Challenges in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Teaching and Learning Research

Abstract

A significant measure of pedagogical scholarship on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) higher education teaching and learning commonly prioritizes a ‘tips and tricks' approach to achieving positive student outcomes. Such often excludes or minimizes the active use of theory, being premised on problematic assumptions that can also potentially stagnate the field itself through circular reasoning. In this chapter, the author offers three considerations as a foundation for critical approaches to language teaching and learning. Firstly, the author acknowledges the performative and discursive capacity of language in shaping teaching and learning experiences; secondly, learners are positioned in this chapter as active agents in the learning process who have the potential to reinterpret or reject teaching and learning approaches; and finally, an argument is made for audience-specific teaching and learning practices using demographic data. To exemplify the application of these three considerations, Stuart Hall's Encoding-Decoding Theory serves as a key theoretical framework in this chapter, in conceptualizing critical approaches to teaching Generation Z learners.