Language Teaching Resources Research Articles

‘I thought I was a refugee’: a narrative inquiry of an EFL teacher’s piloting of a newly published textbook

ABSTRACT Textbooks hold a central position in English Language Teaching (ELT), providing linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cultural resources embedded within specific pedagogical frameworks. Despite its centrality, the end-users’ engagement in textbook development remains vague and untouched. Situated within a textbook development project, this longitudinal study attempts to delineate an experienced English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teacher’s piloting of a newly published textbook in tertiary education in China. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews, field observations, classroom observations, and documents spanning over one year, the narrative inquiry traces and depicts the participant’s transition from ‘groping in the darkness’ to ‘seeing a silver lining in the cloud’, which is fluctuated with the participant’s analysis, adaptation, evaluation, and appropriation of the material, highlighted with her re-interpretation of the textbook rationales and re-construction of the personal pedagogical approach in a context-response manner. Facing the challenges and pressures during the textbook piloting project, the teacher’s continuous self-reflection and perseverance are the fundamental driving forces to customize the materials. Furthermore, the flexibility of the textbook content and the support from the editorial team do play essential roles in the piloting project. Through deciphering the rocks and roses in a teacher’s first encounter with a newly published textbook, the study provides practical insights for textbook publishers, textbook writers, language teachers and teacher educators regarding both textbook development and professional development.

Research on the Development and Construction of Confucius Institutes in Portugal under the Belt and Road Initiative

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was proposed by President Xi Jinping during his visits to Central Asia and Southeast Asia in 2013, advocating for collaborative development with countries along the route. Spanning across the continents of Asia and Europe, the Indian Ocean, and the western Pacific, the BRI involves 64 countries with a total population of over 3 billion and a combined GDP accounting for nearly 20% of the global economy, holding significant strategic importance. Historically, the BRI serves not only as a platform for commercial trade but also as a medium for cultural exchanges among the countries along its route. In reality, embracing cultural diversity aligns with the collaborative development goals of the BRI, promoting cultural and civilizational exchanges among nations, achieving holistic cultural complementarity, and fostering social harmony and development. In recent years, Chinese language education has been included in the educational systems of European, Latin American, and African countries alongside languages such as French, Russian, and Spanish. In the context of increasingly integrated global interests, Chinese language education has gained more attention. To internationalize and diversify Chinese language education, the term Confucius Institute was coined. Drawing on international experience, the Chinese government has established numerous Confucius Institutes and classrooms overseas. Among them, Portugal is one of the European countries with the closest cooperation with China in education, language, and humanities. With the comprehensive development of Sino-Portuguese relations, more opportunities have arisen for Sino-Portuguese language and cultural exchanges, expanding the development prospects of Confucius Institutes. Currently, the four main Confucius Institutes jointly established by major universities in Portugal are: Minho University Confucius Institute, University of Lisbon Confucius Institute, University of Aveiro Confucius Institute, and University of Coimbra Confucius Institute. Each Confucius Institute has its own educational positioning, such as providing basic Chinese language teaching, training Chinese language teachers, improving Chinese language teaching resources, and organizing Chinese cultural exchange activities, providing Portuguese students with a platform for learning Chinese language and culture.

Foreign language teaching on the basis of internet resources

The article deals with the use of Internet resources in the modern educational process, particularly, inforeign language teaching. One more advantages of using the Internet in the foreign language courses is an opportunity to communicate in real language environment, which contributes to the development of communicative competence. It is concluded that application of Internet resources in the process offoreign language teaching allows educational institution to train a competitive expert.

Emerging Trends and Issues in English Language Teaching: A Bibliometric Analysis

English language has been considered a lingua franca and used as a medium of instruction in Pakistan. The English language has been taught with traditional methods of teaching, which fail to develop language competency among learners. The study has been designed to analyze Pakistan's emerging English teaching trends based on available literature. The data has been collected by secondary literature published in various research journals. The articles were selected by inclusion and exclusion criteria by searching with key words of English language teaching. We then selected various articles, read them, and used them as a resource. For this purpose, the content analysis was used by Braun and Clark (2006) by focusing on the content of the paper. It has been found that there needs to be more technology in language teaching and technological resources for teaching purposes, along with a shortage of language teaching skills and professional development of the teachers in English language teaching. Using technology in the classroom is recommended, adopting multi-model learning and communicative language teaching.

