Volume 44, Issue 4

Initial teacher preparation and teachers’ continuing professional development are two significant pillars of the teacher education enterprise. The former encompasses a wide range of teacher-education initiatives at the levels of diploma, bachelor’s degree, postgraduate diploma, and even master’s degree for teacher licensure purposes. These are widely documented in the literature. What is important is how teacher professional development contributes to bolstering the teacher-educator force, which is relatively insufficiently documented due to the very fact that different educational systems have somewhat different expectations of such programs in relation to the ideologies and theories underpinning the teacher professional development program design and curriculum offering. Taking stock of a postgraduate diploma program in English language teaching (PGDELT) for teachers’ continuing professional development with a 31-year history housed at a premier teacher education institution in Singapore, which has successfully graduated over 1, 000 English language teachers for colleges and universities in China, I intend to highlight some of its key features, as a former student and then a lecturer on the program, in order to draw implications for sustainable growth of language teacher education programs, especially those whose main purposes are to prepare teachers of English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) and provide continuing professional development opportunities for such inservice teachers.

This exploratory study examines whether genre has an impact on syntactic complexity and holistic rating in EFL writing. Over 300 sample texts produced by intermediate learners were collected from a test and some regular after-class assignments for English writing courses. Each participant completed two writing tasks, one argumentative and the other narrative. Results show that genre type has a significant impact on L2 syntactic complexity. Genre effect is found stronger with timed writing tasks. L2 holistic ratings show correlation with syntactic complexity on the different measure(s) depending on genre type and planning conditions. Regression analyses reveal that for timed writing tasks, clausal density (clauses per sentence) is a reliable predictor for holistic assessment on intermediate EFL learners’ writing quality. It is found to account for 6% of the score variance for timed writing and 10% for timed argumentative writing. Genre is evidenced to be related to EFL writing holistic ratings. Closer examination indicates that while syntactic complexity is predictive of holistic writing scores for argumentative writing, it does not correlate with holistic scores for narrative writing. Other linguistic features rather than syntactic complexity may be accountable. Overall, the study lends support to genre effect in the relationship between syntactic complexity and L2 writing quality holistic rating.

It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English by native speaker students and Chinese ESL learners, paying particular attention to verbs which collocate with intensifiers. The data consisted of written production from three corpora: two of these are native English corpora: the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The third one is a recently created Chinese Learner English corpus, Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners (TECCL). Findings suggest that Chinese learners of English produce significantly more intensifier-verb collocations than native speaker students, but that their English attests a smaller variety of intensifier-verb collocations compared with the native speakers. Moreover, Chinese learners of English use the intensifier-verb collocation types just-verb, only-verb and really-verb very frequently compared with native speaker students. As regards verb collocates, the intensifiers hardly, clearly, well, strongly and deeply collocate with semantically different verbs in native and Chinese learner English. Compared with the patterns in Chinese learner English, the intensifiers in native speaker English collocate with a more stable and restricted set of verb collocates.

This paper explores agency fluctuations and identity transformations in Chinese English-majors and how they are related to the process of English learning. By tracing a group of students for four years in a Chinese university and conducting qualitative analyses to their oral narrations of learning experiences at different periods, the study has found that most participants started and ended their university life at relatively high levels of agency, with inevitable ups and downs in between. Agency fluctuations in the learners are the result of their identity positioning and repositioning within a complex and ever-changing context. Concordant or conflicting identities may co-exist within an individual learner and keep changing across different situations. Learner identities will cause increase or reduction in their investment in English learning, while their learning experience will in turn reinforce or undermine their identities. The study sheds light on the intricate relationships between agency, identity and language learning and therefore has important implications for English learning and teaching in China.

Based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis, the present study investigated the differential effects of three post-listening output tasks (gap-filling, translation, and sentence-making) on immediate acquisition and retention of such vocabulary dimensions as productive knowledge of orthography, receptive recall of meaning and form, and productive knowledge of grammatical functions. Ninety second-year English majors were divided into three groups to finish listening plus one of the post-listening tasks. The results showed that the post-listening output tasks had positive effects on immediate acquisition of productive vocabulary knowledge, partially in agreement with the Involvement Load Hypothesis. However, the effects on vocabulary knowledge retention were found to be largely inconsistent with the Involvement Load Hypothesis. The finding thus challenges this hypothesis in that involvement load is not the only determining factor and suggests that the theoretical construct of involvement load should be constructed with more caution.

