This paper describes a two-year action research project at a Japanese university which investigated the implementation of two EFL lecture courses. It outlines some of the challenges of conducting EFL lectures and offers suggestions about how they may be overcome. These lecture courses aimed to help prepare students for study abroad at English-medium universities. The courses were designed to be accessible and engaging for students and considered factors including lecturer talk-time, guided note-taking, and opportunities for review. The first cycle of the study, using a researcher journal and questionnaire, identified issues including a lack of active participation, and a near absence of revision between classes. Measures were taken to address these shortcomings in the second cycle, including the introduction of participation extra-credits and supplementary reading materials with weekly assessment. Peer observations and questionnaires were used to assess the relative success of the new interventions. It was found that while students responded positively to the courses overall, they were less enthusiastic about the guided note-taking and the pace of the classes, and issues remained with both participation and reaction to the further readings. The findings suggest promising avenues for further investigation and future course development.
2025-10-10
The unprecedented use of English as a means of international and intercultural communication around the world has made it increasingly unrealistic and inappropriate to hold to the native speaker norms. This paper examines preservice teachers’ perceptions of teaching English as an International Language (EIL), employing qualitative methods. The participants were 31 teacher candidates enrolled in an undergraduate course “Teaching English as a Second Language” in the teacher education program of a public university in a Southwestern State of the U.S. The data sources included online postings, interview transcripts, and synthesis papers. This study revealed that although the participants were all aware of the heterogeneity of the English language and were willing to promote multilingualism, the majority of them still clung to the notion that “Standard” English is the only variety of English that should be taught in the classroom. This paper maintains that in order to raise classroom teachers’ awareness of teaching EIL, teacher educators should demolish American or British English as the orthodox and establish a new pedagogic model that de-emphasizes the native speaker norms and embraces all varieties of the English language.
This paper compares high-graded essays to low-graded essays in terms of various ‘Claims’ resources used by undergraduate students. The theoretical basis of the Claim is mainly derived from the ENGAGEMENT system of the appraisal theory within a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL ) framework. The ENGAGEMENT system is concerned with how writers engage with readers through internal voices of Averral and external voices of ‘Attribution’. Data was collected from 12 persuasive essays written by both international and local Australian students enrolled in an EAP course running at a regional university in Australia. The text analyses reveal significant differences between high-graded essays and low-graded essays in using Claim resources. While successful writers can produce essays that display a balanced incorporation of strategies of internal Averral into their presentation of external Attribution within particular schematic stages, poor writers fail to display the pattern. Pedagogical implications will be discussed in terms of academic literacy and integrity.
Following Hamers and Blanc’s (2000) main types of codeswitching (CS) and Bautista’s (1999) framework on functions of CS, two distinct sources of data were used to identify and analyze various code switches made by the three female college freshman students during their group discussion, and the two adults (male and female) engaged in a 2-hour audio-taped recording of a one-on-one interview. Results of the study reveal that codeswitching in both groups occurred at the inter-sentential, extra-sentential, and intra-sentential levels. The present study also validates D’Souza’s Competence-related Code-Mixing (CM) (where a person’s competence in L2 is low and therefore has to go back to L1) and Culture-related CM (where a person uses terms and expressions in the heritage language that may not have an accurate translation in another language). In light of these findings, pedagogical implications especially in the Philippine language education contexts are given.
In this discussion of a recent course design at Duke Kunshan University, a Sino-American joint university located in Kunshan, China, rhetorical theory is used to facilitate the development of academic presentation skills in the context of an EFL Academic Communication Skills (ACS) course for postgraduate students. Specifically, audience awareness, the rhetorical situation, kairos, and visual design are used to help students develop fluency, confidence, and rhetorical effectiveness in academic presentations. The article begins with a discussion of the teaching context, a rationale for the innovations described, and an explication of the course content before expanding on how theories from the disciplines of rhetoric can be applied to academic presentations. In the end, the author argues that incorporating rhetorical theory into an ACS course is not a replacement for a language-centric approach to teaching presentation skills, but a necessary supplement that will help prepare postgraduate students for academic and professional careers.
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