MULTIMEDIA RESOURCES AS A FACTOR OF INCREASING STUDENTS' MOTIVATION IN LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES

The phenomena of globalisation and the increase in the number of communication tools have led to a significant boom in the use of multimedia resources in foreign language teaching and learning. Since success in learning a foreign language is linked to the assessment of the learning environment and since multimedia resources certainly change the learning environment, the integration of multimedia and ICT tools into teaching and learning should have an impact on motivation and, consequently, on learning success. Furthermore, in the context of pedagogical innovations, learning should be achieved by all participants in the educational relationship. In this sense, this study aims to meet the need to analyse the use of multimedia resources in the context of educational innovation through learning assessment. This paper is a field study. The mixed-methods research is based on the collection and analysis of data from various scientific sources, questionnaires of students studying English at the higher education institution of Ukraine “National University “Zaporizhzhia Polytechnic” and observation of their activity and performance. The purpose of the study is to establish the connection between the use of multimedia resources and increasing students' motivation in learning foreign languages, to test the teachers' perception of the student's role in learning a foreign language in a higher education institution, as well as the learning outcomes achieved by the same subjects after the introduction of a pedagogical innovation using multimedia resources. The results show that the perception of learning, interest, and satisfaction differ depending on the gender of students. The use of multimedia materials in accordance with the teaching-learning method affects the perception of the respective roles between the teacher and the student. Changes in student roles are accompanied by changes in teacher roles. The change in the roles of students is accompanied by some resistance from some of them. The main result achieved by students is related to the development of autonomy and has little to do with learning the subject as such. The research shows that the recommended approach did not lead to a significant improvement in the quality of learning and the level of mastery of the discipline by students compared to their school achievements. However, the results clearly demonstrate the growth of motivation and development of independence among students, their active participation in group work. That is why the introduction of multimedia innovations has a really positive effect on motivation.

The Impact of Educational Innovation on Teachers’ Pedagogical Practices: The Case of the ORELT Project in Kenya

This paper reports the findings of a pilot project, Open Resources for English Language Teaching (ORELT), that aimed to introduce open resources for teaching English in Kenyan junior secondary schools alongside the traditional textbooks that until now have been the only teaching resources available to teachers and learners. The ORELT materials, which consisted of open content in the form of DVDs, books, and online content were developed by the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL), Canada, for use throughout the Commonwealth of Nations. Before the rollout of these materials, English teachers from selected schools were enlisted for an in-service workshop where they were trained on the materials and the concept of open resources, and were given a hands-on familiarisation with the resources. Two ORELT workshops were conducted for four days each between 18–21 March 2013, and 6–9 May 2013 at the Kenyatta University Conference Centre (KUCC). Participants of the first workshop were drawn from secondary schools within the urban and peri-urban areas of Nairobi. Participants for the second workshop were drawn from rural schools. This article views the introduction of these open resources in Kenyan schools as an educational innovation and investigates the effects of such an innovation on teachers’ pedagogical practice. The study found that this innovation had a generally positive impact on the teachers’ pedagogical practice in terms of their pedagogical content knowledge and skills, teaching methodology, and professional growth.

Neither Portugal nor Brazil: An Investigation of the Decolonial Efforts in Instructional Materials Adopted in Early Portuguese Courses at US Universities

Abstract: This study investigates the efforts towards promoting the decolonial teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language in instructional materials adopted in early Portuguese courses at higher education institutions in the United States. A framework for qualitative analysis of course materials, textbooks, and syllabi was designed based on Zavala's (2016) model for decolonial education and Rodríguez's (2015) studies on deep and surface culture. Eleven Portuguese undergraduate language programs in the United States submitted materials for consideration. Seven of these programs use the same textbook, which splits its linguistic and cultural instruction between Brazil and Portugal, and often presents limited views of other Portuguese-speaking countries. Two programs replace Portugal for Brazil as the core linguistic and cultural content of their course, which may suggest a shift away from colonialism, but towards economic power. The remaining materials adopted by two programs, however, promote the pluricentricity of Portuguese and delve into issues beyond surface-level celebrations of culture or the dissemination of factual information about minority Portuguesespeaking countries. Their materials expose the power imbalances between all Portuguese-speaking countries and give learners the opportunity to hear from the subalterns. Findings show a shortage of Portuguese-oriented materials as well as resources for decolonial language teaching. To help address this shortage, intervention ideas for educators planning to promote decolonial thinking in the Portuguese classroom are proposed.

