EFL Lecturers Research Articles

Online Assessment amidst COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring EFL Lecturers’ Practices and Perception

Assessment is a part of everyday life in education, and it takes many forms for many different aims and levels. Measuring the students' progress, competency, and accountability was necessary during the learning process. This study aims to learn about lecturers' opinions and practices about using online assessment during Covid-19 in the context of ELT classrooms. The research method used is qualitative research with a case study approach. It was conducted in the Economics and Business Faculty of the University of Muhammadiyah Jambi. Participatory observation and interviews are used to acquire data. It found some crucial points; online media used by lecturers to assess students and the positive and negative sides of lecturers' online assessment practices. They choose online text messages like Whats App Group and Telegram Group for interactive assessment. For neat task submission, they chose Google Classroom. And for assessing speaking, Tiktok, Instagram and Youtube became alternative platforms. There are benefits and drawbacks that lecturers have encountered, such as effectiveness and efficiency in correcting students' tasks as its benefits, plagiarism, student cheating, and extending submission tasks as its drawbacks.

Ideational Metaphor Analysis on EFL Students’ Academic Writing

Over the last decade, research on the quality of EFL students' English academic writing has increased. However, research on EFL students' academic writing that incorporates grammatical metaphors is regarded scarce. As such, this study seeks to elucidate the occurrences of ideational metaphors in students' academic writing essays. The qualitative descriptive method was used in this study. This research involved a total of 25 undergraduate students from the University of HKBP Nommensen Medan, Indonesia, English Department, Faculty of Language and Arts, who studied Academic Writing course in the third semester. Students were required to submit a 350-word essay on the subject "Learning Challenges during the Coronavirus Pandemic." The research's data corpus totals 10,252 words. The results indicate that the students' writings contain 281 clauses comprising the ideational metaphor. It is deemed little in comparison to the corpus's overall data set of 10,252 words. Material processes dominate the incidence of ideational metaphors, followed by mental processes, relational processes, behavioral processes, and existential processes. This finding implies that the essay structure of EFL students is unlikely to have a large proportion of solid grammatical metaphor clauses. The pedagogical implication of this research is that EFL students, lecturers, teachers, and other educational practitioners interested in teaching English academic writing should be aware of grammatical metaphors in writing texts as a proxy for the quality of scientifically academic writing.

EFL Lecturers’ Challenges and Suggestions in the Online Teaching

Online EFL teaching and learning in universities has been conducted for two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the EFL lecturers’ challenges in small private universities in Indonesia are still scarcely investigated. Therefore, this research was conducted with the purpose to describe the Indonesian EFL lecturers’ challenges in their online teaching in the small private universities where they teach English. This was a qualitative research which used online semi-structured interview to six EFL lecturers from six different private universities in East Java to collect the data. Meanwhile, those six private universities did not have the official online platform for online teaching yet. The theory of Miles, Huberman, and Saldana was used to analyze the data. The result was that they faced some challenges in their online EFL teaching related to their students’ presence, the bad internet connection, the unconducive home condition, and the very slow students’ responses. Besides, they suggested to the universities to provide the official online learning platform which is completed with the places for storing their teaching administration archives. Hopefully, these research results can be the consideration for the university policy makers when deciding the guidelines of the online teaching and learning in the universities.

Exploring EFL undergraduates’ views of the impact teachers have on their online learning engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced education systems worldwide to switch all learning and teaching to the virtual platform since late 2019. This swift transition has a certain impact on students' engagement during their online classes. Studies propose that online learning engagement, as a multidimensional construct, is affected by online connectivity and peer or teacher support. However, little has been done, specifically in the context of higher education in Vietnam, to study the influence of each factor separately. In pursuit of filling this gap, four focus group discussions are conducted. The discussions firstly aim to comprehend the participants' general perceptions about the influence of EFL lecturers on their online engagement, while the main part is to investigate how the four specific roles of online lecturers, including their pedagogical, social, managerial, and technical roles, affect learning engagement. This explanatory study concludes that how effectively EFL lecturers can perform these roles has a substantial impact on their students' engagement in learning English online. From the findings, the paper suggests language teachers should be provided with more training that caters to enhancing their flexibility in creating autonomy-supportive online tasks as well as their digital competence.

