Adult ESL Research Articles

The effect of Task-Based Language Teaching on the speaking fluency and accuracy of adult ESL learners: a study on trainee teachers in West Bengal

The effect of Task-Based Language Teaching on the speaking fluency and accuracy of adult ESL learners: a study on trainee teachers in West Bengal

The Effect of Pre-reading Strategies on Adult ESL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension plays a significant role in second language learning. Yet, it is still the most challenging skill to acquire for second language learners. Because reading is an active process, research indicated that readers need to apply different strategies before, during, and after reading. This study aimed to examine the effect of pre-reading strategies on reading comprehension of adult ESL learners. Fourteen adult ESL students participated in the study. Data were collected through pre and post reading comprehension tests during a period of three weeks. Students’ performance was measured before they were introduced to the pre-reading strategies and was compared to their performance after learning and applying those strategies. Results showed that students’ scores increased significantly after using pre-reading strategies.

Exploring Indonesian EFL students’ lexical diversity and its correlation with academic vocabulary use in an online academic writing environment

This paper reports on a quasi-experimental study designed to explore the relationship between lexical diversity and academic vocabulary use among Indonesian EFL university students engaging in online academic writing discussions and assignments. The study analysed 11,624 tokens and 5437 types collected from students' contributions in online discussions and academic writing assignments. Findings revealed that the level of lexical diversity among the students was significantly varied depending on the text length and the total amount of data. It was found most students were indicated to possess average ESL level of academic writing with a D value ranging from 50 to 70 while some others indicated a high level of adult ESL with developed academic text in the range between 70 and 80 D level. Moreover, it was also found that the degree of lexical diversity was not affected by the writing topic familiarity or students' academic year. Findings revealed a statistically significant negative correlation between measures of lexical diversity and academic vocabulary use. Contrary to expectations, while a diversified vocabulary generally correlates positively with student writing performance, this relationship reverses in contexts emphasizing the academic quality of writing. These results highlight the complex dynamics of lexical usage in academic writing and suggest that mere lexical diversity does not always equate to higher academic writing quality. This study contributes to a critical understanding of how lexical diversity functions in digital academic environments and offers implications for English language teaching practices in higher education settings.

Blocking and Interleaving Effects on English Speaking Proficiency of Adult ESL Learners

Blocking and Interleaving Effects on English Speaking Proficiency of Adult ESL Learners

How a Phonics-Based Intervention, L1 Orthography, and Item Characteristics Impact Adult ESL Spelling Knowledge

How a Phonics-Based Intervention, L1 Orthography, and Item Characteristics Impact Adult ESL Spelling Knowledge

Halt for Speaking

Conversation analytic (CA) research on multimodality has mostly focused on the “movement” rather than the “freezing” of such movement, except for a small body of work on gesture holds mostly in sign language and several European languages. Based on two large corpora of video-recorded family interactions and adult ESL classroom interactions in American English, this conversation analytic study demonstrates how halts of eating and drinking are carefully configured to preserve contiguity by facilitating completion and repair. Findings expand our understanding of the interdependence between multimodality and sequence organization within the larger context of managing multiactivity and materiality.

Impact of Undocumented Immigrants on Adult ESL during COVID-19 and Beyond

Impact of Undocumented Immigrants on Adult ESL during COVID-19 and Beyond

Adult ESL Learners’ Perceptions of Participatory Teaching Methods: A Narrative Inquiry

Adult ESL Learners’ Perceptions of Participatory Teaching Methods: A Narrative Inquiry

Parenting in a new land: the influence of English language proficiency on immigrant parents’ experiences with intergenerational challenges

Abstract The purpose of this survey study was to explore how the English language proficiency of Asian and Latin American immigrant parents influenced their levels of intergenerational challenges as reflected in their experiences with diminished parental authority, role reversal, acculturation gap, value discrepancy, family conflict, and emotional distance. The 86 participants were Asian and Latin American immigrant parents from eight classes at three adult ESL programs in Southern California. They reported lower levels of intergenerational challenges than was expected based on the extant literature, and their experiences were quite similar regardless of their adult ESL class levels. Overall, the parents from different ethnic backgrounds shared more commonalities than differences as language and cultural learners raising children in a new land. This study sheds light on the experience of immigrant parents raising children in ethnic enclaves and pushes against common discourses about immigrants’ acculturation. The findings suggest that preserving their linguistic and cultural heritage has become increasingly important to many immigrant communities and may play a crucial role in how they navigate their roles as parents.