Towards a more equitable ELT practice: Practicing queer inquiry in Thailand's university language classrooms

AbstractDespite the sustained focus towards inclusive language teaching and queer pedagogy in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and language education in recent years, employing an inclusive pedagogical practice and having language teaching resources that respect the gender identity among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) students remain a challenge in many English language teaching (ELT) classrooms throughout the world. Employing an auto‐ethnomethodological approach, in this article the authors present their teaching practice experience in an attempt to queer their ELT classroom and provide a safe space for all gender identities in learning the language through a queer‐informed language teaching framework in an ELT classroom at a university in Thailand. It is the goal of this inquiry to add to the empirical evidence for gender inclusivity in an ELT classroom. Additionally, this study offers language practitioners consideration for having a queer‐informed classroom where there is diversity, inclusion, and engagement and where students are free to discuss their sexual identities, adding to the growing influence of gender perspective and inclusivity in heteronormative language education.

Classification and Informatization of Subject Resources for English Language Teaching in the Context of Data Theory

Abstract The construction of information resources based on the development needs of disciplines is the fundamental guarantee for carrying out disciplinary service work. An English teaching resource guarantee system is created by combining the OAI protocol with Open URL technology in this paper. Furthermore, the VIPS algorithm is used for style tree construction, combined with split bar weights and mixed text density for extracting web page body information. Then, the weight factor is introduced to improve the PageRank algorithm, and the critical resource selection strategy is combined to achieve the mining and classification of English teaching resources. In addition, the study introduces a knowledge graph for entity recognition and combines graph convolutional networks with user preference weights for optimizing teaching resource recommendations. Based on this basis, the performance of the constructed English teaching resources assurance system is verified for webpage information extraction, teaching resources classification, and personalized recommendations. It is found that the correct rate of English webpage information extraction is 96.42% when the text density of the preceding and following text is 0.334 and 0.527, respectively, and the personalized recommendation performance of English teaching resources is 4.12% higher than the best-performing KGCN model in terms of AUC index. The English teaching resources guarantee system can effectively ensure the precise classification of teaching resources in the English language and provide new guidance for furthering the automation of English teaching resources.

Construction and Reform of the Russian Audiovisual Speaking Course in Higher Vocational Institutions in the Context of Deep Learning

Abstract This paper focuses on the development and construction of language teaching in higher vocational colleges and universities under the perspective of deep learning, proposes the use of multimedia courseware to update the course content, interactive teaching to optimize knowledge transfer and skills training, and the creation of an interactive training environment for the Russian language. Analyze the language learning environment of higher vocational colleges under deep learning, clarify the direction of Russian language teaching, use wavelet transform algorithm to compress and process Russian language teaching resources, and enrich the teaching construction. Classify language classroom teaching interaction behaviors, clarify the criteria for judging teaching interaction behaviors, put forward connection timing classification technology under deep learning, and construct classroom interaction behavior recognition based on speech recognition. Combining video samples to analyze the classroom interactive behaviors of Russian language teaching, analyzing the use of Russian digital teaching resources, and evaluating the advantages of the reform of the Russian Audiovisual Speaking course in the light of students’ satisfaction with the reform of the course. In the interactive Russian language classroom teaching, the proportion of teacher’s and student’s speech is 24.24% and 30.205%, respectively. The proportion of open-ended questions and closed questions is 4.68% and 3.67%, respectively, and 83.62% of the students are satisfied with the classroom teaching of Russian Audiovisual and Speaking, so it can be seen that the construction and reform of the Russian language course forms a classroom that takes the students as the main body and the teacher as the auxiliary teaching This shows that the construction and reform of the Russian language course forms a classroom with students as the main body and teachers as the auxiliary teaching, which is in line with the needs of Russian language teaching.

Challenges and needs in Ladino teaching among ten language revitalisation activists

This article presents results from interviews with ten teachers engaged in Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) revitalisation. The purpose of the study is to collect Ladino teachers’ experiences to understand the challenges they face and the needs they express to continue their activities.
 Challenges were related to students’ linguistic backgrounds, students’ and teachers’ confidence about expressing themselves in Ladino, and to views on language normativity. The teachers expressed needs concerning finding stable teacher positions, about creating a Ladino proficiency test and certificate, developing resources for language teaching, and updating Ladino’s vocabulary to reflect contemporary life. Creating venues for learners to use the language, and opportunities for Ladino teachers to meet and discuss pedagogical issues were seen as important.
 The teachers’ views differed considerably regarding questions on language norms, and an official language proficiency certificate. The results point to the need for further discussions, and for teacher development initiatives.

