Issue Information

Active applications in EFL learning, such as video-making projects, enable students to apply and engage with the target language, thereby enhancing the motivation of non-English major students to learn a foreign language. The purpose of this study was twofold: (i) to develop a course by using teamwork video-making projects; and (ii) to investigate students’ attitudes towards video-making within a project-based English course. 45 second-year tourism students, enrolled in a mandatory English for Tourism Purposes (ETP) course for a semester at a private university in northern Taiwan, served as the participants. To enhance their motivation to learn, this study included a video-making project, which required students to work in groups, using English predominantly, to produce their videos. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected, together with the results of survey questionnaires and selected interviews. The results indicated that students’ learning performances and attitudes towards English learning benefited from the teamwork process, especially for those with lower levels of English proficiency. Learner motivation was found to be significantly correlated with their perceptions of the videos, regardless of their various levels of English proficiency. The majority of students expressed enjoyment in the video-making process but acknowledged the need for improvement in their time management skills, problem-solving abilities, use of various technologies, and capacity for social interaction and group work. Nevertheless, this study provided valuable indicators for future applications despite these shortcomings.

Curriculum development is an essential process that involves the selection of objectives, content, learning experiences as well as organising and evaluating these experiences to determine the extent to which they are effective in achieving stated objectives. It further involves implementation in which the structured set of learning experiences is disseminated and the resources are provided to effectively execute the plan and the actual execution of the plan in the classroom setting, where the teacher – learner interaction takes place. Nevertheless, it involves putting into practice the officially prescribed curriculum content in which various stakeholders become engaged in the process by making their contribution to operationalise the curriculum. Based on literature review, this paper seeks to discuss five issues that could affect decision making in curriculum development process particularly during the stage of implementation. In discussing these issues, teaching and learning of English subject is taken as the reference point, that is, the examples for substantiation of the contention are drawn mainly from the key issues in English language teaching (ELT) in Tanzanian education system by looking at teacher quality, limited authentic teaching and learning materials, class size, limited exposure towards using English language and assessment and evaluation procedures.

This study examines students’ comprehension of lecturers’ English (L2) and their preference as well as perception on the use of Vietnamese (L1) in EFL classes. Data was collected from questionnaires and focus-group interview with students. Data analysis revealed that students’ English comprehension level was relatively low while the majority of them had a positive attitude toward lecturers’ classroom English speaking. Meanwhile, findings show that a majority of students were motivated to listen to lecturers’ English, which was found to be contradicted to the general belief about non-English major students’ English learning motivation. The students perceived two main factors which influenced their comprehension of lecturers’ English speaking and their learning motivation. Those factors are divided into lecturer-related and student-related. Among those, student-related factors including students’ English vocabulary, strategies in listening to English, and listening practice were believed to be the most influential.

Lexical bundles in ELT articles are considered as the bases of coherent contexts. In line with some previous studies, the present article aimed to compare native and nonnative ELT articles in terms of four-word lexical bundles. In so doing, a corpus including 200 ELT articles were chosen from 12 academic journals. First, all lexical bundles were identified and classified structurally and functionally based on Biber et al. (1999) taxonomy and Hyland (2008a, 2008b) functional category of lexical bundles in academic text respectively. To analyze the corpora, Antconc software (version 3.3.2), proposed by Anthony (2012), was used. The results revealed that authors of both corpora made use of various types of four-word lexical bundles; however, there were significant differences between native and nonnative articles in terms of their use of four-word lexical bundles; Iranian authors used theses lexical bundles almost twice more than native authors. In terms of functions, it was found that text-oriented bundles were the most frequent lexical combinations used by native and nonnative authors. Considering the results and previous studies, it is inferred that employing different lexical bundles to show the significant parts of academic research articles can help to effective information delivery in academic writing.

This study attempts to investigate EFL first-year-university students' apprehension in learning the English language. Several EFL teaching strategies are used in first-year-English classes and their effectiveness in making learning more successful in discussing the problem of apprehension in learning English. The current study tries to investigate the causes and factors behind this problem as well as, trying to find solutions for this issue. A set of questionnaires was implemented among first-year-university students of Mohamed Al Bachir Al Ibrahimi (169 students). The results revealed that the majority of the participants possessed a higher level of anxiety in learning the English language at university due to some factors discussed in this research. Further recommendations and suggestions to overcome this impediment in learning the English language in the academic sphere. 

There are differences between language use in an scientific context and its use in the context of oral communication. While some sentence structures, expressions and words are frequently used in scientific writings and expressions, they are used less in daily written and spoken language. In this study, an attempt was made to reach a conclusion by scanning 50 randomly selected adjectives in the Turkish National Corpus in three categories: academic texts, non-academic texts and oral expression. The frequency of words in the adjective category used in scientific prose, non-scientific prose and oral expression was examined. The findings revealed that while some words are frequently used in scientific prose, they are not used at all in oral expression, and likewise, some words are used less in non-scientific prose. The reason why adjectives are examined in this study is because adjectives are more subjective expressions. Subjective expressions can be more easily evaluated for use in different contexts.

This paper aims at studying the images of two main characters “Guo Jing” and “Huang Rong (Lotus)” in the target text, the first two English volumes of Legends of the Condor Heroes written by Jin Yong in Chinese and translated by Holmwood and Chang. With the help of LancsBox’s “graphcoll”, it analyses the collocates of the key words “Jing” and “Lotus” to see whether the choices of expressions in the target text influence the portraits of the hero and heroine. The study found that translators used different translation strategies to get close to the original text yet each translator has her own preferences, influenced by their own cultural background, which leads to a gap in presenting the protagonists. This study hopes to provide some thoughts to Chinese college students on translation studies and proper application of translation strategies to tell Chinese stories well.