Research in English Language Pedagogy
Volume:11 Issue: 1, Winter 2023

The monograph "The Evolution of EMI Research in European Higher Education," authored by Molino et al. (2022), is essential for academics concerned with Applied Linguistics, World Englishes, English as an International Language, English as a Lingua Franca, and, more importantly, English-Medium Instruction (EMI). The book meticulously presents cutting-edge research on EMI in European tertiary education over the past two decades. It offers a thorough comparative analysis across five different countries, namely Denmark, Croatia, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, in order to identify gaps in our knowledge of pertinent theories, research, and practice. The book compiles the collaborative efforts of the writers on a database of over 200 resources that have been annotated and includes a variety of publications in different formats, types, and languages, as well as details on relevant research topics, methods, and conclusions. The nine-chapter book delves into different aspects of EMI implementation, including policies, attitudes, language use, assessment, training, learning outcomes, intercultural communication, and identity. This comprehensive book enables in-depth debates on both the most extensively investigated and the least-explored EMI topics in order to chart a course for future study both in the context of European higher education and beyond. The primary objective of this volume is to adopt a global viewpoint on the various phases of EMI deployment across settings and the development of research interests.

Transitivity and its associated clausal semantic processes are assumed to bear textual representations of reality and encode authors' conceptions of the world in linguistic terms. Given this and the differential epistemologies featuring quantitative and qualitative research, the transitivity analysis of their associated academic reports gains salience. This study involved the comparative transitivity analysis of the discussion sections of 40 quantitative and qualitative applied linguistics research articles. Relative distributions of the six transitivity processes in systemic functional linguistics (relational, material, verbal, mental, existential, and behavioral) were investigated through a series of Chi-Square tests. Moreover, the most frequent processes in quantitative and qualitative discussions were in terms of their semantic associations. The results showed that mental, relational, and behavioral processes were the most frequent in both quantitative and qualitative discussions. In addition, qualitative research articles' discussions housed more mental and material processes, while quantitative research articles' discussions involved a significantly higher number of relational, verbal, and behavioral processes. However, frequent processes were semantically similar in the two corpora. The results are discussed regarding the ideological and generic associations of quantitative and qualitative research. The findings have implications for academic writing instruction and shed light on linguistically encoded reality in quantitative and qualitative research articles.

Emergency online teaching and learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic has called for new research. The pandemic situation has increased the importance of creating a low-anxiety atmosphere and enhancing learners’ enjoyment levels. As a result, this study aimed to investigate the level of language learners’ emotions; that is, foreign language enjoyment (FLE) and foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) in online education together with the effect of teachers’ L1 use on these two effects. Participants were 81 intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in four intact classes, in two of which the teacher used both their first language (L1) and English, while in the other two, he only used English as the medium of instruction. They then completed a questionnaire, consisting of two parts, one designed by Horwitz et al. (1986) and the other one by Dewaele and MacIntyre (2014), which reveal the levels of FLCA and FLE, respectively. The paired t-test indicated higher levels of FLE compared to FLCA reported by the participants. The correlation analysis pointed to a significant negative correlation between FLE and FLCA, implying that as enjoyment increases, anxiety level decreases. Furthermore, according to the independent t-test, learners in both groups reported similar levels of FLE and FLCA. Thus, it could be concluded that teachers’ use of L1 did not affect the levels of FLE and FLCA in online education. The current study provides significant pedagogical implications for EFL practitioners.

In this study, the researchers investigated the possible effect of teaching content words through using Concept Mapping (CM) strategy plotted on two cognitive variables: language proficiency and age within some eighty Iranian young and old English language learners with higher and lower proficiency levels (Elementary vs. Intermediate) who were conveniently selected and classified into four classes. Their age range varied from 10 to 25 years old. After five sessions of treatment, the researchers gave the post-test. The results could not identify priority in the predictability power for any of the two age and proficiency variables F (2, 77) = 1.96, p < .15, R2 = .04. The findings can be helpful for English teachers as well as syllabus designers to use CM strategies for teaching vocabulary and including such materials in the sources regarding age and proficiency level as cognitive variables related to CM implementation.