Evaluation of English Language Material for the 9th Grader Student at SMP Nurul Islam Ngemplak Boyolali

Teaching language in this global era demands mostly the creativity of the teachers, this is because in 21th century, students need to be critical thinkers, creative, communicative and collaborative. Therefore, the creativity of the teacher is manifested by evaluating the multiple resources and adapting or adopting them based on the contextualized learning situation including individual differences, styles and learners needs. It is also essential for the teacher to integrate the four macro skills in teaching language in order to make the students more communicative and collaborative. Hence, this paper presents the evaluation of the language teaching resources before and during applying them to the classroom contexts. The data were collected by document review and interview with the secondary school teacher. The data were analyzed qualitatively through interactive model. There is variation of the results based on the techniques of data collection. The interview shows that theoretically the teacher is creative to make the materials for students. Meanwhile, the document review findings show that there is a need of improvement on the way to evaluate and use the English materials based on the context. Finally, in evaluating the textbooks in order to adopt or adapt by adding or removing some materials to make English textbooks match with students’ contexts.
 Keywords evaluation, adapting, adopting, macro skills, English language teaching.

Discussion of the Use of Concordance Programs in the EFL Classroom

Classroom concordance programs involve the analysis of concordances of language features. The use of concordancers can provide learners analytic skills to manipulate comprehensive databases for the sake of coping with real-language problems. Due to its practicability, the approach has been developed for language teaching in the ELT classroom. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the use of concordance programs in the EFL classroom. A great number of studies regarding the use of corpora and the concordancer as a resource in language teaching and learning demonstrate that concordancing as a teaching tool can be effectively used in classroom to meet some specific teaching purposes, and concordance analysis can help students discover and differentiate meanings of words and phrases, identify useful phrases and unfamiliar collocations, explore word order, and distinguish words with similar meanings. Consequently, in the EFL context, a series of concordance exercises can be carried out to assist students to investigate language data and derive patterns of language use. Furthermore, an active pedagogical approach should be oriented to the acquisition of valuable knowledge, to the solution to sophisticated problems and to the development of learning abilities. Based on this, teachers should select the right pedagogical approach to increase students’ motivation, promote their initiative, and guide them into the procedure of knowledge exploration.

The Psychology Of Educational Aids And Their Impact On Teaching The Arabic Language To Non-Native Speakers/ سيكولوجية الوسائل التعليمية وأثرها في تعليم اللغة العربية للناطقين بغيرها

This research emphasizes the overlooked importance of educational resources in Arabic language teaching for non-native speakers. It highlights the risks of choosing resources that do not align with students' preferences; the psychological impact of instructional materials on students' learning experiences is underscored by a call for building resources on psychological foundations for maximum effectiveness. The research employs a quantitative methodology. The survey, consisting of quantitative and qualitative questions, is administered to education practitioners and specialists. The study follows a descriptive method of data collection and analysis, emphasizing the quantitative aspects of the survey while also including qualitative insights from participants. Results have demonstrated the positive influence of educational materials on student performance. However, the psychological impact requires further investigation in teaching Arabic to non-native speaker.

Decolonizing ELT teacher education by incorporating knowledge of local communities in the teaching practicum.

Despite significant advances in the epistemological frameworks that guide teacher education in Colombia and elsewhere, it continues to be governed mostly by traditional Eurocentric paradigms. Decolonizing teacher education requires epistemological moves to resignify the plurality of local knowledges and praxis. This article aims at reporting a qualitative research project carried out with three student teachers of a teacher education program with emphasis on English, at a public university in the northeast of Colombia. The main objective was to explore and reflect on how EFL pre-service teachers incorporated knowledge of local communities as resources for language teaching and learning during the practicum. Data were gathered over a three-semester period through pre-service teachers' lesson plans, materials, a final academic report, and a semi-structured interview. Data were analyzed based on the principles of thematic data analysis. Findings revealed that student teachers approached knowledge from an ecological perspective coming from different ways of knowing, seeing, being and living in the world. At the same time, the ecology of knowledges helped them to overcome the challenges they faced during the project.

Importance of Digital Technology in English Language Learning

The development of  a modern digital educational  environment, which has an inexhaustible opportunity to improve the quality of education, has become relevant                                                                                         in  the  21st  century. Digital technologies  are an important component  of  English language teaching in high school. The relevance of using digital resources in English language teaching ensures a high quality of education. Modern information and communication technologies allow the teacher to effectively manage the teaching of all language components (speaking, listening, writing and reading). Indeed, modern information and communication technologies are a necessary and comprehensive tool in the process of learning/teaching English. They allow to make the learning process more interesting, diverse and dynamic. Use of digital technology in  English learning contributes to: Raising motivation of learning; Cognitive skills activation of students; Variety of teaching methods; Timely monitoring of training results; Student-oriented learning... Modern information and communication technologies are a necessary and comprehensive tool in the        process of teaching English.

