Volume 38, Issue 4

This article has been developed from a keynote address given at the June 2015 Faces of English conference held at the University of Hong Kong. The article examines the trajectory of Bonny Norton’s research on identity and language learning, highlighting her construct of investment, developed as a sociological complement to the psychological construct of motivation (Norton, 2013). An important focus of the paper is the expanded 2015 model of investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015), which responds to the changing communicative landscape of an increasingly digital world, and locates investment at the intersection of identity, capital, and ideology. Norton exemplifies her theories with data drawn from her collaborative research on English language learning in Canada, Pakistan, Uganda, and Iran. With reference to digital storytelling as a promising classroom practice, she argues that the challenge for English language teachers internationally is to promote learner investment in the language and literacy practices of classrooms by increasing the range of identities available to English language learners.

With the wide spread of English in the global context, scholars increasingly call for the reshaping of English education towards teaching English as an international language. One oft-mentioned proposal is to increase students’ exposure to more English varieties, in particular the variety of English used in their country or region. Against this backdrop, this study investigated the attitudes of Chinese university students and teachers towards China English (CE), an emerging variety in China and the ideological underpinnings beneath their attitudinal responses. In the study, 33 English teachers and 31 students were asked to first evaluate the understandability and acceptability of CE features that are identified in literature and then provide reasons justifying their choices in a questionnaire survey. Results show that both teacher and student participants were reluctant to accept CE as a legitimate variety but their attitudes diverged as regards specific CE features. The in-depth exploration of their justifications revealed that native speaker English ideology, Chinglish stigma and the communicativeness of CE to the outside world were their major concerns in evaluating CE. Findings in this study have implications for educators who attempt to localize English language teaching.

This research explores the studies published in English from 2004 to 2013 on the Public Speaking (PS) course to provide a preliminary framework of the research paradigm and identify its major themes and sub-themes in this field. A majority of the studies were from the communication literature, with the remaining studies coming from the disciplines of linguistics, education and psychology, which indicates research on PS is multidisciplinary. In the literature, the years 2004 and 2005 saw a peak of studies from native-speaking countries while the years 2011 and 2012 began to see an increase of the research from non-native speaking countries. Nearly half of the studies fell into the non-empirical category. With the method of content analysis and based on the research agenda in the public speaking proposed by Lucas (2011), seven themes were identified, including public speaking anxiety, goals of the public speaking course and pedagogical strategies, pedagogical content, course assessment, technology and integrative methods as pedagogy, PS textbooks, and adaptation of the course to non-native speakers. It is hoped that the findings here can contribute to refining research on PS course in China and providing insights for Chinese practitioners.

This study examined the relation between word concreteness and word translatability. Translatability was operationalized in terms of both lexical and semantic cross-transparency. Two separate scales were used to measure the level of concreteness of 123 target English words and their translatability into Chinese. The results of this study showed that word concreteness and translatability are significantly correlated, and that word concreteness determines the extent of semantic closeness between the translation of English and Chinese word pairs. Concreteness might be a variable that influences how translatable a word is between English and Chinese. However, this influence mainly applies to the semantic cross-transparency between the two languages, not the lexical cross-transparency. A link was proposed between the levels of translatability of a translation pair according to concreteness and associated properties. The paper also discusses the implications of the findings for second language learning and teaching, in particular the “translation effect” and teachers’ “codeswitching” behavior.

In recent years, SLA and L2 learning motivation have received extensive attention of researchers and teachers across the globe but the issue remains underdeveloped and there are only some small-scale studies on this subject in Pakistan. Among different factors that affect L2 learning motivation, the current study focuses on exploring differences in L2 learning motivation by college type (private vs. public) and major subject of study (Arts vs. Sciences). Analyzing the questionnaire data from 547 first year college students, the study singles out different situation-specific factors that account for variation in ESL learning motivation. Results indicate that private college students have a higher motivation level and better achievements in ESL learning as compared to public college students. Public college students have strong instrumental motivation while private college students show preferences for an ideal L2 self. L2 motivation does not differ a great deal between students with different subjects of study but there is a big gap in the achievement of both groups. Arts majors’ motivation depends heavily on their attitude towards English while science majors are instrumentally motivated to learn English. We also discuss some possible reasons for the differences in motivation and implications of the study for ESL teachers and learners.

To date, only a handful of studies have investigated the interlocutor effects on peer-peer test discourse, and they focus almost exclusively on the paired format in the Cambridge speaking tests, which is mostly a discussion type collaborative task. In the oral English test administered by a Chinese university under the present study, role-play is a major test type. This study chose for analysis three out of over 100 video recordings of test takers participating in roleplay- based interaction. The author adopted conversation analysis (CA) and Young’s (2000) constructivist, practice-oriented view of interaction and competence to assist the interpretation of speech exchange throughout the interaction. It is evident from the data that learners make use of various interactional resources and employ different strategies in the assessmentbased role play. It could be tentatively concluded from the conversation analysis of the paired interaction that the interaction framework together with the participants’ strategic competence in negotiating their own interactional resources, to a great extent, determines their joint performance of the collaborative task. The configuration of pairing in terms of proficiency is found to have an impact on joint interaction performance and strategic use. The implications of the current study include: interactional competence could be more readily accessed via role play than discussion type of pair work; qualitative conversation analysis of test takers’ actual practices can reveal what quantitative methods are unable to detect, and therefore is an indispensable complement.

The present case study explores the effects of mediation of dynamic assessment (DA) on EFL writing development of English majors. Two junior English majors and their English writing teacher in a Chinese university were involved in a DA writing task. Student B was asked to write an application letter in English of around 500 words during her spare time. Student A and the teacher, as the mediators, tried to help her improve the essay based on her Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The dialogues in the two mediation processes were recorded and transcribed. Analysis of the data from Student B’s compositions and the recorded talks during the mediation process showed that there are some similarities between the two mediations including making more use of implicit prompts to guide the learner and playing a positive role to facilitate EFL language growth, especially grammar. The analysis, however, also showed great differences. The teacher tutor attempted more prompts and more implicit strategies than the peer to show that the teacher could do a better job in exploring the learner’s ZPD. Even so, the peer might be of important help in improving the language and content before a teacher mediation in the DA process.