Willy Ardian Renandya

The quality of students’ teachers can have a major impact on their lives during and after students’ formal education. This article proposes nine areas for teacher improvement toward the goal of being good teachers. These areas for possible improvement include: (a) language proficiency, (b) pedagogical knowledge and skills, (c) understanding of their students, (d) balance of implicit and explicit teaching, (e) membership in communities of teachers, (f) participation in lifelong learning, (g) use of technology, (h) promotion of student engagement and (i) safeguarding of their own health.

In many EFL contexts, the ability to speak fluently is often the goal of L2 learning. However, L2 teachers may not be well-equipped to help their L2 learners achieve this goal. Some may still be using antiquated teaching methods that may in fact impede or even harm learners’ speaking development, while others may use teaching methods that overly emphasize certain dimensions of speaking skills (e.g., linguistic or cognitive aspect) and neglect the other equally important dimensions (e.g., affective and metacognitive aspects). This paper first examines two approaches to teaching speaking: the direct/controlled approach and the indirect/transfer approach, highlighting their major strengths and weaknesses. It then describes a more recent approach, proposed by Goh and Burns (2012), which combines the strengths of the older approaches into a more coherent and comprehensive model for teaching speaking. A lesson plan will then be presented to exemplify how this approach might pan out in a speaking lesson designed for a group of intermediate students in China.

Research to date suggests that extensive reading (ER) can help develop learners’ language competence. Students who read a great deal in the target language are more likely to develop a higher overall proficiency. This article aimed to examine the extent, range, and nature of research activities on ER and identify gaps in the existing literature on the effects of ER on language learning. To identify relevant studies, EBSCOhost, ProQuest, and Web of Science databases were searched using the following search terms: extensive reading or graded readers or free voluntary reading (TI) and extensive reading or graded readers or free voluntary reading (AB). A total of 109 studies published from 2001–2021 were then analysed to determine the characteristics and emergent themes of prior studies on ER. Our analysis revealed that the existing studies placed greater emphasis on improving learners’ reading attitudes than learners’ linguistic abilities and language use (e.g., speaking and writing skills). Given the potential impact of ER on students’ overall language development, not just increased reading proficiency and skills, the ER research base should be substantially expanded so that we know more about its effects on diverse aspects of language learning.

Choosing the right international journal for your research paper can be a daunting task and the process may seem complicated. This is particularly so if you have had little or no experience publishing in an international journal. This paper provides practical guidelines that could help novice writers find answers to questions such as these: What types of journals are available in the field of TESOL and Applied Linguistics? Which types of journals are the most suitable for their papers? What are some of the key criteria that institutions use to assess the quality of a journal? What is the review process like? How long is the wait time? What is the rejection rate of the journal? Are there journals that have lower rejection rates for novice writers? The paper also lists a number of journals that novice writers could aim for in order to increase the acceptance rates of their submissions.

Studies on learner demotivation has attracted the attention of second language (L2) researchers and scholars worldwide in recent years. In this paper, L2 demotivation is defined as external and internal influences which can lead to the diminishing motivation to study the target language. This paper further identifies and discusses significant influences in the form of teacher- and learner-related factors that affect learner demotivation. For teacher-related influences, inappropriate teaching styles and attitudes, poor teaching quality as well as teacher demotivation have been cited by several studies as key factors of learner demotivation. Learner demotivation can also be affected by learner-related influences arising mainly from intrinsic issues such as low self-esteem or poor self-worth. Suggestions for pedagogical implications include the enhancement of teachers’ professional development, the use of 5Ts (Teacher, Teaching Methodology, Text, Task and Test), as well as imparting students’ coping strategies for self-regulation. Finally, we suggest that future studies on demotivation could explore less commonly applied theories and research methods and expand demotivation research to include older L2 learners.