Cultural Analysis of Liberal Feminism in American English Language Teaching Resources

One of the ways to spread the approach of liberal feminism in the world is to use English language education, through which English culture is spread among language learners. With the aim of discovering the signs of promoting liberal feminism in language teaching resources, this research, with a cultural approach, first determined the dimensions and components of liberal feminism. After that, three sources were selected from the most widely used sources of English language education in Iran, and the parts where the signs of promoting liberal feminism were evident were analyzed for content. The analyzes were done based on the components of liberal feminism and common Iranian Islamic culture. These analyzes were given to 20 experts for verification, and conclusions were drawn after corrections. The results indicated that the two dimensions of equality (35.5%) and empowerment (30.5%) were the most frequent in these sources. The dimensions of freedom (17.5%) and legal protection (13.5%) were in third and fourth place. The statistics of other components were less than 5% and negligible.

Lingvotrenager as a means of electronic linguodidactics: experience in the development and implementation of the video tutorial cycle "A Walk in the Primorsky Territory" in the learning process of RCT

The subject of the study is the linguodidactic and linguometodic potential of the interactive simulator as a means of electronic linguodidactics in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language. In the course of the research, a set of methods is used: methodological modeling, questionnaires, expert evaluation, etc. The main method of research is the method of pedagogical experiment. During the experiment, a model of the educational process was built using a language trainer as a means of electronic linguodidactics. The pedagogical experiment was conducted in three stages and was aimed at studying the features of the educational process when teaching Russian as a foreign language using electronic linguodidactics. The data for the analysis were collected by questioning the students who took part in the experiment. The relevance of the study of electronic linguodidactics in the teaching of RCT lies in the fact that in the conditions of a pandemic and a mass transition to distance learning, the needs of students in intensive foreign language acquisition continue to grow. This requires RCT teachers to create and use electronic educational resources in language teaching and their multidisciplinary development. In addition, the idea of syncretism of educational technologies seems relevant. The study made it possible to formulate the theoretical foundations of the linguometodic simulator in the most complete way and to confirm its practical significance in teaching RCT. The theoretical and practical significance of the research lies in deepening and expanding scientific and methodological ideas about the place and role of an interactive language trainer in the environment of electronic means of teaching RCT, as well as in presenting opportunities to improve the effectiveness of the formation of language skills and speech skills in teaching RCT. The main conclusion of this study is the position on the relevance of the use of electronic linguodidactics in the teaching of RCT, in particular an interactive language trainer.

Translanguaging as EFL Teaching Method

There has been a heated debate about which method of the two, monolingual or bilingual, is more effective in ESL classrooms. As societal demands are shifting upon learning foreign languages, new approaches to second language teaching are rejecting the monolingual norm and long-standing views about acquiring L2 are challenged. The article offers an overview of the literature on this issue and this overview serves as the basis for an updated framework that indicates necessary areas of change in conceptualization from monolingual to bilingual norm. It can help bring new light onto effective uses of linguistic resources in foreign language teaching, which may lead to the speeding up of the L2 acquiring process. The article also discusses the difference between code-switching and translanguaging and concludes that the two terms cannot be perceived as one and the same. The article suggests that teachers in English language classrooms should be taught ways to incorporate L1 in teaching L2 and offer intentional translanguaging pedagogies to their learners.

Orchestrating multimodal resources in English language teaching: a critical study of an online English teaching video

ABSTRACT This study develops a framework that integrates multimodality and translanguaging to analyze meaning-making in an online English teaching video. We consider pedagogy as more than teaching approaches and methods, but as a process of design that is realized by the orchestration of multimodal semiotic resources. In terms of multimodal analysis, we systematically transcribed the configuration of resources used in different stages and moves of an online English teaching video on YouTube, and how they work together to achieve the objectives of the lesson. From a translanguaging perspective, we employ the notion of “orchestration” to understand how resources in the teacher’s repertoire work together. The analysis demonstrates how multimodal resources are intertwined to construct meaning that cannot be captured by studying them in isolation. A critical analysis of the video was conducted to determine the extent to which translanguaging pedagogy and raciolinguistic ideologies are found in the video. The study concludes that not only is it important to consider multimodal design of online videos; the social justice agenda of a translanguaging pedagogy that eschews native-speaker norms and raciolinguistic ideologies is equally important, especially for learners from diverse linguacultural backgrounds.