Volume 10, Number 1, June 2013
For decades, there has been a shortage of language teachers in the US and other parts of the world. While teacher retirements and attrition certainly help explain the shortage, teachers’ sense of efficacy in teaching languages also plays a role, especially among novice instructors (Swanson, 2010a). The present quantitative study focuses on measuring teacher education candidates’ sense of efficacy in teaching languages at two points: near the beginning of the teacher education program and one year following program completion. Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy’s (2001) Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale and Swanson’s (2010a) Foreign Language Teacher Efficacy Scale were used to measure participants’ sense of efficacy in teaching. Data analysis revealed that participants’ sense of efficacy in the area of content knowledge increased over time. However, mixed results in participants’ confidence in other areas such as student engagement and classroom management were found. The findings have implications for teacher education program and program directors.
This paper presents findings of a study which investigated how students’ language background (i.e. character-based or non-character based L1) influenced the way they learned kanji in the same classroom (i.e. with the same instruction). The study was conducted in an intermediate level, kanji-focused course where a core group of the cohort were non-character based L1 background (NCB: English) learners. The study examines the NCB students’ kanji learning in the course, in comparison to that by character based L1 (CB) learners in the same course, and explores the different performance of the CB and NCB learners. The findings indicated that the instruction in class assisted both the NCB and CB learners to improve their kanji learning. The different performance of each group suggested different paths to learning kanji. However, their test results showed a significant overlap in their kanji, thus suggesting some common progression of kanji learning.
Should We Teach Strategies? (pp. 35–39)
I suggest that effective strategies are those that make input more comprehensible and that help us use writing to solve problems. It may be useful to teach some strategies directly, but some strategies may be innate, and others could develop as a result of comprehensible input. Those that can be taught help us recover from inefficient strategies we learned in school.
By drawing the on APPRAISAL Theory (Martin & White, 2005), an analytical framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) for interpersonal meanings, this article reports on a case study that investigated the use of evaluative language between the high- and low-rated English argumentative essays by two Chinese university EFL students. The study found that the high-rated essay successfully employed appraisal values to foreground authorial voice and position readers, thus manipulating arguability of utterances and building strong persuasion. The study suggests that more attention should be given to the teaching of EFL/ESL writing from an interpersonal perspective and proposes the necessity of explaining EFL/ESL students’ use of evaluative language from both linguistic and socio-cultural perspectives.
It is known that metacognitive strategies are important for successful second/foreign language readers. This paper investigated the metacognitive strategies of English major students in academic reading at Guizhou University in China. All of the participants were third-year English majors. The data were collected by means of a Metacognitive Strategy Questionnaire (MSQ), a semi-structured interview and a reading comprehension test. The results revealed the overall metacognitive strategy use in academic reading comprehension of Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students with both high and low proficiency. The in-depth analysis of their differences was also illustrated. The results indicated that there was a significant positive correlation between metacognitive strategy use and English reading achievement. This study bears crucial pedagogical implications in the teaching of reading for EFL learners.
This study aimed to investigate technical university learners’ academic reading difficulties, strategies, and learning needs. The participants involved were English and non-English majors at a technical university. The results of a qualitative open-ended interviews indicated that most of the participants struggled to master their subject disciplines because of inadequate linguistic proficiency and that their academic reading difficulties could be broadly attributed to deficiency in their language ability and their inability to comprehend content matter. Vocabulary was perceived to be the primary challenge when reading content-area textbooks. Moreover, while the learners’ reading strategies and needs varied across disciplines, most learners showed a desire for greater support (e.g. in highlighting key points, and pre-teaching terminologies, sentence structures, grammar, and reading strategies). These findings have implications for appropriate syllabus planning as well as the need to rethink the roles of EFL teachers for academic reading.
Teachers’ quality questions contribute to enhancing students’ existing thinking and reasoning skills. The practice of teacher questioning in the EFL reading classroom is critical in supporting student learning, especially in such contexts where there is limited research on these issues as in Indonesia. This study investigated the practice of teacher questioning and teaching reading in secondary schools in Indonesia. Teachers from three grade 11 classes from three different secondary schools participated in this multiple-site case study which was employed to generate rich explanatory data across sites. Data were gathered from the teachers in the form of observations, interviews, and textbook analysis. The findings from this study show that the teachers relied on the textbooks for pedagogies for teaching reading and for the kinds of questions they asked to assist in reading comprehension. The teachers were exposed mainly to low-level questions. Thus, they faced some challenges in generating high-level questions in these conditions, and required assistance in order to do this. The study provides important information about the practice of questioning strategies in a foreign language context in Indonesia and put forward implications for changes in reading lessons.
The study examines the effects of enhancing self-regulated learning in the teaching of spoken communication on speaking efficacy and performances among second year students attending spoken and written communication lessons in the College of Business and Economics of Bahir Dar University. In this study, two sections consisting of 91 participants were included. To gather data, scales, tests, and diaries were used. Descriptive statistics, paired t-test, independent samples t-test, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) were applied to analySe the quantitative data. On the other hand, the qualitative data were analysed using such steps as look-ing for themes and coding, categoriSing codes of similar content, and writing summary and interpretation. The outputs of the ANCOVA show that 56% of the variance in speaking performance and 39% of the variance in speaking efficacy are accounted for by the self-regulated learning intervention controlling for initial differences. The qualitative analysis also indicated that the experimental group improved its speaking efficacy and performances. Overall, the results reveal that the experimental group surpasses the control group in both speaking efficacy and performances. The results imply that attention needs to be paid to the enhancement of self-regulated learning in the process of teaching spoken communication.
The study examines the effects of enhancing self-regulated learning in the teaching of spoken communication on speaking efficacy and performances among second year students attending spoken and written communication lessons in the College of Business and Economics of Bahir Dar University. In this study, two sections consisting of 91 participants were included. To gather data, scales, tests, and diaries were used. Descriptive statistics, paired t-test, independent samples t-test, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) were applied to analySe the quantitative data. On the other hand, the qualitative data were analysed using such steps as look-ing for themes and coding, categoriSing codes of similar content, and writing summary and interpretation. The outputs of the ANCOVA show that 56% of the variance in speaking performance and 39% of the variance in speaking efficacy are accounted for by the self-regulated learning intervention controlling for initial differences. The qualitative analysis also indicated that the experimental group improved its speaking efficacy and performances. Overall, the results reveal that the experimental group surpasses the control group in both speaking efficacy and performances. The results imply that attention needs to be paid to the enhancement of self-regulated learning in the process of teaching spoken communication.