The COVID-19 pandemic posed novel challenges to language teachers and learners, as 'emergency remote teaching' became a necessity in order for teachers and learners to isolate from one another. Much has already been written about the nature of those challenges and language teachers' response to them, which response frequently made use of…

Vijay Kumar Bhatia retired from his role as a professor at the City University of Hong Kong and is now Visiting Professor at the Hellenic American University in Athens, and Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has extensive experience of teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels over a period exceeding 50 years in…

Audiovisual platforms like YouTube facilitate the introduction of informal learning practices for their pedagogical exploitation both in class and online. One such practice is the creation of a BookTuber community for recommending books, thus making it possible for students to engage in an out-of-class community where common interests can be…

With the largest number of English learners in the world, the influence of the English language teaching (ELT) reform in China cannot be underestimated. This article explores the implications of the actual use of English in China's workplace for ELT reform in the context of English as a lingua franca (ELF). On the basis of cross-validated data…

The affordances and pedagogical benefits of technology in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms are widely acknowledged. One potential use of technology is in eliciting and managing students' responses, which is an area where EAP/ESP teachers often report difficulties. Traditionally, teachers…

Following Hyland's model of metadiscourse, evidential is defined as an expression that references information from other texts. Evidence in traditional academic writing may include peer-reviewed articles, published books and personal communication with field experts. With a sharp increase in the use of online teaching and learning environments by…

In recent years, the use of English corpora to instruct grammar in writing classes has become increasingly popular. In English for Specific Purposes classes, such a novel approach is critically important since it not only allows teachers to achieve a profound understanding of which syntactic structures should be instructed, but it also increases…

One of the consequences of the digital era has been the undeniable rise in the use of English in business. Studies have shown that large numbers of people in the business community now rely on English to get their work done, and at the same time, that many business transactions now take place through digital technologies in the form of computer…

Needs analysis is the key step to designing relevant and useful courses in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), but finding ways to deliver needs in a motivating and interesting way is also paramount. Therefore, investigating students' motivation to learn ESP is central in needs analysis. Few studies have investigated needs from the perspective of…

This study examines the question of how the feedback of peers and teachers on a collaboratively written student text, mediated by track changes and commenting functions in Microsoft (MS) Word, can act as a form of socialization into an academic or professional discipline. It focusses on a collaboratively written legal memorandum, authored by…

Currently, a growing number of teaching approaches focus on aspects of variation in language (e.g. English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), World Englishes, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), genre theories, etc.); however, each of these approaches tends to focus on particular (specific) aspects of language variation and do not fully account for the…

The present study investigates how learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) improve the readability of their texts in an explicit genre-based approach that is utilized in an oil and gas exploration workplace in Angola. By drawing on the English for Specific Purposes and Systemic Functional Linguistics genre traditions, the study engages 18…

Many studies have found EFL/ESL learners over/under/misuse linking adverbials. Because their use is specific to genre and register (Biber et al., 1999), and news writing is a compulsory course for EFL journalism majors at many Chinese universities, this study investigates their usage patterns in news and suggests teaching material design for the…

Curriculum development research on nursing English in Taiwan has tended to end at needs analysis, offering little guidance on how to design and implement a course. Our objective was to examine how a course on workplace communication in English for nursing students in Taiwan would emerge in the classroom if teachers and students collaboratively…

This paper reports on a needs analysis underlying a proposed business English reading course using a problem-based learning approach designed to enhance English reading abilities of Thai undergraduate students. As part of a work in progress, the needs analysis survey was done prior to the course design with the major stakeholders in business and…