Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training issued a new general education curriculum and Getting-to-know-English for Grades 1 and 2. Teachers are crucial to implementing Getting-to-know-English for Grades 1 and 2. However, teacher agency has been understudied, despite recent studies in Vietnam. These studies examined teacher agency in executing…

Internet memes--usually taking the form of an image, GIF, or video with text--have become an important type of semiotic tool for meaning making. Due to the fact that memes can help learners leverage semiotic modes in social contexts, they hold great potential for language education. Integrating ecological social semiotic frameworks, this…

Gamification is a methodological strategy that has been applied for several years in the field of modern language learning. It is employed primarily to increase students' motivation by incorporating game elements into an otherwise didactic context. Research into the use of gamification in language teaching has focused largely on characterizing the…

This article reports on a practitioner research study that adopted the intercultural approach to integrating Vietnamese and Indonesian cultural issues into Taiwanese university classes for English as a foreign language (EFL). A content-based course design was developed to infuse cultural topics including food culture, lifestyle and interpersonal…

This article traces the intellectual roots and developments of the notion of competence in second language (L2) teaching and research. Since L2 teaching and research invariably concern competence of some sort (linguistic, communicative, interactional, or otherwise), there have been countless attempts to define competence from diverse theoretical…

Proponents of extensive reading argue that test-oriented language teaching and learning could discourage extensive reading practice. However, this has not been examined empirically. Given the possibility that the consistency of reading texts used in extensive reading and entrance examinations is one source of washback, the present study employed a…

Whether or not to teach grammar explicitly is an issue that has long been debated in the field of SLA. There seems to be a growing consensus among many researchers now in support of embedding some element of explicit instruction within a communicative curriculum. The main arguments in support of explicit instruction are threefold: two widely cited…

This study is centered on investigating students' preferences and measuring the level of their virtual remote learning experience satisfaction in a university-level language course within the framework of Social Constructivism. Using mixed methods, data collection was made primarily through a survey and focus group discussions of college students'…

This article foregrounds the role of the learner's experienced and expressive body in the process of action-oriented intercultural second language acquisition (SLA), drawing on phenomenological and related research on embodiment. It suggests that processes of perception, cognition, intentionality, and action are fundamentally shaped by the…

The release of ChatGPT marked the beginning of a new era of AI-assisted plagiarism that disrupts traditional assessment practices in ESL composition. In the face of this challenge, educators are left with little guidance in controlling AI-assisted plagiarism, especially when conventional methods fail to detect AI-generated texts. One approach to…

This paper reports on a qualitative study of 13 bilingual paraprofessionals at a university in the USA enrolled in a second language acquisition class that was part of a professional development programme. Drawing on socio-cultural theory, the study focused on documenting how the paraprofessionals negotiated the academic demands of a hybrid online…

This study endeavored to gain insights into English as a Foreign Language (EFL) preferred strategies in teaching EFL writing during the pandemic, particularly dealing with technology use. Six writing teachers from various universities in East Java, Indonesia, participated in this study. They were asked to respond to interview questions that were…

"Variability" and "fractality," two key concepts in Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST)--the former concerning changes and variations, and the latter concerning recursiveness and self-similarities--may seem contradictory at first glance. This forum piece attempts to elucidate how the two seemingly contradictory properties can…

Owing to the fact that all educational activities have been moved to an online setting due to restrictions to control the spread of the Corona Virus, the realm of education has been subject to unprecedented changes. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the perspectives of freshman English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students and their…

Neo-national ideologies are often associated with despots and political extremists. Yet, we argue that neo-nationalist discourses also manifest in everyday TESOL classroom interactions. In English-dominant contexts, teachers send potent messages about who does or does not "belong" in classrooms, largely based on racialized notions of…