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This paper aims to present an exploratory study based on the combination of Digital Storytelling (DST) and Discourse Analysis (DA) in a semester-long English Language and Linguistics undergraduate course for developing and enhancing students’ 21st Century Skills and evaluating the role played by the integration of these methodologies in promoting young learners’ activist role for social change. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analysed through descriptive statistics, computer-assisted qualitative content analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1989; van Dijk, 1996, 2014). Accordingly, this study aims to shed light on the benefits and effectiveness of combining critical linguistics methods like DA and novel pedagogies such as DST to promote 21st-century students’ social agency and competencies.

This study investigated how politeness is used when students and professors communicate through email. Specifically, it (1) identified the communicative purposes of student-professor email correspondence, (2) determined the linguistic politeness strategies in student-professor email correspondence, and (3) examined how linguistic politeness strategies serve teachers’ and professors’ communicative needs. From the analysis of 95 emails between 17 undergraduate students and three professors, several strategies for both positive and negative politeness were observed. Most positive politeness strategies are used by students to provide justification for actions considered unfavorable to the professor as well as to receive favorable responses while professors employ such strategies to provide a sense of inclusivity and empathy. Negative strategies were commonly used in student-initiated emails while professors employ such strategies to avoid the imposing perception. The study also noted the evident use of a hierarchical, linguistic politeness marker regardless of the strategies used in the email and the use of emoticons.

This sociolinguistic paper intends to investigate the perceptions of adult bilingual learners to explore whether they view Punjabi use as a blessing or a barrier as a mode of interaction and communication in light of the impact of social attitudes. A mixed-method approach was used to obtain the data. An online circulation of questionnaires among 100 female students from two universities in Sialkot was made, and follow-up interviews were conducted with two students from each university. The paper has highlighted the positive and negative outcomes of Punjabi use in the Punjabi society/community.

Plagiarism, a serious academic misconduct, is common in undergraduate students’ theses. This study aims (a) to determine the types of plagiarism committed by EFL students in their undergraduate theses and (b) to see how they differ between students with high and low English proficiency. Data were collected from 45 theses in a well-established university in Indonesia. The theses were screened for plagiarism using Turnitin before each plagiarized sentence was analyzed. English proficiency was measured using a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The findings show two most frequent types of plagiarism: (a) verbatim copy, and (b) patchwriting. Missing citations are frequently found in the two types of plagiarism. Another type of plagiarism, which is rarely documented, is (c) running-on citations. Meanwhile, the types and amount of plagiarism slightly differ between students with high and low English proficiency. This paper concludes that many EFL students did not use sources and citations correctly in their theses.

This study investigated an English teacher’s pedagogical strategies for increasing students’ English use in her bilingual class framed by a linguistic ethnographic design. It observed the teacher's classroom with field notes, using the framework developed by Schwartz and Asli (2014). A semi-structured interview was also conducted to learn about the teacher's perspective and challenges while teaching her bilingual class. It was found that translanguaging (intra sentence) was the most often employed approach by the teacher, followed by gesture. A translation approach was seldom adopted. Despite the use of pedagogical strategies, the teacher also encountered the following obstacles: (1) students who spoke the local language rather than English, and (2) time management issues.

The present study sought to find any probable differences between the various functions of metadiscursive hedging devices in the ‘discussions’ of Persian-text research articles (RAs) written by Iranian academic authors in hard and soft sciences. Sixty (N = 60) discussions from Persian-text Iranian academic journals (from five disciplines in hard sciences and four disciplines in soft sciences) were randomly selected. Two human coders were asked to code the functions of hedging devices in the selected corpus based on the theoretical framework suggested by Hyland (1998). Results indicated that authors of hard-science RAs prefer content- and reader-oriented hedging devices and use them more frequently in their RA discussions whereas their soft-science counterparts prefer writer-oriented hedging. It is argued that these differences might be due to (a) personality traits, (b) politeness, (c) the nature of hard and soft sciences, or (d) a combination of all of these.

This study examined frequent errors in graduate Iranian EFL students’ academic writing to find the strategies and techniques which would help them overcome such errors. Employing a descriptive, non-experimental research design, the researchers analyzed 40 term papers collected from 40 graduate students studying TEFL at IAU, Isfahan Branch. To determine to what extent the participants were familiar with the identified errors in their academic writings, the researchers also conducted semi-structured interview sessions with volunteer candidates. The findings showed various problems in content, format, and mechanics of their writing. Lack of attention, careless manuscript preparation, vagueness, imperfect and untidy literature, lack of clarity, sloppy presentation, and weak recommendations were the most frequent errors. It was concluded that through careful attention to the errors identified, writing instructors could help graduate students to maximize their chances of getting published by avoiding these errors.