Code-switching in English classrooms and its Impact on undergraduate learning in a public university in Afghanistan

The alternate use of two different languages as code-switching is situated in the field of bilingualism and it is considered a common feature of those who speak two or more languages. The occurrence of code-switching in English classrooms is considered a conducive linguistic resource to be exploited and practiced sensibly. This study aims to highlight the current situation of code-switching in EFL classrooms, the motives for EFL lecturers’ code-switching during their instruction to facilitate the teaching and learning process, and the measures for avoiding the use of code-switching. A qualitative study based on interviews followed by classroom observation was conducted. Eight EFL learners in a public university participated in this study. Four instructional periods of classroom observations were carried out. The results indicated that code-switching is predominantly employed and learners perceive it positively and lecturers use it for content clarification and building rapport with learners. Moreover, it can be also considered as impeding language skills. Keywords: Code-switching; EFL; EFL classroom; language.

Chinese EFL Undergraduates’ Pragmatic Competence in English Letter Writing

Pragmatic competence, as an essential part of communicative competence, plays a vital role in people’s daily communication, especially cross-cultural communication. This study aims to investigate Chinese EFL undergraduates’ pragmatic competence in English letter writing according to gender and faculty, and explore four EFL lecturers’ perceptions on pragmatic competence, problems faced by their students and methods used by lecturers in teaching English letter writing. This research is a descriptive research design using QUAN-QUAL model. A letter writing test was employed as one research instrument. Stratified random sampling was adopted to select 450 samples (225 males and 225 females) from three faculties (150 from Chinese Language Faculty, 150 from Management Faculty, and 150 from Education Faculty) in Nanfang College, Guangzhou and Hunan City University. In the real study, students’ writing was graded by one lecturer based on the scoring rubric adapted from Chen’s scoring rubrics for pragmatic competence and IELTS writing scoring rubric in which 5 components were included: choice of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, organization, mechanics. The results of the letter writing test indicated that female students’ pragmatic competence was better than male students’, and the pragmatic competence of students from social science faculty (Chinese Language Faculty and Management Faculty) was better than those from natural science faculty (Education Faculty). Lecturers considered it necessary to teach pragmatic competence in class though only a small proportion of lecturers did it. It is suggested that some teaching approaches such as process approach, modeled writing, revise after writing could be used in class so that students’ motivation is stimulated and better learning results could be achieved.

The Perceptions of Turkish EFL Lecturers on Teaching through Information and Communication Technology

The Perceptions of Turkish EFL Lecturers on Teaching through Information and Communication Technology

College English Language Teaching Reform and EFL Lecturers’ Reflection on Teaching: A Case Study in China

With the rapid development of newly improved colleges and universities across China, there was a commensurate need for English as a Foreign Language teaching and learning (EFL). As a result, China’s Ministry of Education initiated the College English Language Teaching Reform (CELTR) to improve English language teaching and learning at tertiary institutions in the country. The purpose of this article was to look into EFL lecturers’ perceptions of the CELTR and see how much the CELTR had improved their teaching reflection, which in turn influenced the CELTR’s effect and implementation. A total of 92 EFL lecturers from a newly renovated university in Nanyang City, Central China, participated in the study. Purposive sampling was used to obtain data for the study, which included a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with eight EFL lecturers. The findings revealed that EFL lecturers had a reasonable degree of awareness and knowledge of the CELTR, that lecturers’ reflection on teaching had improved slightly since the CELTR was implemented, and that EFL lecturers’ intents and use of reflection on teaching had increased under the CELTR. They used many ways to undertake reflection on teaching. The findings revealed that EFL lecturers constantly reflected on their teaching contents, methods, and events during the CELTR implementation process in order to improve their teaching practice and better meet the students’ specific needs, and they believed that reflection on teaching could not be separated from teaching practice.

