Indonesian JELT
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Anxiety in oral English classrooms: A case study in China
Get PDFThis paper reports the result of a case study on anxiety in oral English classrooms in a Chinese university. By way of survey and reflective journals, the study revealed that (1) anxiety was experienced by a considerable number of students when speaking English in class, (2) the students reported to be the most anxious when singled out to speak English in class or giving presentations at the front while the least during pair work, (3) a multitude of variables such as lack of vocabulary, low English proficiency and memory disassociation contributed to student anxiety in class, and (4) most students felt helpless about being anxious when speaking English in class. Finally, some suggestions were discussed in order to help students reduce anxiety and become more confident to speak English in oral language classrooms, thus ultimately enhance their learning of oral English
Probing rhetorical structures of advanced learners' expository prose: A data-based approach
Get PDFLogic, as the basis of rhetoric, always affects the way ideas, words, and evidence are assembled into one coherent structure. As rhetoric varies from culture to culture, it frequently brings about awkwardness, inappropriateness as well as immaturity of an expository prose if it does not meet the convention of organizational patterns and signals as expected by the readers having that rhetoric. A number of scholars have highlighted the importance and insights of contrastive rhetoric for the teaching of academic writing. This paper describes various rhetorical problems encountered by dozens of advanced Indonesian learners of English taking an academic writing class at AMINEF (American Indonesian Exchange Foundation) who plan to study in the USA. This paper concludes with the caveat that difficulties in adopting English rhetoric is not simply a linguistic problem but includes cultural understanding and awareness of its style. This paper offers insightful writing instructions to cope with the existing problems
Upending traditional writing instruction: A plea to teach visual texts in L1 and L2 classrooms
Get PDFWith the advent of multi-media, interpreting visual texts has become an important function of literacy. Yet, few L1 or L2 English writing classes devote any time to these texts, in part because many L1 and L2 teachers do not know how to interpret these texts themselves. This article suggests two methods for understanding visual discourse: the interpretation of images, pictures, and graphics within a system of similar visual artifacts and the location of those images, pictures, and graphics within a historical and cultural context. As an example, two graphics on the University of Athens’ homepage were examined
Development in L2 writing after a semester of study in an Australian university
Get PDFThere is a common expectation, particularly amongst international students, that studying in an English-medium university would lead to an improvement in their writing skills (as well as other language skills). However, to date there has been very little research about the impact of studying in an English medium university on the development of learners’ writing. This paper reports on study which was part of a larger project. The larger project, using a test-re-test design, investigated whether the reading and writing skills of international students improved after one semester of study in an Australian university. The study reported here analysed the writing test scripts of 20 students whose global writing scores indicated improvement in writing and who had not accessed any language support during the semester. A range of quantitative and qualitative measures were used to analyse the data, including measures of linguistic fluency, accuracy and complexity. The study found that the greatest improvements occurred in how learners structured their writing and developed their ideas. There was also a marked improvement in the formality of learners’ language, but less evidence of improvement in language accuracy and complexity. These findings suggest that some aspects of written language may need more explicit language instruction in order to improve
Exploring the repair procedures used in non-linguistic skill teaching and assessing their relevance for language teaching: The 'Start' project
No full textThis article reports on research conducted in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK. ‘START’ (Skills Training And its Relevance to Teaching) examined some of the teaching procedures and practices followed by teachers of non-linguistic skills (classical singing, table tennis and flight simulation) and identified how these procedures and practices could potentially be applied to the teaching of foreign languages. The context for the research is briefly outlined and the methodology of the study described in this article. The major part of the article discusses the findings in the key area of error correction: explicit other-repair, identifying potential trouble-sources before they occur, modelling, and developing critical thinking in students
Construction grammar and English language teaching
