New Public Management (NPM)-inspired higher education (HE) governance has become increasingly topical in recent years. However, while existing research provides an overall understanding of relevant changes, it does not offer a complete analysis of complex governance and falls prey to deterministic and relatively narrow ideological impositions.…

Teacher feedback is the key to online collaborative discussion. To investigate the effects of different forms of teacher feedback intervention on learners' cognitive and emotional interactions in online collaborative discussion, this study collected collaborative discussion text data of online collaborative learners. Based on the framework of…

Effective citation contributes to the success in master's (MA) thesis writing. The current study investigates cross-disciplinary citation practice in EFL Master's theses. First, the corpus was compiled by collecting 20 Applied Linguistics (AL) and 20 Biology (BIO) MA theses Discussion sections. The forms and rhetorical functions of citations were…

This article discusses, from a sociocognitive perspective, the integration of usage-based linguistics (UBL) models in favor of conversation analysis (CA) for second language acquisition (SLA). On this basis, it presents a pedagogical approach, viz. role-based interaction analysis (RBIA) for foreign language learning (FLL), by scaffolding, tracking…

This article explores university students' approaches to and positions with regard to making the most of their study time. The article discusses how various normative societal expectations around students' use and management of time feature in their talk about how they organise their everyday lives. The research is based on thematic interviews (n…

The current study aimed to compare the influence of explicit versus implicit instruction on EFL learners' use of interactional metadiscourse markers in their writing. The study also aimed to explore the perceptions of EFL learners on the instruction of these markers in their writing classes. 120 female undergraduates who are Arab EFL learners took…

The task of verifying credible and original information is now more complicated, especially for undergraduate students. This study uses information literacy and discourse analysis to develop English as a foreign language learners' critical reading skills while verifying information on social media. A reading test including false news was used to…

The present study examined the relative effects of discourse-based and sentence-level grammar instruction on the learning of English present perfect in academic writing, using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. Participants were 37 multilingual graduate students enrolled in different sections of an ESL-writing course at a U.S.…

In market-oriented higher education (HE) systems, fee-paying students are positioned as customers, and studying is juxtaposed with service use. In this study, we investigate how students position themselves in relation to the student-as-customer discourse in Finnish HE, in which only students coming from outside the EU and EEA areas are charged…

A variety of research studies reveal the advantages of actively engaging students in the learning process through collaborative work in the classroom. However, the complex nature of the learning environment in large college general chemistry courses makes it challenging to identify the different factors that affect students' cognitive and social…

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have mission statements as a matter of course. This article analyses 127 mission statements from UK HEIs, comprising 76.048% of the mainstream UK higher education sector. The statements were divided into the categories of Russell Group; Other; and Specialist Institution. A mixed methods research approach was…

Despite writing and speaking being related activities, their end-products are entirely different. However, previous studies have not shown consistency in terms of grammar use in these two modes. Accordingly, in the present study, I aim to define the syntactic characteristics in these two modes with large-scale data and organized research designs.…

The course syllabus serves as an important first contact between professors and students in university courses and the language used in a syllabus can influence students' first impressions of the professor and expectations for the course. Existing research in Self-Determination Theory has shown that autonomy-supportive language leads to increased…

This study addresses how Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) perceive conversations in English materials as compared to speakers of English as a first language (L1). Data were collected through questionnaires completed by 48 participants (28 L2 English learners in China and 20 L1 English speakers in the UK), eliciting evaluations…

English-medium instruction (EMI) programmes have been mushrooming in the last two decades as part of the internationalisation processes. However, the rapid implementation of EMI has outpaced research in many different areas, classroom interaction being one of them. Since classroom interaction is an indication of quality teaching, the analysis of…