Volume 14, Issue 2

This article reports on a two-step investigation of foreign language learning boredom amongst Chinese university non-English-major EFL students and English teachers. In Study 1, 22 students and 11 English teachers were interviewed and 659 students responded to an open questionnaire, recalling and describing their experiences and perceptions of boredom in learning English. The data allowed a multidimensional conceptualization of Foreign Language Learning Boredom (FLLB), empirically supporting the control-value theory in educational psychology. Based on the conceptualization of FLLB, in Study 2, the Foreign Language Learning Boredom Scale (FLLBS) was developed. Through surveying 808 students in a pilot and 2,223 in the main study, a 7-factor FLLBS with 32 items was validated using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses as well as further validity and reliability analyses. It is argued that FLLB is a crucial addition to the emerging field of foreign languagelearning emotion research.

The study contributes to research on the development of the heritage language after return to the country of origin and examines whether the ultimate attainment of the heritage grammar after many years of residing in the country of origin brings returnees to a level compatible with that of monolinguals. We focus on the production and perception of evidentiality markers in the heritage Turkish of Turkish-German bilinguals who returned to Turkey after finishing a German high school and have been residing in Turkey for more than 11 years. Two production tasks (a narrative task and a discourse completion task), as well as a grammaticality judgement task were used in the study. The data analysis revealed that the production and perception of evidentiality by the returnee participants diverged from those of the monolingual control group. The divergence manifested itself in ungrammatical uses of evidentiality markers in the context of the indirect evidentiality and less sensitivity to grammatical and ungrammatical items comprising direct and indirect evidentiality markers. The findings of the study suggest that after many years of residing in Turkey the language behaviour of the returnee participants still possesses features that are typical for heritage speakers.

Students’ experiences and practices regarding English as a lingua franca (ELF) have been central to the discussion in research on intercultural communication in academia as it provides the basis for English language policy and practices in the international university. To date, however, few previous studies have explored diverse factors for perceptions of ELF communication with a single framework. To fill this gap, this study provides the integrative research model for perceptions and behaviours regarding ELF communication in the international university context, using Theory of Planned Behaviour. It further explores the effect of those factors on actual intentions to engage in ELF communication. Data were collected from 232 questionnaires and seven interviews on the offshore campus of a Hong Kong university in mainland China. Findings showed that factors such as acceptance, social expectations, the sense of control over linguistic knowledge for intercultural communication, and self-esteem had significant effects on intentions. The study concluded that ELF speakers’ decision-making process to engage in ELF communication is not simply based on individual behaviour, but on social performance in academic communities of practice. This study suggests academic and educational implications for incorporating the ELF perspective into English language policy and practices in the international university.

There is a huge scarcity of documentation of instances in which students do not follow the peer review training guidelines. One factor in these unanticipated scenarios could be learners’ self-efficacy (SE). The current investigation illustrates how different sources of SE contribute to students’ agentic orientations during peer review. For this purpose, six secondary-one students were paired to implement peer reviews in an after-school English writing course, after receiving peer review training. The data from three dyadic peer review sessions, stimulated recalls, and pre-/post-interviews were triangulated with quantitative data from 20 learners. The results showed that the students’ low SE for self-regulation (SESR) for peer review at the outset overshadowed the impact of training and influenced the use of strategies by them during the peer reviews. Whereas those with high SESR followed the instructions from the training session and regulated the peer reviews professionally, those with low SESR ignored these guidelines, which resulted in constrained agency and promoted their skepticism of peer review in the end. However, by comparing their own performances as reviewers with those of their peers, the students’ SE for regulating future peer review also changed. This paper underscores SE as an important construct in peer review for L2 young learners.

Based on the premise that human experience is storied, the researcher engaged in the writing of critical autoethnographic narratives to examine ideological contention in language learning, language use, and language teaching. Using raciolinguistic ideologies as theoretical framework, he shows the ways ideological orientations embedded in circulating metacommentary push individuals to engage in aesthetic labor around the ways they employ their linguistic resources. Findings suggest that language educators and learners should engage in critical examination of seemingly innocent metalinguistic commentary, as these contain contradictory and multiple ideological orientations that largely shape the perception and employment of speakers’ linguistic repertoires.

This article aims to provide an updated, empirically solid overview of what’s hot and what’s not on the current CLIL research agenda in order to weed out the non-issues which we should no longer figure on the CLIL agenda from the real issues which will continue to shape the future of the field. This objective will hopefully be attained while concomitantly answering Bruton (2019), as, unfortunately, his most recent arguments are still not rooted in any research he himself has conducted, are not grounded on the latest empirical evidence, and limit themselves to re-interpreting studies conducted over a decade ago or which present a lack of empirical robustness. Only stalwart empirical evidence from the last few years is used here to provide a recent, research-driven overview of where we stand and where we need to go in the CLIL research arena, dismantling the assumptions put forward by Bruton (2019) as regards egalitarianism, the CLIL-EFL divide, and research into the effects of CLIL, and mapping out future pathways for progression which affect attention to diversity in bilingual education, incorporating a pluriliteracies approach, and replicating, extending, and meta-analyzing existing research.

Translation has traditionally been viewed as a branch of applied linguistics. This has changed drastically in recent decades, which have witnessed translation studies growing as a field beyond, and sometimes against, applied linguistics. This paper is an attempt to think translation back into applied linguistics by reconceptualizing translation through the notions of distributed language, semiotic repertoire, and assemblage. It argues that: (a) embedded within a larger textual-media ecology, translation is enacted through dialogical interaction among the persons, texts, technologies, platforms, institutions, and traditions operating within that ecology; (b) what we call translations are second-order constructs, or relatively stable formations of signs abstracted from the processual flux of translating on the first-order; (c) translation is not just about moving a work from one discrete language system across to another, but about distributing it through semiotic repertoires; (d) by orchestrating resources performatively, translations are not just interventions in the target language and culture, but are transformative of the entire translingual and multimodal space (discursive, interpretive, material) surrounding a work. The paper argues that distributed thinking helps us de-fetishize translation as an object of study and reimagine translators as partaking of a creative network of production alongside other human and non-human agents.

In this paper, we examine the effects of learning environment on second language (L2) gender agreement. English speakers learning L2 Spanish participated in a self-paced reading task and a picture selection task prior to and after a short-term study abroad experience. The results from the self-paced reading task showed that their reliance on the masculine article as the default (e.g., McCarthy, Corrine. 2008. Morphological variability in the comprehension of agreement: An argument for representation over computation. Second Language Research 24(4). 459–486) was reduced over time abroad. Findings from the picture selection task showed that the learners did not attend to the gender of articles unless it was their only cue, but that after the study abroad experience they began to use gender as an anticipatory cue for lexical selection. We interpret these results as support for an adapted version of the Shallow Structures Hypothesis (Clahsen, Harald & Claudia Felser. 2006a. Grammatical processing in language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics 27(1). 3–42; Clahsen, Harald & Claudia Felser. 2006b. How native-like is non-native language processing? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10(12). 564–570) and the notion that in immersion contexts L2 learners shift their parsing strategy to be more communicatively focused (Schwieter, John W. & Gabrielle Klassen. 2016. Linguistic advances and learning strategies in a short-term study abroad experience. Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education 1(2). 217–247).