2025-10-10
This article makes the argument that institutions of higher education are responsible for showing care to faculty and students and must offer support for well-being within the policies and practices of the institution. The experiences of teaching during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic offered lessons that can be gleaned from faculty and student experiences to improve pedagogy and curriculum and increase well-being for all. The author reports on her dissertation study on facultystudent interaction and well-being, investigating the qualities of interactions between faculty and students that influenced their well-being. She collected qualitative data in early 2020, observing classrooms and interviewing faculty and students. The data analysis incorporated the instructional arc to examine intentions and reflections of both faculty and students. The discussion of these findings leads the author to propose a series of actions administrations can take to better support faculty: valuing teaching, compensating and rewarding care work, and seeking faculty feedback on their well-being. Faculty can support students’ well-being by infusing caring pedagogy and engaging in curricular and policy reform discussions that value student input. The author concludes with an illustration of the Flow of Care as a motivation for continued attention to how care influences wellbeing in higher education.
In Japan there has recently been a national movement to include students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) in mainstream education. In recent years, Japanese universities have seen a rise in SEN student numbers. As English is a compulsory subject for first year students at most universities in Japan, it is not unreasonable to predict that regular contact between SEN students and English faculty will occur on a regular basis. Studies have shown that negative attitudes of faculty members have had an adverse effect on SEN students (Kendall, 2016) and that SEN students are more likely to face obstacles such as lower academic expectations, inferior pedagogy, and a lack of access to the core curriculum (Wolanin & Steele, 2004). If this is true, then it is imperative that English-teaching faculty at Japanese universities are aware of any barriers in their classrooms that may contribute negatively to the education of SEN students. In order to determine if barriers exist, fifteen English teachers working at Japanese universities were interviewed to ascertain their experiences, interactions and perceptions with regards to SEN students. The findings show that, while positive attitudes and behavior toward SEN students exist, so do barriers to learning. The writers conclude that awareness building and training regarding SEN is key to reducing these barriers. Finally, examples of possible training courses are given, as are recommendations for university English teachers.
COVID-19 evidenced the need for emotional support and care by a generation of students widely exposed to information and communication technologies. This study aimed to explore professors' practices of caring for students to help them cope with their difficulties before, during, and after the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The participants were thirty English preservice teachers and ten professors at an Ecuadorian national university. The BarOn model, adjusted by García et al. (2018), was used to collect information regarding the pandemic's impacts on the students' emotional wellbeing. The research team adjusted the instrument to the formats of in-depth interviews, observation checklist, and focus groups. The categories and subcategories selected were students' care, health and well-being, resilience, and perseverance before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The results confirmed that the participants, even with their developed autonomy and maturity levels, required the guidance of professors to cope with stress, anxiety, and depression caused by social distancing, economic impacts, and loss of loved ones during the pandemic. The study concluded that literature group reading, open dialogues promoted by professors, and mentoring could generate supportive environments to improve students' capacity to deal with dramatic events.
Recently, in light of the global pandemic and calls for a shift in teaching with care (e.g. Bovill, 2020; Gravett, 2021), research has focused on the kinds of classroom discourse that create a supportive environment and establish social connectedness in blended learning environments or, in other words, teaching with care. According to Noddings (2012), teaching with care requires empathy. In fact, empathetic dialogue incorporated purposefully as part of a teacher’s instructional strategy can produce positive learning outcomes and may be considered relational pedagogy. Relational pedagogy focuses on establishing meaningful interpersonal relationships between teachers and their students (Hickey & Riddle, 2021). Yet, teachers find it hard to weave intentional empathy in their instruction. They find it challenging to sustain empathetic and dialogic interactions in class as many consider teaching to be ‘mechanical’ (p. 6) and their relationship with students to be more ‘business-oriented rather than a personal one’ (Sarki & Anjum, 2020, p. 24). This study aims to show that it could be done. It shows how I sought to be socially connected with and emotionally present for my students by focusing on empathetic and dialogic interactions in a critical thinking and communicating course. Data for this study were drawn from transcriptions of teacher-student interactions, student evaluation feedback and critical reflections. A convergent qualitative analysis through open and template coding revealed that empathetic and dialogic interactions do not need to be separately adopted instructional practices. They can be woven into classroom discourse while the teacher and students are engaged in intellectual discussions. Further, 38 pharmaceutical engineering undergraduates described their experiences of empathetic, dialogic interactions when they feel (1) cared for as individuals, (2) supported in their learning, and (3) acknowledged for the struggles they face. This study recommends that teachers of higher education adopt a relational pedagogy, focusing on their relationships with students and practising empathetic interactions. The practical suggestions of modelling the language of intellectual empathy and the communication of care will build a safe space for our students within diverse classrooms and a landscape of global uncertainties.
