Volume 40, Issue 1

This paper reports the design, implementation, and outcome of an action research. The research aimed to examine and improve college students’ attitudes towards varieties of World Englishes through a mild intervention in an intercultural communication class. Viewing education as a means to facilitate Intercultural Communication Competence (ICC), of which language attitude was an integral part, the study designed a four-step pedagogical intervention to help students become more open and critical of their attitudes. The four pedagogical steps included language attitude elicitation, deconstruction, reconstruction, and creative solutions to communicative problems. The study found that students largely had conservative language attitudes and prejudices to start with. After the intervention, over 40% of the students acquired more open language attitudes, while some remained ambivalent about embracing linguistic diversity, and a small number of students maintained their previous conservative attitudes. Challenges of attitude change and language attitude education are discussed.

This study makes a qualitative inquiry into the use of collaborative learning in Chinese higher education (HE) EFL classrooms with its focus on students’ experience. It seeks to reveal the dilemmas encountered by considering the cultural aspect of teaching and learning within the Chinese context. Drawing on data sources from 60 students’ written reflections, 2 groups of post-hoc interviews and the researcher’s field notes, the study reveals that: 1) the use of collaborative learning conflicts with students’ formed learning behaviors and grammar-oriented exams; 2) guanxi as an indigenous Chinese sociocultural construct prevails in the language classrooms as a communicative tie among students, which facilitates students’ interaction and peer collaboration; 3) power differentials, by contrast, engender less interaction and create distance among peers. Notwithstanding these incompatibilities, the study claims that collaborative learning is consonant with the Chinese culture that emphasizes collective orientation and socially appropriate behaviors during interaction. It is concerned with the right way of learning among peers. Finally, the study suggests ways for teacher educators to cope with these dilemmas.

This study investigates the role of morphological awareness in ESL vocabulary acquisition. Participants were 198 Chinese college students enrolled in a joint program which required them to study in China for the first two years and then study in the U.K. to complete their degrees. They completed a total of four paper-and-pencil tests: morpheme discrimination, morpheme recognition, vocabulary size test (VST) and word associates test (WAT) tests. We drew upon path analysis to explore the interconnected relationships among multiple explanatory variables (facets of morphological awareness) and outcome variables (facets of vocabulary knowledge). The results demonstrated that English derivational awareness was strongly predictive of both ESL vocabulary breadth and ESL vocabulary depth, and that preexisting ESL vocabulary breadth could enhance the relation between derivational awareness and ESL vocabulary depth. To summarize, these results indicate that an improved English derivational awareness not only helps to expand ESL vocabulary size but can also consolidate learners’ deep understanding of word properties, which will in turn assist them to establish connections with other associative words and phrases.

This study investigated the effects of the frequency at which English as a foreign language (EFL) students were exposed to words from the input modes of reading and listening. Accordingly, 15 words of three frequency groups were selected. A total of 60 Chinese EFL students were recruited. The four test types of recall of form, recognition of form, recall of meaning, and recognition of meaning were administered to measure participants’ ability in building a form-meaning link. Immediate posttests were administered for assessing vocabulary development, and delayed posttests were administered two weeks later for assessing retention. The results revealed that new words could be learned incidentally in both modes, but more word knowledge was gained in reading. The effect of word exposure frequency on incidental vocabulary gains was significant for the four test types in both of the two modes. Since only partial word knowledge was acquired by both modes, it appeared that for the two modes to be a valuable source for incidental vocabulary learning, not only word exposure frequency, but also elaborate word processing is needed. Relevant implications for teaching and learning vocabulary are discussed.

Idioms have attracted great attention over recent decades. Nevertheless, controversies still remain in regard of the most plausible cognition mechanism for idiom comprehension, especially concerning non-Indo-European languages and second/foreign language users. Event Related Potential (ERP) experiments on proficient English learners whose native language was Mandarin Chinese were conducted to test the influences of idioms’ familiarity on both Chinese and English (as foreign language) idiom comprehension. Data including accuracy rates, reaction time, and latency and peak amplitudes of N400 were recorded and analyzed, indicating that familiarity might play a significant role in idiom comprehension in both native and foreign languages. Further, idioms, should they have similar familiarity levels, may be easier to process in the native language (Chinese) than in the foreign language (English).

Based on the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and the British National English (BNC), I investigated the features of discourse marker (DM) so in English as lingua franca (ELF) by comparing it with its use in native speech. I first calculated the frequency of so in ACE and BNC. Then, taking Buysse’s (2012) meta-functional theory of DM so as framework, I comprehensively analyzed the functions of so in ELF and native speech. The results show that Asian ELF speakers utter more tokens of so than native speakers, especially in the scopes of “marking results”, “marking conclusion,” “holding the floor,” “marking summary,” “opening new section of discourse,” and “shift-back and elaboration.” The study implies that in English teaching and learning, ELF should not be treated as an undeveloped language and that the teaching of discourse markers should focus more on the pragmatic functions than on semantic meaning in the narrow sense.

The present paper discusses the tension between tradition and modernity with respect to the teaching of English in Iran. It demonstrates that the second decade of the present century marks a shift, albeit nascent, in a) Iranian teachers and officials’ attitudes towards the content and method of English language teaching in terms of the need for greater interaction in the classroom, and b) raised awareness of the importance of culture in language teaching. We pose the question: “how can Iran continue to build on new ideas about English language teaching at school and tertiary levels with a view to improving not only pupils’/students’ performance but also embracing modernity in a globalized world?” The discussion is based on a survey of literature addressing the current state of English education in Iran.