No full textThis paper begins by noting that disappointments have been expressed with the communicative approach to language teaching, before discussing a number of problems involved in its implementation. This leads to the question of how English language teaching can attend to grammatical form, but without sacrificing the focus on communicative function. The paper then points to a convergence between strands of research in both theoretical and applied linguistics. In theoretical linguistics, the increasing prominence of ‘construction grammars’ resonates nicely with recent suggestions that ‘lexical phrases’ or ‘formulaic sequences’ should be given greater focus in language teaching. The rest of the paper goes on to consider the pedagogical value of the notion of a construction
noticing and grammatical accuracy in ESL learners' writing
Get PDFThis paper presents an overview of an exploratory study on the role of noticing in improving written accuracy. The noticing hypothesis, as conceptualised by Schmidt (1990, 2001), focuses on the need to enhance learners’ awareness of target language items in order to convert input into intake and subsequently internalise input as part of interlanguage. This study also takes into account the comprehensible output hypothesis (Swain, 1985, 1998) that proposes that output can promote noticing as it encourages learners to become aware of the gap between their interlanguage and the target language usage. These concepts have been translated into three types of feedback techniques for written output and the techniques are Enhancement, Reformulation, and Sequential. All three techniques function as a means to enhance learners’ awareness of past time forms and are therefore form-focused in nature but avoid explicit explanations of those target forms. Results indicate that noticing is influenced by the types of learner responses to the techniques. The structural components of a target form may influence the success of its acquisition. Statistical results suggest that all three instructional techniques were equally successful in enhancing noticing and in increasing learners’ written accuracy
ESL writing variablity: Writing tasks, gender, and proficiency level
Get PDFResearch focusing on L1 (native speakers of English) writers has shown that students tend to perform differently on different writing tasks. L1 students perform better on narrative and descriptive writing tasks than argumentative. In fact, some scholars have suggested that L1 students lack a schema for argumentative writing, which perhaps contribute to their poor performance on argumentative writing tasks. This tendency seems also applicable to L2 (non-native speakers of English) writers. This paper reports the findings of a study on the impact of narrative and argumentative writing tasks, gender and proficiency level on the quality of Malaysian English as a second language (ESL) learners’ writing. The findings of this study are discussed in the light of variability in ESL writing. Their implications for writing assessment practices are also highlighted
Irregularities in vocabulary load and distribution in same level textbooks written by different writers
Get PDFA syllabus provides a focus for what to be studied and how the contents should be selected and sequenced. In Malaysia, the syllabus has an additional role that is to guide the textbook writers in producing textbooks for school use. The English Language Programmes for Malaysian secondary schools provide more than one textbook for every academic level. These textbooks must comply with the syllabus in order to achieve the same learning objectives at the end of each programme. There will also be public examinations at the end of Form Three and Form Five. Two Form 2 textbooks were chosen and WordSmith 3.0 was used to analyse these textbooks to identify whether the textbooks were similar and had included all the contents listed in the syllabus. The findings show that one of the textbooks is relatively better that the other in terms of types, distribution of words, presentation of items in the syllabus and repetition of new linguistic items throughout the textbook. This reveals that ad hoc writing of textbooks by different writers for a similar level can lead to irregularities, the most severe problem being non-conformity to syllabus requirements
How ESL learners with different proficiency levels handle unfamiliar vocabulary in reading
Get PDFThis article presents findings from research into spontaneous vocabulary handling strategies employed by a sample of 20 Singapore secondary students from a typical neighborhood school. Following the definition of the term ‘strategy’ referring to a specific action or step, I identified 21 types of strategies used by the participants, and compared the way the high and low proficiency students employed them by comparatively examining the majority usage strategies of the two groups. To find the evidence of their strategy use, think-aloud protocols paired with immediate retrospective interviews and general interviews when necessary were analyzed. The study showed that the students mobilized multiple strategies on individual words and that the high proficiency students used strategies both more flexibly and effectively than their low proficiency counterparts. The differences in the use of strategies between the groups suggest a need for learner strategy training and awareness raising, an issue which is also discussed in this article