Language Teaching Research, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 907-910, March 2025.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
Considering the contribution of intelligent personal assistant (IPA) platforms to English as a foreign language (EFL) speaking courses and the insufficiency of research in this regard, the current study applied a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach to explore the impact of Google Assistant, an IPA platform, on EFL learners’ International English Language Testing System (IELTS) speaking test marks and their fluency, comprehensibility, and accentedness. Two intact classes at a language institute were chosen and randomly assigned to an IPA class with 20 EFL learners and a non-IPA class with 23 EFL learners. The IPA learners interactively and individually communicated with Google Assistant by giving commands/requests/questions, and the non-IPA learners communicated the same commands/requests/questions with their peers interactively. The IELTS speaking skill test, the fluency, comprehensibility, and accentedness scales, and an individual semi-structured interview were used to collect the necessary quantitative and qualitative data. One-way between groups analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), applied to analyse the quantitative data, revealed that the IPA and non-IPA speaking instruction developed the EFL learners’ IELTS speaking test marks, fluency, and comprehensibility, and reduced their accentedness. The former (i.e. the IPA instruction) outperformed the latter (i.e. the non-IPA instruction) in developing IELTS speaking test marks and comprehensibility, and reducing accentedness. Thematic analysis, applied to analyse the qualitative data, uncovered several themes and categories that indicated the IPA learners’ positive attitudes and perceptions towards the use of Google Assistant for interactive, one-to-one speaking activities. The findings suggested effective techniques for integrating IPAs into EFL speaking courses to enhance IELTS speaking test marks, fluency, and comprehensibility, and reduce accentedness in EFL learners.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
This article presents and discusses findings of project-based (language) learning and teaching (PBLT) research published in English between 2002 and 2024. The purpose of our qualitative research synthesis (QRS) is to identify the macro and micro contexts, research foci, theoretical and methodological orientations, technology use as well as benefits, challenges, and regional understanding of PBLT in East and Southeast Asia as reported in the studies analysed for this QRS. Our goals for conducting the QRS study are to offer generalizable findings of 21 years of PBLT research to guide future PBLT research and to inform PBLT pedagogy in East and Southeast Asia. The findings of our QRS contribute to the advancement of the emerging qualitative research synthesis in the TESOL field in general and of PBLT research and practice in particular.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
It is often assumed that the most frequent English words are known by post-beginner second language learners. Yet the sheer frequency of these words and the important roles they play in discourse mean that confirmation of whether they are indeed known would be valuable for understanding second language vocabulary development and reading comprehension. This article reports on a study in which university learners with Japanese as their first language (L1) (N = 200) were tested on their written receptive knowledge of 63 senses/functions of the first 44 words in the New JACET8000 word list. The study found that for 13 senses/functions item facility was < 0.9. That is, some gaps in receptive knowledge were uncovered which qualitative item analysis suggested may stem from relative frequency of exposure, instructional experiences, knowledge of one sense/function blocking the acquisition of another, as well as abstractness and lack of a direct L1 equivalent. Nevertheless, overall receptive knowledge of the tested senses/functions of these ultra-frequent words was extremely good. Hence, although miscomprehension may arise from occasional gaps in knowledge of these words, the assumption that ultra-frequent words are receptively known by post-beginner second language (L2) learners does seem reasonable.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
Theorizing teacher identity is an important component of effective language teacher education. The current study maps the professional identities of 20 practicing teachers of English as an additional language (EAL) from two distinct contexts: Sri Lanka (n = 10) and Australia (n = 10). Data tapping each participant’s professional identity was elicited with semi-structured interviews structured around three domains: personal experience, professional context and external political environment. From the resultant teacher discourse, thematic analysis was applied to identify nine themes that teachers from both contexts perceived as being influential in the development of their professional identities, with two of these themes being perceived by some teachers as being of limited or no influence. These themes are defined and elucidated with quotes. Key differences in the way themes were manifested among the Sri Lankan and Australian teachers are also described. Findings provide a reference for language teachers’ critical reflection on their professional identities, especially those at the beginning of their careers.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
