• Journal Menu
  • About This Journal
  • Aims and Audience
  • Abstracting/Indexing
  • Editorial Board
  • Subscription Information
  • Contact Information
• Authors
  • Author Guidelines
  • Code of Conduct
  • IJLS Editorial Style
  • IJLS Style Sheet
  • Peer Review Process
  • Call for Papers
  • FAQ
• Editors
  • Editorial Board
  • Reviewer Guidelines
  • Code of Conduct
  • Peer Review Process
  • IJLS Editorial Style
• Archives
  • Papers in Press
  • Latest Issue
  • Back Issues
  • Special Issues
• Home

This qualitative study aims at examining pre-service EFL teachers’ insights into the use of a critical literacy approach at a public university in Colombia. Taking an action research design, audio recordings of class sessions, class workshops with students’ writings, and focus groups were conducted with 17 participants during a 15-week coursework. Emerging findings uncovered student-teachers’ insights into the activities developed and the use of readings with a critical literacy approach. Data also revealed participants’ views and positions on social and educational issues and on some teaching practices in their experience as undergraduates at a public university and as future teachers. This study suggests that language teacher education programs in Colombia be planned and designed considering student-teachers’ contexts, realities, interests, and needs since this may be the way to bring about valuable opportunities to foster reflection and dialogue, to engage in active readings of texts and current realities, and to share voices freely in the classroom.

This pilot study explored Thai EFL learners’ cultural intelligence (CQ) through their reflections in cross-cultural journals. The sample consisted of 96 cross-cultural journals from 32 high English exposure (TEHs), 32 medium English exposure (TEMs), and 32 low English exposure (TELs) groups. Drawing from the theoretical grounds of CQ fundamental factors (Ang et al., 2007), CQ practical aspects (Livermore, 2011), and 5R reflection writing scale (Bain et al, 1999), the findings revealed three similar factors of CQ among the three sample groups: (1) cognitive CQ, (2) metacognitive CQ, and (3) motivational CQ. Three similar reflective patterns were also observed: (1) reporting, (2) reporting and responding, and (3) reporting, responding, and relating. The differences lie in the way the TELs exemplify a recorder type of learner while the TEMs and the TEHs show a move toward the reflector type of learner. In spite of the fewer chances to interact with other people from different cultures during the COVID-19, the findings suggest a possible lead to some behavioral adjustments of these EFL learners in their future cross-cultural interactions.

The importance of translation as an academic discipline is now firmly acknowledged, and so is research on translator training. In this field, however, there seems to be a void concerning language teaching (in this article, English). This contribution will discuss how integrating corpora into English language teaching for translator training allows to overcome the major limits of English course books for general purposes, which do not promote the teaching/learning of the language from a contrastive viewpoint and do not tackle domain-specific languages. Starting from research on translator competence, the role of bilingual competence will be identified along with its positive repercussion on other sub-competences. The communicative approach in ELT will be contrasted with the goals of translator training, so as to understand the areas where ELT for TT has to be redesigned and how corpora might contribute to this goal.

The study examines the politeness strategies applied in the responses by the Hong Kong Chief Executive to journalists’ questions. It analyses four pieces of spoken data from press conferences conducted following the initial march against the implementation of the Extradition Bill in June 2019, to the official Bill withdrawal announcement made in September 2019. By adopting pragmatic approach—relational work proposed by Locher and Watts (2005, 2008)—the analysis demonstrates how Carrie Lam verbally and non-verbally employs politeness strategies to refute journalists’ accusation. It also explores indirectness and verbal and non-verbal evasive strategies employed in her responses; these make her perform (im)polite verbal and non-verbal behaviour in press conferences. The results show how (im)politeness techniques such as evasion, indirectness, positivity, rejection and ignorance are employed in Carrie Lam’ responses when she was addressing face-threatening questions. This study provides new insight into how (im)politeness of interactants is evaluated in a discursive approach. It also provides a new direction for understanding the interactional language and strategies currently used in Hong Kong’s press conferences.

Teacher enthusiasm is an effective factor in teacher behavior and the quality of teaching-learning processes, yet it has been almost entirely overlooked in ELT and teacher education in Iran. The aim of the present study was therefore to examine the capacity of vision and imagery in improving language teacher enthusiasm. Eight EFL teachers were recruited via purposeful sampling and were exposed to a six-week vision-based intervention. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and were analyzed according to thematic content analysis. The findings demonstrated that the vision-based intervention was effective in boosting TEFL teachers’ enthusiasm. Two major emergent themes of the data were (a) the improvement of positive emotions towards teaching profession, and (b) the enhancement of instruction as well as job satisfaction. The results of this study indicate the importance and effectiveness of mental imagery and vision enhancement in the development of teacher enthusiasm.

This study investigated the rhetorical move structure of the dental sciences research article abstract (RAA) genre using Swales’ (2004) model of move analysis, CARS (Create a Research Space), to find the frequency of rhetorical moves and steps in RAAs of the selected journals and also to examine the association between the frequency of moves and steps in the RAAs. To this end, 251 abstracts from articles published in 2018, 2019, and 2020 in four Iranian PubMed-indexed dentistry journals were selected and examined. The frequencies were counted and compared using the Chi Square statistic. The findings revealed that all of the abstracts included M3S4 and M3S5, and all but only one, included M3S1. Yet, M3S2 and M3S7 had not been used in the abstracts whatsoever, and M1S3 had been employed only once. It was also found that the RAAs in the Journal of Dentistry and the Dental Research Journal used the steps considerably more frequently than the RAAs in the Journal of Dental Research and Frontiers in Dentistry. The findings of this study can provide EAP instructors with practical insights into the needs and wants of dental students, and also serve as a complement to the guidelines for academic writing for dental researchers to produce more received RAAs.

The necessity for a reference framework (RF) for teaching Persian to speakers of other languages (TPSOL) is an essential issue in different fields of teaching Persian, including (1) materials development, (2) course design, (3) proficiency tests, and (4) certificating. Defining grammatical, lexical and functional contents for each educational level is also important. The present paper aims to introduce the process of the development of a Persian Reference Framework (PRF) which is mainly based on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and its being localized for Persian. This paper describes the preparation, evaluation and performance progression of PRF, which has been approved as the Persian framework of reference by the International scientific cooperation center of the Iranian ministry of sciences. The paper also explains the content selection procedure of the three main domains in PRF (i.e., grammar, vocabulary, and function) and demonstrates how these domains were tailored to Persian proficiency levels to describe elementary, intermediate, and advanced level learners of Persian from other languages. The results showed that 278 lexical, 119 grammatical, and 184 functional fields exist in Persian which have been assigned to the three Persian proficiency levels. The PRF helps its users to make comprehensive choices for their specific group of learners.

Conversation analysis (CA) is an important tool for the understanding of interactional competence as well as the discursive nature of verbal interactions especially in contexts where power is negotiated. In spite of its potentials, CA has not received due attention in studies of discourse in Iran partly due to (a) its intricacies, (b) the complexity of its symbols, and (c) the precision with which conversation analysts have to perform the transcription of corpora. This paper revisits CA and aims to present a short ELI5 description of it especially for bachelor’s students who aspire to continue their studies in areas of pragmatics and discourse analysis. After a review of some of the important research studies that have employed CA as their main drive, this paper revisits the system of symbols that EFL learners need to master to be able to conduct CA.