Many candidates undertaking high-stakes English language proficiency tests for academic enrolment do not achieve the results they need for reasons including linguistic unreadiness, test unpreparedness, illness, an unfavourable configuration of tasks, or administrative and marking errors. Owing to the importance of meeting goals or out of a belief…

This paper presents an analysis of the prescribed text list for senior school English (including English as an Additional Language or Dialect, EAL/D) in Queensland, Australia. Queer understandings about the normalization of cisgender and heterosexuality provide a framework to analyze prescribed texts for adolescent learners. Hetero-cisgender norms…

Despite all the attempts to convince teachers and school authorities to support critical thinking (CT) skills in school settings, the application of CT skills has not reached a satisfactory point. Using a quasi-experimental design, the present study attempted to examine the effect of critiquing journal articles on English major students'…

The present study analyses the impoliteness of criticism over social status and distance, incorporating the concept of "levels of imposition." Criticism as a fundamental speech act is commonly used by people in the modern era, either in the digital world or the real world. It usually contains impoliteness if it embodies negative…

Drawing on neoliberal ideology as a theoretical lens, this study critically examines how neoliberal ideological assumptions shape the interpretation and implementation of TGUP (Top Global University Project) as an English-medium instruction (EMI) policy in the Japanese context at multiple levels of government, universities, and multilingual…

Inspired by the call to question (critical) assumptions underpinning frameworks for "seeing" (Lather, 1993) and ground criticality in alternative forms of knowing (Pennycook, 2018), this paper examines critical frameworks for approaching identity, experience, and (in)equity in "English" language teaching (ELT), with a focus on…

The present study investigated how Cantonese speakers learning English as a second language (L2) would comprehend English irony and whether their L2 proficiency and use would moderate their irony processing. Thirty Cantonese speakers with differing English proficiency (intermediate vs advanced) were asked to complete an irony comprehension task in…

This study explores what young Danish learners found anxiety-provoking or difficult in their English as a foreign language (EFL) classes. Participants (n = 32) were early and later starters (ages 8 years vs. 10 years) at two primary schools where children were not assessed in English. The qualitative inquiry aimed to examine what differences…

While multi-peer feedback has been increasingly implemented in the academic writing classroom in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts, scant attention has been paid to the development of culturally-situated student feedback literacy arising from the provider-provider interaction in teacher-centered EFL classroom contexts. This study…

This article describes the trajectories of collaboration experienced by three individuals in three different roles (informant, research assistant, and supervisor) in two research projects about English as a foreign language reading in a higher education context in Argentina. Data come from reflection logs and retrospective narratives written by…

The study aims to investigate the higher education students' and teachers' perception of using literary text in the foreign language course; to evaluate learners' progress in the foreign language communicative competence throughout the experiment period; to outline the policies and strategies of using analytical reading in the English class, which…

Though the emergence of standardized testing promoted classical approaches such as summative achievement tests, it brought about serious criticisms regarding the stakes of these tests and their consequences on different dimensions of education. Exploring these consequences attracted researchers' attention in education. A mass of studies are…

"The English Speaking Achievement Test for Japanese Junior High School Students" (ESAT-J) was introduced to contribute to levelling up public English education in Tokyo in 2022. Critics, however, have made claims in the mass media against the use of the test and stakeholder groups have called for its cancellation. This paper presents an…

The objectives of this study were to examine the EFL supervisors' written feedback focus, and language functions at selected public universities in Ethiopia. To address the objectives of the study, qualitative and quantitative approaches with concurrent mixed methods design was adopted. 55 supervisees were randomly selected out of 205 for the…

In the past decades, neoliberalism has permeated (foreign) language education, as has been discussed by critical research in the fields of: curriculum theory, applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language policy, language assessment, to name a few. Despite the fact that research on foreign language education and neoliberalism is certainly…