This reflective paper draws on my experience in caring for students as a lecturer in the English Language (EL) department of the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. My care considerations are broadly categorized into the three areas of positioning of the teacher in relation to students, negotiation of needs, and pedagogical design for students’ well-being. Being a former primary school teacher, I see myself as both teacher and mentor when conducting teacher-training modules in NIE. As the positioning of self in relation to students (Barrow, 2015; Noddings, 1984) informs both my interactions with them and my lesson plans, I see this positioning as a starting point in care considerations for teaching. In negotiation of needs, I discuss open communication channels that allow the deepening of understanding of different needs and expectations (Baice et al., 2021; Gravett & Winstone, 2022). The third area of care focuses on “care-full” planning of curriculum structures that consider students’ needs and limitations (Anderson et al., 2020, p.11; Conceição & Howles, 2020). I also consider the state of Singapore’s highly competitive education landscape in order to highlight the specific needs of local university students, such as the need for teachers to create safe learning spaces that encourages cooperation rather than competition for holistic development (Noddings, 2012). Other than anecdotes from my EL classes in NIE, I refer to the qualitative student feedback that I received between 2019 and 2022 in my reflections on the impact of my caring methods.
The study explored the relationship between foreign language anxiety, motivation and intercultural communication competence of Chinese university students in top-notch programs. 223 undergraduate students from a leading university in China participated in the study by filling in a battery of questionnaire including the modified versions of Gardner’s Classroom Anxiety Scale and Attitude towards English, Noels et al.’s Language Learning Orientations Scale, Chen and Starosta’s intercultural sensitivity scale, and Portalla and Chen’s intercultural effectiveness scale. 10 of the participants then joined in the follow-up interviews, sharing their personal experience of English learning and intercultural communication. Results indicated that: (1) these students experienced a low-to-medium level of anxiety, and a medium-to-high level of motivation in general, in which intrinsic motivation appeared to be at a higher level than the extrinsic motivation; (2) there was a statistically significant negative correlation between their English use anxiety and English learning motivation; (3) they have experienced a low level of interaction confidence and interaction enjoyment in intercultural communication, and they had also expressed medium to high level in other aspects, for example interactant respect and interaction attentiveness; (4) as for the relationship with intercultural communication competence, the English use anxiety had statistically significant negative correlations with most aspects, while different aspects of English learning motivation had a statistically significant positive correlation with each other. Implications for future research and teaching were also discussed.
Plagiarism is becoming more widespread at Canadian universities, but what are English-as-asecond-language (ESL) student perspectives on their challenges to avoid plagiarism and university strategies to support students? This paper presents a study of English-for-academic-purpose (EAP) writing students at a Canadian university. The study employed semi-structured individual qualitative interviews with 20 students who had completed an advanced writing course. The course discussed plagiarism and APA 7th edition extensively. The participants represented ten countries and ten first languages. One 60-minute interview per participant was conducted online. The data were analyzed qualitatively for recurrent themes. Research findings indicate that the predominant cause of the participants' challenges was their lack of experience using citations before entering the university. Thus, the participants found APA 7th edition hard to observe initially and paraphrasing an enormous challenge. Based on the participant perspectives and related literature, the paper proposes a strategy to implement from the semester start comprising: (1) interactive training workshops with explanations, models, templates, resources, and student practice with citations and academic writing, (2) access to self-correction software like Turnitin and Grammarly Premium, and (3) simultaneous oral-written teacher feedback (Hu, 2019).
Most learners of a second or foreign language fall short of necessary academic vocabulary, and the problem has become increasingly evident in the context of technical fields such as mechanical engineering. This paper reports on the development of a corpus-based academic word list for mechanical engineering graduate students from a total of 120 academic articles collected from four internationally recognized journals. The created corpus called Mechanical Engineering Academic Corpus (MEAC) has 755,794 words. With Coxhead's word selection criteria and Range software programme for lexical analysis, a 398-word/289-word-family Mechanical Engineering Academic Word List (MEAWL) was constructed. Comparisons show that MEAWL is only approximately half of Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL) in size (289 word families vs.570 word families) but has a higher coverage in MEAC than AWL (12.82% vs.11.95%), and therefore may be more suitable for mechanical engineering students, who will spend much less time on vocabulary learning. The practical value of MEAWL such as its pedagogical implication in material development is also discussed.
This article presents an interview with Professor Wang, a renowned researcher in statistics and language education. He shares his research journey, from choosing English as his major to becoming passionate about statistics after assisting his supervisor with data analysis. He also discusses his research findings and implications for English teachers and junior researchers, as well as his experiences and advice as an academic leader and a journal editor in the USA and China. The interview provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in the field of language learning and teaching.
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