The Relationship Between Informal and Incidental Learning of Volunteers in Adult ESL and Their Intercultural Maturity

Adult ESL is a high-turnover field, and volunteers are a critical component of the adult ESL workforce. Existing research focuses on learners’ experience in the classroom. There is limited attention to how teachers might change as a result of encountering immigrant learners in adult ESL. The purpose of this study was to understand the informal and incidental learning activities experienced by teachers in adult ESL settings and the impact of the learning on their intercultural maturity development. This study is based on survey data from 212 adult ESL teachers. The results demonstrated that adult ESL presented opportunities for informal and incidental learning for teachers. Both volunteers and paid instructors identified learning from teaching as the most important source of learning. Participation in informal and incidental learning activities was positively correlated with intercultural maturity. Further, organizational support promoted informal and incidental learning.

Democracy and Adult ESL Education during COVID

The silence of teachers of English as a Second Language in the face of a disastrous open border policy is deafening.

The Effect of Video Feedback on Adult ESL Learners’ Paragraph Writing Skills

The OUSL Journal is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL). It is the first scholarly journal in Sri Lanka focusing on research in the field of Open and Distance Learning (ODL), and is being published since 1997. The journal provides a platform to publish research and pedagogy relating to teaching and learning at the University level, and in particular to Open and Distance Learning (ODL). It also provides a forum for research and review articles related in the areas of Agriculture, Natural Sciences, Education, Engineering, Humanities and Social Sciences and Health Sciences.

Translanguaging Life Writing: Autobiography-Driven Writing Instruction

Deficiency-oriented attitudes are still common occurrences despite growing emphasis on linguistic and cultural diversity. Promoting inclusivity in learning, Herrera (2016) proposed “biography-driven instruction” emphasizing the power of students’ assets. Though her work was intended for young learners’ biliteracy, I argue that the tenets can be used as a framework for more equitable adult ESL instruction to build on learners’ “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al., 1992) and “cultural wealth” (Yosso, 2016). In this article, I theorize an “autobiography- driven instruction” approach where L2 writing instruction can foster inclusivity through life writing by acknowledging diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds as assets, drawing from rich lived experiences, and tapping into multi-competencies. Drawing from the work in translanguaging and life writing, this article problematizes the deficiency-based assumptions, argues for life writing practices, and provides a practical look into the theorized autobiography-driven instruction. I detail how this approach can help students take a more active role in their learning and inevitably leads to amplifying diverse voices and inclusivity in ESL by learners (1) choosing the content they write about, (2) practicing a variety of the life writing genres, and (3) sharing their personal stories to create empathy and build rapport.

Locating Language-Teacher Identities in the Settler-Colonial Universe

The practice of English language teaching has long been an important part of socializing transnational migrants and international students into ongoing English-dominant settler-colonial projects in North America and beyond. The professional activities, knowledge, and identities of English language instructors are therefore central to the reproduction of the settler-colonial order. In this article, I investigate the relationship between language-teacher identities and settler-colonial discourses of raciolinguistic differentiation and hierarchy in Canada. Working in a discursive constructionist conceptual framework, I adopt occasioned semantics to analyze excerpts from research interviews with two ELT instructors in post-secondary and adult ESL contexts. I demonstrate how these instructors’ talk about students and languages performed language-teacher identities-in-discourse and argue that these performances reflected and contributed to reproduction of settler-colonial discourse patterns. I further suggest that settler colonialism constitutes for ELT practice in Canada a hermetic “universe” with its own internal logics and relations that must be examined and made explicit through reflection. Some pedagogical implications of this analysis include the need for ELT instructors as well as English-language teacher educators to develop an awareness of local settler-colonial histories, teach for truth and reconciliation, and embrace strategies for de-naturalizing the settler-colonial “universe” as they create spaces of possibility for decolonization to be carried out. One research implication is that language-teacher identity scholarship would be strengthened by embracing epistemological and methodological decolonization.

Putting it into context

Abstract Developing L2 learners’ productive mastery of vocabulary is a challenging task. Recent research has called for greater attention to understanding how receptive vocabulary may be transformed for productive use (Schmitt, 2019). Using a design-based research methodology, this study investigated adult ESL learners’ productive oral vocabulary development through engaging them in a series of classroom workshops where they were exposed to nine target words in five different contexts. Findings suggest that such exposure to words combined with phonological form-focused elaboration facilitates the development of metalinguistic awareness, specifically the associations between grammatical patterns and word meaning, leading to subsequent productive use of target words. The paper contributes to the understanding that vocabulary training combining a focus on meaning with a focus on phonological and grammatical form may enhance form-meaning mapping, leading to productive oral vocabulary development.