The present study examines accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility of American English, Moroccan English, Turkmen English, and Chinese English, from the perspectives of three groups of listeners: native speakers of English and Chinese speakers of English with or without international experiences. Of the 145 listeners, 38 had face-to-face interviews. These listener groups were asked to listen to the recordings of the four English varieties and fill in a cloze test. Results indicated that the three listener groups differed significantly in rating comprehensibility of American English, Moroccan English and Chinese English but they did not give Turkmen English statistically different ratings; there were no significant differences in accentedness ratings except for Chinese English; and there were significant differences in the intelligibility scores of the four English varieties. In addition, with respect to seven linguistic variables—speed, clarity, intonation, smoothness and fluency, vocal intensity, pause, vocabulary and grammar, there were significant differences in three listener groups’ rating of six variables in American English except the one of “speed”. By contrast, Chinese English received significantly different ratings only in “proper speed”. No differences were found in the ratings for Moroccan English and Turkmen English. Finally, unlike Chinese listeners without international experiences, native listeners and Chinese listeners with international experiences shared some similarities in correlations between the ratings of accentedness and comprehensibility and those of linguistic variables on Moroccan English, Turkmen English, and Chinese English. However, the results for American English from Chinese listeners without international experiences and native listeners seemed to be more alike. Linguistic variables correlating with accentedness and comprehensibility of American English showed a mixed profile. Qualitative data provided more variant elaborations on the pronunciations and language uses of the speakers.

This study explored the distribution of three types of English formulaic language, which involves four categories in L1 Chinese L2 English learners’ speaking performance. In addition, it investigated the relationship between the English learners’ use of formulaic language and their spoken English fluency. A CCA (canonical correlation analysis) was conducted to examine the correlations between two sets of fluency variables (dependent variables) and linguistic variables of English formulaic language use (independent variables). The fluency variable set consists of: (1) temporal indices such as SR (speech rate), AR (articulation rate), MLR (mean length of run), and PTR (phonation time ratio); (2) linguistic variables of English formulaic language like F2R (two-word formulaic sequences/run ratio, B3R (three-word lexical bundles/run ratio), and B4R (four-word lexical bundles/run ratio). These are calculated according to the frequency of the English formulaic language in the speech samples of the participants (n = 86) across three academic levels. The results indicate that the learners’ spoken English fluency is highly related to their use of English formulaic language. Its limitations and future research directions are also discussed.

This review visualizes the knowledge domain of motor speech disorders (MSDs) in linguistics between 2000 and 2019 by means of scientometric methods. With topic searches, the study collected 869 bibliographic records and 20, 411 references from Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) of Thomson Reuter. The clustered and visualized document co-citation network of the MSDs knowledge domain in CiteSpace identifies 15 research foci in different periods, including apraxia of speech, acoustics, children, technology, aphemia, childhood apraxia of speech, primary progressive aphasia, speech motor delay, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, rhythm, foreign accent syndrome, phonation, phonological awareness, dose and speech perception. Revolving around linguistics, these foci could be divided into studies on speech characteristics of MSDs in terms of phonology and phonetics, remedies for MSDs in terms of neurolinguistics and acoustic phonetics, dysarthria secondary to neurological diseases based on pathological linguistics, subtypes of apraxia of speech, methods of MSDs based on auditory phonetics and a newly recognized subtype of MSDs. Meanwhile, the emerging trends of MSDs in linguistics are detected by the analysis of reference citation bursts, suggesting growing research in remedies for MSDs with the focus on assessments and effectiveness of treatments, speech characteristics and indexes of dysarthria secondary to neurological diseases and assistance to diagnose apraxia of speech. To sum up, the review has indicated that the acoustic measures to assess MSDs and acoustic remedies for dysarthria may not only be the past foci but also be future trends.