Volume 37, Issue 3

This paper draws on semi-structured interview data to explore the conceptions of research held by College English teachers in China and the extent to which these conceptions are conducive to professional development. Our analysis highlights several tensions in the teachers’ perspectives between doing research for publication and for pedagogical growth, between conducting theoretical research and practical research, between quantitative and qualitative perspectives, and between personal and external motivations for doing research. The data also illustrates how teachers’ conceptions of such issues are informed by multiple and sometimes conflicting sources of advice and experience. The paper concludes with implications for how to make research engagement conducive to College English teachers’ professional development.

This longitudinal study presents a full view of three rural high school EFL teachers’ stories about learning to do action research through reflection. It takes a closer look at the contributions of reflection to action research, the challenges the teachers faced, and the changes they achieved. Over a 22-week semester, the three teachers engaged in a series of interrelated learning activities including journal writing, individual dialogues, group meetings and action research. The findings show that learning to do action research was a time-consuming and arduous task, and such difficulties arose when they identified research topics, formed research questions, collected data and wrote their reports. However, reflection through writing, talking and discussing pushed the process forward. The teachers’ professional development was mainly reflected in the changes in teaching practices and beliefs. A revisit held seven years later confirms that teachers’ ability to identify problems and to take action improved, but none of them tried to do further action research. For the teachers living in an unsupportive research context, integrating action research into teaching practices may not be a priority.

The word processing depth hypothesis implies a positive association between learners’ word processing and their lexical learning. In research, learners’ task-inherent involvement load (i.e., word processing) has not been found to be consistently associated with their lexical learning. Meanwhile, existing studies have not obtained consensus results, either, from directly associating learners’ actual word processing and their lexical learning. Against this backdrop, this paper reports a study investigating the association between Chinese EFL learners’ actual word processing and their lexical learning in performing a collaborative oral output task. Interactional and statistical analyses revealed that the participants engaged in four types of word processing; their overall word processing was significantly correlated with both their productive and receptive word acquisition and retention; their different types of word processing were significantly correlated with their productive word learning, but showed variances in correlations with their receptive word learning. The findings were discussed from the perspectives of word processing in collaborative output, word processing and lexical learning, and word processing and different modes of lexical learning.

This paper presents an empirical study of the acquisition of English ambiguous verb-locative prepositional phrase constructions (VLPPs) by adult Mandarin and Spanish speakers. This study assumes that the semantic properties of the target VLPPs that relate to change-of-Iocation in sentences such as The boat floated under the bridge arise from an uninterpretable syntactic feature selected by English but unselected by Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Results obtained from an animated cartoon selection task indicate that neither the Mandarin nor the Spanish speakers at any level of English proficiency possess native-like interpretative knowledge. Tense/ Aspect effects on the interpretation of the target constructions by Spanish speakers were also found. These results are interpreted as consistent with the Representational Deficit Hypothesis view (Hawkins, 2003, 2005) of adult second language acquisition.

This study intends to investigate the effects of receptive vocabulary breadth and depth on listening comprehension by college students. The experimental results indicate that both the breadth and depth have a significant correlation with listening comprehension; vocabulary breadth contributes more to EFL learners’ listening comprehension. The findings of this study give pedagogical implications for the teaching of listening in China.

This study investigates perceptions of and attitudes toward plagiarism by Chinese ESL students and American students with questionnaire and interview as the main sources of data. It was found that Chinese students exhibited less knowledge of plagiarism than American students due to a lack of previous instruction. Chinese students showed different perceptions about some cases of plagiarism such as using memorized words without citing, which may have been caused by the emphasis on memorization in Chinese learning culture. However, Chinese students held similar attitudes toward plagiarism; that is, they thought it was morally wrong and should not be tolerated unless it was unintentional. Based on the findings, this paper calls for Chinese scholars to spend more time addressing the problem by making it part of the curriculum.

As the number of Chinese international students studying in the U.S. has grown dramatically in recent years, there has been increasing attention to how English Composition instructors approach these students’ writings. Using a dialogue format representing “narratives of classroom life” (Nelson, 2011a), this paper demonstrates two polemic views held by teachers and researchers: one view sees students’ language use as problematic as it differs from the expected standards required for academic success in the U.S., while the other calls for more tolerance of the students’ linguistic and cultural diversity and accordingly, more strategic ways to give “error feedback.” By opening up the debate, the paper explores possibilities for teachers in the U.S. and around the world to help their students address the gap between academic expectations, and what they are currently capable of.