“Keeping Words in Context”: Language Policy and Social Identification in an Immigrant Job Training Program

ABSTRACT This ethnography examines how teachers interpret and enact language-in-education policies in an adult ESL classroom in the United States, where students simultaneously received job training as Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs). We draw on postmodern and interpretive lenses from the ethnography of communication, considering how workforce-oriented language policies impact teachers’ agency during speech events when classroom participants discuss the meanings of unknown words. We assert that during talk about word meanings (semantics), models of social identity formed, sometimes in conflict with the sociocognitive complexities of second language acquisition. Findings indicate that the meanings of polysemous words were narrowed solely to the immediate healthcare context, and that instructional time often focused on teaching lexis common on multiple-choice tests, preparing students for their final CNA examination. Implications for teachers and policy makers are discussed, including the potentially equalizing applications of polysemic research within workforce language instructional models.

Conceptual framework for teaching civic education in the adult English as a second language classroom

AbstractCivic education provides adult English learners with the tools to be able to actively engage in their communities. This knowledge allows them to gain agency, develop a sense of belongingness, and facilitate lifelong learning. However, teaching civic education can be challenging for instructors for many reasons, such as prioritizing on developing the learners’ linguistic skills over their civic and citizenship knowledge. Thus, this article proposes a conceptual framework to incorporate civic education to the adult ESL classroom. Furthermore, it provides examples of relevant strategies and specific activities that illustrate the framework in action.

İkinci Dil Öğrenicilerinin Ders Notlarında Ana Dillerini Kullanma Kalıpları: Bir Vaka Çalışması

It is an undeniable fact that notetaking is an effective strategy in second language learning. This study highlights B1 level adult ESL students' strategy of using their L1 during their notetaking in a native-speaker teacher's lectures. For this study, a combination of grades taken in B1 level English courses were collected from different participants and these grades were analyzed through thematic content analysis. Additionally, the same participants were given a semi-structured questionnaire to discuss the overall effectiveness of partial first language use in students' grades. The study findings showed that, in general, when students encounter a complex vocabulary and can immediately remember the equivalent of these words in their first language, they directly translate the foreign language word they encounter into their mother tongue. However, if they cannot remember the exact first language equivalent of the foreign word, or if the first language version is complex, or if the student is unsure, it shows that they have explained these words using their second language. These findings have significant contributions to educators and test-designers as they can develop new language teaching and assessing strategies via using L1 notetaking.

Adult ESL Education and Learning Anxiety: An Exploratory Case Study Involving Malaysian Security Personnel

The Blueprint on Enculturation of Lifelong Learning for Malaysia recognises learning after the school and higher education systems as the third pillar in human capital development, and encourages continuity in upskilling (which includes the improvement of English competency) for individual empowerment and mobility. Despite this, there is a lack of research in the area, with most studies centralising Malaysian ESL practices involving only school or tertiary learners. Studies on professional development, meanwhile, tend to favour school teachers, resulting in a lack of empirical findings relevant to other professions. The present case study involved 111 Malaysian ESL learners enrolled in a six-month English language improvement programme organised by a public Malaysian university during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants were full-time security personnel of the said university and comprised both males and females. The participants’ English proficiency and language learning anxiety levels were measured pre- and post-intervention using The Cambridge English Assessment: General Test and the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) respectively. FLCAS data garnered were subjected to non-reversed and reversed scoring to lend the study better transparency and greater depth. Results indicate minimal change in terms of English proficiency post-intervention, whereas FLCAS data indicate increased anxiety. Recommendations for future research are outlined.

Challenging Dominant Language Ideology in the Adult ESL Classroom: A Case Study

In the United States, dominant language ideology validates the use of Standardized English as the only appropriate linguistic practice (Lippi-Green, 1994; Flores & Rosa, 2015). In educational settings, dominant language ideology manifests through the beliefs in language standardization and monolingualism (Farr & Song, 2011). The present case study investigates how dominant language ideology is manifested in the adult ESL classroom by examining the practices of one ESL teacher. The study employs multiple sources and modes of data (questionnaires, in-person observations, a semi-structured interview, and teaching artifacts) collected over multiple lessons. The study shows that the teacher generally resists dominant language ideology: she views students’ code-switching as a resource, rather than a deficit and does not associate Standardized English with correctness. Accordingly, incorporating language variation in the ESL classroom is viewed as a necessary teaching practice. Nevertheless, the teacher reinforces the notion of the monolingual native speaker as the authority for linguistic expertise and, thus, aligns with the tenets of dominant language ideology. Ultimately, by offering an account of the practices of one ESL teacher, the present study illuminates the ways in which teachers can resist dominant language ideology in the classroom and, thus, engage with critical language pedagogy.