Adopting processability theory (Pienemann, 1989), the present study sought to trace the dynamic trajectory of the morphosyntactic development in the English speech of 24 Iranian learners. The participants recruited were interviewed in the initial experiment and the final experiment sessions. The data were obtained through some simple communicative tasks which mediated the interviews the participating learners gave. English speech fragments elicited were submitted to a distributional analysis and emergence criteria. They appeared to be collectively explained by the processability theory hierarchy, notwithstanding their idiosyncratic structures. While regularities speak to universal stages, individual variations are an indication of constraints imposed by the developing L2 system. The findings of the present study have pedagogical implications for syllabus designers and teachers alike, which are discussed in due space.

The subject of corrective feedback in writing in English has always been a contentious issue among Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers despite an extensive body of research investigating the matter. This mixed-methods study aimed to examine the effectiveness of Interactive Metalinguistic Feedback (IMF) on the Iranian middle school students' ability in argumentative writing. To this aim, based on a multi-stage sampling, from 5 middle schools in Varamin, six classes were selected randomly; finally, 40 EFL students were sampled from the courses as the main participants of this study. A researcher-made writing test and a self-assessment questionnaire were utilized to collect the quantitative data.  The participants were grouped into Interactive Metalinguistic Feedback Class (IMFC) and Control Class (CC) and they were given a writing test as a pretest to ensure their homogeneity in terms of initial writing ability. After a 12-session treatment, a writing posttest was given to them. Furthermore, a self-assessment questionnaire was administered to collect data on students' attitudes toward the IMF in the learning-teaching process. To assemble the qualitative data, an interview accompanied by observation was conducted after the treatment to complement the quantitative results. The experimental findings of this current study revealed that IMF had a significant effect on the growth of argumentative writing ability among EFL students. The results of the qualitative part also indicated that social learning, situated learning, and dialogic interaction through IMF encouraged students to develop their writing skills as they co-constructed knowledge with others.

Simultaneous evaluation of the impact of different types of dynamic assessment on EFL learners' listening comprehension has never been conducted as far as the related literature discloses. Most of the studies connected with the dynamic assessment and various language skills have focused on speaking and writing performance. The present qualitative study aimed to examine Iranian EFL learners' attitudes toward the application of three models of dynamic assessment; namely, Interactionist Dynamic Assessment (I-DA), Group Dynamic Assessment (G-DA), and Computerized Dynamic Assessment (C-DA to Listening Comprehension Instruction. For this purpose, the Preliminary English Test (PET) was administered to 140 Iranian EFL female learners in four English Language Institutes in Ahvaz, Iran, who were chosen through availability sampling, and 80 of them were selected as homogeneous participants of the study. Then, they were given a perception questionnaire intended to elicit their insights about applying the different types of dynamic assessment. Three parallel questionnaires were constructed, each consisting of 15 items, and asking the learners about the efficacy of interactionist dynamic assessment in the I-DA group, group dynamic assessment in the G-DA group, and computerized dynamic assessment in the C-DA group. The descriptive analysis of the respondents' answers revealed that the degree of the IDA, GDA, and CDA learners' positive attitudes towards the application of DA reached statistical significance. This finding implies that EFL teachers may need to deliberate on the positive influence of different dynamic assessment models on EFL learners' listening comprehension improvement and, therefore, provide them with more opportunities to interact.

Academic writing in general and writing research articles in particular have long been considered a crucial mode of discourse, which is due to its challenging requirements for writers. Metadiscourse resources aid the reader in reading comprehension through coherence and cohesion. This study attempts to analyze research article discussion sections written by native authors regarding metadiscourse markers. To this end, 40 research article discussions by native writers from humanities were selected and analyzed. The purpose of the study is to discover the number and types of metadiscourse markers and rhetorical techniques used in composing these texts. The study continues on a qualitative research design, through text analysis, on the basis of Hyland’s (2005) Metadiscourse Model. The findings indicated that the writers used the interactive metadiscourse markers twice as often as the interactional ones. This research could have a direct bearing on teaching writing and material design to enable EFL learners to use an optimal extent of these resources effectively.