The Challenges of E-Learning for Higher Education Lecturers and Learners

The use of E-Learning in the English language learning process is very useful for stakeholders, especially lecturers and learners. But in reality, lecturers and learners often experience difficulties in using it both from a technical and non-technical perspective. This study aims to investigate the challenges faced by EFL lecturers and learners and how they face them. To overcome this problem, this research employed a case study. This study involved 244 learners and 12 lecturers to fill out a questionnaire and five of them were interviewed. To collect questionnaire data, this research used a google form, meanwhile, the researcher carried it out online using the zoom application for interviewing respondents. After collecting the data, the results of the questionnaire were processed using IBM SPSS software and the interview results were described qualitatively. The results showed that lecturer constraints include lack of time to develop E-Learning content, inability to optimally utilize E-Learning features, problems in lecturer-learner interaction, poor internet connection, and lack of learner motivation. Meanwhile, the challenges of learners include the lack of tools to access E-Learning, lack of motivation, technical problems, and barriers to E-Learning features. It can be concluded that lecturers and learners face challenges both technically and non-technically in using E-Learning. The implication of this research is that despite all the challenges faced, lecturers and learners are required to be able to adapt to E-Learning environment in order to facilitate the online learning process.

Written Corrective Feedback Strategies Applied by Van Lang University’s EFL Lecturers in Teaching Online

During the covid-19 pandemic, many changes occurred that disrupted our lives. Authors must adapt to survive, and learning through online platforms is a change that forces us to adapt to avoid disrupting the learning process. The primary goal of this research project is to investigate the WCF techniques used by 30 teachers while teaching writing English online. The research instrument sets comprised 16 questions, including open and closed ones. The study uses quantitative and qualitative methods. This research paper is a timely complement to the topic of WCF strategies. It will serve as a resource for many teachers who are unsure about using the WCF approach when teaching writing online.

Inter-Cultural Interactions in EFL Classroom

Interculture communication is very important aspect of EFL classroom. Students learn tons of new things in classes like these. They get to understand the culture of different places and learn the true meaning of competence. This study investigated the place of culture and intercultural communicat ion in Indian EFL classrooms and Indian students' perceptions on Imperatives for studying Intercultural Communication. Students needed for the new cultural and intercultural knowledge in EFL classrooms and hoped that curriculum can meet their needs on intercultural communication competence, and students are aware and hope to institutional and EFL lecturers to create intercultural environment and encourage effective intercultural dialogue in EFL classrooms in order to achieve: pedagogical, personal development, peace, economic, demographic, and ethical imperatives of intercultural communication . Each individual belongs to a special group. Every person characterized by different ways of thinking, behaviors, rituals, clothes, beliefs, values, and norms.

The Effectiveness of Blended Synchronous and Asynchronous Learning for Teaching Reading Comprehension

Some studies investigated the use of synchronous and asynchronous learning in EFL classrooms. However, the investigation of blended synchronous and asynchronous learning use in the reading comprehension class was scarce. Therefore, the researchers in this present study focused on investigating the effectiveness of the blended synchronous and asynchronous learning implementation for teaching reading comprehension. This study aimed to know whether or not there was a significant difference in the students’ reading comprehension ability before and after the blended synchronous and asynchronous learning implementation. This was a pre-experimental study with a one-group pretest-posttest design. Meanwhile, the population in this study were three classes of the third-semester students of non-English departments of a university in Jombang. One class consisting of twenty-five students was taken as the sample using purposive sampling. The experimental students were given a pretest of reading comprehension before getting the six-meeting treatment of blended synchronous and asynchronous learning. After the treatment finished, they did the reading comprehension posttest. After all the reading scores were collected, the descriptive statistics, normality test, and paired sample t-test were applied using SPSS. The t-test result showed that the obtained t-count (11.616) was higher than the t-table (2.063). That result revealed that the students’ reading comprehension ability was significantly different before and after the blended synchronous and asynchronous learning application. Thus, blended synchronous and asynchronous learning was effective for teaching reading comprehension. Then, it is highly recommended for EFL lecturers to combine synchronous and asynchronous learning in their remote English classes.

The Reality of English Presentation Skills of English-majored Students in Vietnam

Presentation skills play an indispensable role in undergraduates’ education and developing their future careers because this skill assists college students in accomplishing a superior knowledge base and enhancing their public speaking. The study aims to measure English-majored students' reality at the Faculty of Foreign Languages of Van Lang University in Vietnam about speaking skills, especially presentation skills. The quantitative study has been carried out among 600 second-year, third-year, and four-year students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages of Van Lang University in Vietnam. The results of the research paper demonstrated that most students were not confident about their presentation skills because of making mistakes about vocabulary usage, grammar, fluency, and so on when giving presentations. EFL lecturers can consider the results to improve their teaching methods regarding speaking skills and find out more strategies to solve students' speaking challenges.