The study investigates the vocabulary profile of a set of English textbooks New Senior English for China, which is widely used for senior secondary education in China. It examines how the words required by the 2017 National English Curriculum Standard for General Senior Secondary Education in China are covered, repeated and distributed in the textbooks. The results show that the textbooks cover only about 80% of the lemmas required by the 2017 English Curriculum Standard. Among the lemmas covered in the textbooks, half of them are repeated less than five times in the textbooks. Most of the lemmas which recur more than five times in the textbooks have dispersion values above 0.5. Lemmas with dispersion values below 0.1 are mainly composed of theme-based words. Although the study indicates that some words are distributed favorably, the textbooks fail to provide sufficient coverage and repetition of the words required by the 2017 English Curriculum Standard. Therefore, extra exposure and repetition of these words are required for optimal learning.

Despite numerous theoretical discussions and empirical studies that have been generated in the past 30 years or so, a strategic approach to teaching L2 listening has not been whole-heartedly embraced by practitioners, in particular when they work with lower proficiency learners of English. I offer five possible reasons for this: first, the empirical evidence supporting listening strategy instruction is not particularly strong; second, strategy instruction places a rather heavy demand on the teachers; third, teachers are not totally convinced that strategy instruction can solve their students’ listening difficulties which often stem from basic decoding (word recognition) problems; fourth, lower proficiency learners have not acquired a threshold level of proficiency to take full advantage of strategy instruction; finally, there is a possibility that learners may not in fact need to learn strategies, as they may have acquired and used these strategies in their first language. Of these, the first reason, lack of strong empirical support, deserves serious attention from advocates of strategy-based instruction.

Studies on graded readers used in extensive reading have tended to focus on vocabulary. This study set out to investigate the linguistic profile of graded readers, taking into account both grammar and lexis. A corpus of 90 readers were tagged according to the variables in Biber’s Multidimensional (MD) analysis, using the Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT). These variables were analysed using latent class cluster analysis to determine whether the graded readers can be grouped by similarity in linguistic features. While MAT analysis surfaced more similarities than differences within the corpus, latent class clustering produced an optimal 3-class model. Post-hoc concordance analyses showed that graded readers may be categorised as having three classes of complexity: beginner, transitional, and advanced. The findings in the study suggest that selection of reading materials for extensive reading should take into consideration grammatical complexity as well as lexis. The linguistic profiles compiled in this study detail the grammatical structures and the associated lexical items within the structures that teachers may expect their students to encounter when reading graded readers. In addition, the profiles may be of benefit to teachers seeking to supplement extensive reading with form-focused instruction.

Textbooks are an essential component in the classroom, making it extremely crucial to regularly evaluate textbooks used in schools so that their pedagogical contributions towards the teaching and learning processes can be guaranteed.
This study aimed to identify and analyse the cognitive levels of questions available in Secondary Three “All About English” textbooks, which have been used in Singapore since 2013. The objective of carrying out the analysis was to determine the overall cognitive rigor of questions, using a matrix superimposing two taxonomies: Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy and Webb’s Domain-of-Knowledge (DOK) model.
The sample of this study consisted of questions from the Express and Normal Technical (NT) English language textbooks from Hodder Education, where 346 questions were analysed in total. The cognitive rigor matrix was used in the classification of the questions.
The results revealed that in the Express level textbook, most questions were within the cell [2,3] (35.9%), consisting of Understand and “Strategic Thinking” questions. In contrary, for the Normal Technical level textbook, most questions were within the cell [5,4] (17.6%), consisting of Evaluate and “Extended Thinking” questions. Overall, there was a good mix of Lower-order thinking skill (LOTS) and Higher-order thinking skill (HOTS) questions. However, not all cognitive levels were clearly varied, with an over-emphasis on Understand and Evaluate questions, neglecting Remember and Apply questions.
In light of the results, it is recommended that coursebook writers incorporate questions of varied cognitive demands. Similar studies should also be conducted regularly to evaluate the effectiveness of school textbooks in their potential in enhancing students’ critical thinking.