of a range of teachers engaging in an action research…

Correct pronunciation of English words is of vital significance for mutual intelligibility in the EFL context. Despite its prominence in L2 learning, teachers of English cannot decide whether and how to implement pronunciation practice into their teaching practices. For this reason, pronunciation training is widely neglected in language classes or…

Language policies of countries have focused especially on the teaching and learning of English, the universal language of communication because of the increase in international exchange of information. In this context, one of the changes which were made in the field of foreign language teaching in recent years in Turkey is that the intensive…

This brief report presents the preliminary results of the textual data analysis within a qualitative longitudinal study that examines ESL adolescent writers' voice in their academic writing as they transition from a High School Preparation (HSP) intensive English program to mainstream high schools (HS) in Sydney, Australia.

While studies have shown benefits of plurilingual pedagogies on students' experiences learning languages, more research is needed to examine how these pedagogies can be enacted in foreign language programmes in digital environments. Moreover, prioritising oral engagement has been an urgent need among teachers who use synchronous platforms such as…

The attention to fostering learners' critical thinking and creativity skills in secondary school and college students is growing in Western and non-Western countries. This study investigated the integration of a creativity and critical thinking course in an Intensive English Programs (IEP) to determine how the same course may contribute to…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

This study investigates the potential of asynchronous video-mediated oral book report assignments to enhance learners' spoken performance and decrease their speaking anxiety. The participants were 42 B1 level preparatory students from the English Language Teaching department who were taking skills-based intensive English education in Turkey. The…

This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided…

This article considers the challenges heralded by digital technology in relation to the management of academic integrity on high-stakes Direct Entry English Programs in Australia. Firstly, a number of the ways in which students are using digital tools to complete assignment writing are examined. Secondly, findings from a review of academic…

Studies have found that morphology awareness could assist writers to increase productive vocabulary (e.g. Green et al., 2003; McCutchen & Stull, 2015), reduce vocabulary errors (e.g. Karakas, 2012; Ririn, 2010), and produce complex sentence structures using various forms of words. Postgraduate students as second language users of English (L2)…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought life to an unexpected halt, and all levels of education including higher education had abrupt changes from face-to-face teaching to emergency remote teaching to sustain the continuity of education. English preparatory schools that provide newly-enrolled university students with one-year intensive English language…

This article reports on a qualitative study that sought to understand managers' perceptions of teachers' professional identities in the Australian ELICOS sector. The study found that there is a powerful, socially imagined 'wall' that divides two cultures in the sector: the managers on the one hand, and the teachers on the other. While generally…

Despite extensive research into the effectiveness of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) in ESL/EFL language learning, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that supplementing conventional teaching methods of the writing process approach with MALL significantly improves the English writing performance of native Arabic speakers. This…

Electronic peer feedback (e-PF) has offered a number of benefits to English as a foreign language (EFL) students' academic writing competence and reflective thinking. However, little research has been conducted to examine whether e-PF can be incorporated in Confucian heritage culture (CHC) contexts. With a sample of 40 Vietnamese university…