Enhancing Students’ Writing Skills through English Movies-Watching Reports; an Improvement of Linguistic Competences

English movies by some EFL teachers and lecturers are designed for teaching writing classes because learners can see how any of words is pronounced by actors who are English native speakers and they are asked to write reports in line with the contents of movies. Besides, learners can make notes of new vocabulary taken from the movies. Therefore, this study is aimed at finding out the use of Englis Movies-watching reports in improving students’ writing skills at the Mandalika University of Education. The research was conducted by involving the students at the English Zone Club organization. The researcher plans to have the students in this english organization because they tend to be more focus on english writing than other English organization at UNDIKMA. The research design of the present study is a classroom action research design where the researcher apply English movies to treat writing classes. They are asked to watch and pay attention to certain English movies and demand them to write a report on what they would have just watched. The research data are collected by distributing writing test to measure any improvement made through watching English movies on students’ writing skills. To gain the students’ writing improvement of writing skills, researchers make notes around some cycles of applying English movies in the class. The result of data collection was then analyzed by using quantitative statistical analysis. The conclusion of this study showed that the use of English movies was effective to improve grammatical competence, vocabulary, sentence patterns, various language usages, and motivation to practice writing.

Diploma Students’ Perceptions about Their English Grammar Learnability at Umm Al-Qura University

The purpose of this study was to examine diploma students’ perceptions about their experiences learning English grammar as a general requirement course at a higher education institution- namely Umm A-Qura University (UQU) in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, during the first semester 2022-2023. Random sampling was used to obtain the subjects of the study, who were students from different diploma programs attending English language classes at the starter level. The textbook taught was Business Result Starter, which uses the deductive method of teaching grammar through introducing the rules with examples in each unit followed by a section for free practice at the end. Many studies were conducted on the perceptions about teaching grammar, focusing on the perceptions of instructors, with an obvious lack for studies to analyze students’ perceptions about learning grammar. The current study was carried out with qualitative methods to investigate the perceptions of the students and collect the information from their personal experiences regarding how they learned grammar in their English course during the first semester of 2022-2023. A number of ten students were selected as respondents for the study. Structured interviews were conducted whether face-to-face or on Webex. Data Collection techniques included individual discussion for more profound responses that helped in revealing their positive and negative perceptions about how they learned grammar. The study found that most diploma students held positive attitudes towards their experience learning grammar using the deductive method but it was not enough to achieve comprehensive learning or learning for all participants due to individual differences and learning styles. The main strengths of using the deductive method with the diploma students were straightforwardness, comprehensibility, meeting instructor’s expectations, building up learner’s self-confidence, self-learning, enjoyableness, time-effectiveness and building grammatical skill. For the negative perceptions from their experience in learning grammar that semester, the participants informed that they were contributed by obstructing fluency, difficulty to achieve a dual task on rules and free practice of EFL at the same time, attracting attention to rules rather than use of language, and the challenges some learners faced to learn the rules. Through these findings of this study, EFL lecturers at UQU would be able to know the challenges and learning techniques experienced by the students while dealing with grammar lessons, and eventually come out with student-oriented solutions for more effective grammar teaching and for opening new windows of grammar learnability for the students to join the diploma programs. In addition, this study is expected to enlighten both instructors and students about the potential strengths and weaknesses of the deductive method of teaching grammar on the one hand, and to consider students’ experiences and perceptions that might lead to new insights into adopting an integrated or blended method to better teach, and/or increase learnability of English grammar on the other.

UNDERSTANDING ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ VIEWS OF TEACHER RESEARCH: A REPORT FROM INDONESIA

This article reports on a study investigating the perceptions of EFL teachers in schools and language courses (henceforth, teachers) and EFL lecturers in tertiary educational institutions (academic staff) from Indonesia regarding their definitions of and their engagements in teacher research. An online questionnaire was used to gather quantitative data from almost 400 EFL teachers and academic staff from Indonesia. The questionnaire was followed by in-depth interviews with some respondents who met the criteria set and agreed to be interviewed. Results from the study show that both teachers and academic staff align research with evidence-based practice, survey, literature-driven practice and professional communication, and observation-based popular article. In terms of engagements, most of the teachers and academic staff read research papers occasionally, and more academic staff did research compared to teachers. Research done by both teachers and academic staff is largely associated with internal and external factors, such as, professional awareness and professional obligation, with academic staff seem to receive more support to engage in research. The findings of the study provide insights for future continuous professional development (CPD) activities for English teachers and academic staff. The activities might involve exploring ways to integrate teacher research into teachers’ and academic staff’s teaching responsibilities and integrating teacher research into the short-term and long-term goals of CPD.

