The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools in recent years has entailed arguments both for and against their use for teaching and learning among policy makers, schools, teachers, and researchers. While the debates have not reached a consensus yet, many teachers struggle with using them. To help build the literature on GenAI…

This article explores the relationship between place and the language challenges experienced by older Chinese migrants in Auckland with low English proficiency while undertaking daily-life errands. The ability to independently fulfil daily-life needs outside the home is a key factor that influences wellbeing and facilitates the social inclusion of…

This paper is part of an ongoing research project that examines translanguaging practice in predominantly monolingual social domains, and it reports on the views and practices of non-Japanese English teachers' translanguaging in Japanese higher education. Fifteen faculty members from four universities were interviewed about their perspectives on…

Language repertoires have been traditionally construed as a set of chronologically determined compartments (first language, second language, etc.), a scheme which upholds several validity and ethical issues when operationalized in research and education (Ortega, 2019). Complex dynamic systems theory (also complexity theory, here CDST) has been…

Norwegian allows filler-gap dependencies into embedded questions, which are islands for filler-gap dependency formation in English. We ask whether there is evidence that Norwegian learners of English transfer the functional structure that permits island violations from their first language (L1) to their second language (L2). In two acceptability…

Students' attitudes towards native English speaking teachers (NESTs) and local English teachers has been a fertile area of research for many years, but the commonly used surveys focusing on students' explicit attitudes have been criticised because of the influence of prejudice. An alternative is to use social psychology instruments such as the…

Studies exploring grammar teaching in first and foreign language subjects in Scandinavia are very rare. In this article, we present findings from a focused ethnographic study (Gramma3, 2018-2019) of grammar teaching practices in the three major first and foreign language subjects at lower-secondary level (age 13-15) in Denmark: Danish L1, English…

The present study investigates whether CLIL learners' high scores in English as a foreign language (EFL) can be attributed to three specific learner variables: 'EFL aptitude', 'EFL confidence' and 'international orientation' -- and whether out-of-school EFL exposure has an effect. The study was undertaken in eight secondary school CLIL classes in…

Largely banished from language instruction following the adoption of communicative approaches, some researchers now encourage the use of translation as a valuable resource for the language classroom. While increasingly embraced in theory, there remains a need to better understand, through empirical research, the implementation of translation-based…

The literature of empirical studies on the concordance-based cloze test (ConCloze) is far and few between. This is despite the fact that it has a potential for item writing without the aid of native speakers and for making use of corpus-based technology in task design. This article explores the test-taking processes and strategies of a ConCloze…

In this study, we present the development of individualized feedback for a large-scale listening assessment by combining standard setting and cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) approaches. We used the performance data from 3,358 students' item-level responses to a field test of a national EFL test primarily intended for tertiary-level EFL…

This study is intended to explore the influence of partners' L2 proficiency on test-takers' performance and on their interaction patterns in paired oral assessment, and it tries to analyze the underlying causes on the basis of Vygotsky's theory of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and Storch's patterns of interaction. An experiment including…

A growing body of research examines attitudes towards English varieties from an impressionistic perspective, but relatively few studies investigate attitudes towards specific standard and variant grammatical features. This study explores the language attitudes of Thai university students and teachers towards standard grammar and its variation in…

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2018, this article examines how Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority in China, found ways to excel in English language learning despite efforts by the national education system to focus their training in Chinese, the language of the colonizer. It argues that the alienation that…

Selecting the medium of instruction to teach the target language in EFL classrooms has been controversial for several years. This study explores the impact of code-switching versus targetlanguage-only teaching strategies on beginner students' learning and affective sustenance of EFL reading comprehension based on their perceptions. It also…