Analyzing Descriptive Writing among Chinese Undergraduates According to Gender

The aim of the study is to assess the Chinese undergraduate students’ EFL descriptive writing ability according to gender and to explore four EFL lecturers’ views on how to help students enhance their EFL descriptive writing. This study employed descriptive research design using the QUAN-qual model. A descriptive writing test was used as an instrument and the essays of the students were marked by a lecturer. Purposive sampling was used to select samples which consists of 400 Chinese undergraduate students (200 males and 200 females) from Hunan City University in Hunan Province, China. Before the actual study, the researcher carried out a pilot test to investigate the reliability and validity of the instrument (descriptive writing test). The results obtained from the quantitative data showed that female students outperformed male students in their overall writing as well as each component of the writing. In relation to students’ writing level, the lecturers emphasized that it is very crucial to utilize the Process Approach in class to enhance students’ vocabulary and grammar foundation. In addition, students are required to practice writing more frequently which can arouse their enthusiasm in learning English.

Screencast-O-Matic to Support EFL Teaching and Learning Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 situation causes a sudden and unexpected shift of face-to-face pedagogy to emergency remote teaching mode. In that transition, teachers often do not have enough space and time to explore various technology to support their teaching and learning practices that should be done flexibly in multiple places and times. In response, the primary purposes of this article are to introduce a technology tool called Screencast-O-Matic (SOM), its potentials, and possible practices of using SOM that EFL lecturers might adopt for their teaching and learning purposes, specifically in the current pandemic era. Some of the practices discussed in this paper are the use of SOM to: record a video lecturer on how to write a paper following an APA format, give video-based feedback to students’ work, make a digital video presentation, and be a digital mirror that helps students review their speaking performance before they do an actual video presentation. The discussions of the paper are supported by some of the authors’ actual experiences in using SOM in their classrooms, related research findings, and literature. Ideas for future research are presented.

ÖĞRETİM ELEMANLARININ STRATEJİ TERCİHLERİ, TUTUMLARI VE YABANCI DİL KELIME ÖĞRETİMİNDE KARŞILAŞTIKLARI ZORLUKLAR

The aim of this study is to investigate the VTSs implemented by EFL lecturers and also to identify their attitudes towards vocabulary along with the difficulties faced by them in vocabulary teaching. In line with this aim, a mixed-method research design was used. 170 lecturers working at twenty-five universities participated in the study. The researchers used a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The quantitative data instrument was the Vocabulary Teaching Strategies Questionnaire. The quantitative data were analyzed by using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 23. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 8 lecturers. The collected qualitative data were content-analyzed. The analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data showed that the participants applied determination strategies while teaching their students to discover the meanings of new words. On the other hand, while teaching students to consolidate the learned words, they used metacognitive, memory, cognitive and social (consolidation) strategies respectively. Additionally, it was found that the participants experienced difficulties in vocabulary teaching such as students’ lack of practice and repetition, students’ low proficiency levels, time limitation, and students’ tendency to use a bilingual dictionary.

Course review horay and critical thinking skills: the effective teaching model for students’ grammar competence in remote EFL classrooms

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, EFL lecturers need to be creative in handling their remote teaching. However, scarce studies investigated the use of course review horay (CRH) and students’ critical thinking skills (CTS) in remote EFL classrooms especially in grammar classes. The study aimed to explore whether or not CRH was more effective than explanation model to teach grammar and the students having high CTS had better grammar competence than those of low CTS. This experimental study employed a 2x2 factorial design. The population was the second semester students of non-English departments in a private university in East Java, Indonesia. The sample was four groups comprising of two groups (high and low CTS) in the experimental class and two groups (high and low CTS) in the control class. To categorize them into high and low CTS, an Indonesian argumentative essay writing test was used. After six meetings of treatment, the students did the grammar test. The grammar scores were, then, analyzed using ANOVA and TUKEY tests. The results indicated that CRH was more effective and the students with high CTS possessed better grammar competence. The present study implies that CRH and CTS created a joyful learning atmosphere in remote grammar teaching.