This article aims to explore second language (L2) teachers’ attitudes to working with multilingual refugee learners in the context of a sudden shift towards an increasingly multilingual environment caused by the influx of Ukrainian refugee children in 2022 to Polish schools. The teachers have been prepared to teach predominantly monolingual classes and have not obtained any training to meet the needs of migrant and multilingual learners; thus, they had to rely on their personal resources facing this suddenly increasingly multilingual and multicultural environment. A cross-sectional survey study was designed to identify how attitudes of teachers of English and Polish as a foreign language (n = 70) developed towards teaching multilingual refugee learners and to what extent these correlated with teacher Openness to Experience, Intercultural Sensitivity and teachers’ plurilingualism. The quantitative analysis reveals mixed attitudes overall, despite generally positive attitudes to working with Ukrainian refugee learners, and correlating positively with Openness to Experience and plurilingualism, but not Intercultural Sensitivity. These might derive from the complexity of the teaching experience, which goes beyond mere language teaching, and for which the teachers have not received sufficient preparation.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
In recent years, the importance of language exposure and socioeconomic status (SES) in shaping learners’ language learning outcomes has gained significant attention in language educational studies. However, studies that directly investigated the correlation between language exposure from parents and peers, SES, and English digital reading achievement remained limited. This present study examined how language exposure from parents and peers interacted with SES in predicting English digital reading achievement among the three East Asian economies using the PISA 2018 data with 7,703 student participants from Macao, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Results from the Pearson correlation and hierarchical linear regression revealed: (1) that there is a negative relationship between language exposure from parents and English digital reading achievement; (2) that language exposure from best friends and siblings showed a positive influence on English digital reading achievement; and (3) that the effects of language exposure from schoolmates differed among the three economies. Although SES exerted a significant and positive impact on English digital reading achievement among the three East Asian economies, SES did not moderate the relationship between language exposure and English digital reading achievement. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Language Teaching Research, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 467-471, February 2025.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
For language learners, intonation is widely considered to be important in communicating meaning in context, but intonation is also considered by teachers to be difficult to teach, and some have even argued that it may be unteachable. This exploratory study examines whether explicit teaching of three final intonation contours (falling, rising, falling–rising) led to improved perception and production. Thirty-one Turkish learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) participated in a three-week training session on the perception and production of the three contours at the end of a course on English pronunciation. Results from a pre-test/post-test design showed that perception of all three intonation contours improved after instruction, whereas for the production only the falling–rising and rising contours showed improvement. Results also showed that providing contextual information did not affect production but was helpful in perception. This study suggests intonation can improve when it is explicitly taught to L2 learners, like other aspects of pronunciation.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
Although recent research on both agency and social justice has paid attention to the role of these constructs in teachers’ professionalism, the scope of research on how language teachers’ agency and social justice intersect is limited. Drawing on an ecological perspective that captured teachers’ temporal and spatial perceptions, and how structural forces shape teacher agency, we explored agency and social justice among Iranian English language teachers. Data were collected from open-ended questionnaires, narrative frames, and semi-structured interviews. The analysis of the data revealed that teachers used their personal histories and experiences, present sense-making processes, and future-oriented perspectives as agentive tools to promote social justice in their educational practices. The findings also showed that teachers used the affordances of their educational setting as a tool for fostering students’ criticality and activism. The study concludes with a discussion of implications for teacher educators in how to build on agency in teacher education courses to develop understandings of social justice.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
This article reports the findings of a multiple-case study on four teachers of German as a third language (GL3) at a Swedish lower secondary school (year 7). To gain a better understanding of third language (L3) teachers’ pedagogical perceptions and practices about grammar teaching to young beginners, teacher emotions are used as a theoretical frame. The data consist of individual interviews, lesson observations and immediate post-observational oral reflections that are analysed qualitatively using thematic content analysis with narrative features. The study points out the links between emotions and contextual factors inside and outside the classroom – such as time, workload, colleagues’ teaching practices as well as the motivation and attitudes of the students – and shows how these interrelatedly have an impact on teachers’ thinking, beliefs and instructional decision-making. Also, three narratives about teaching grammar are laid out, where the teachers themselves are passionate but at the same time display apprehensive emotions in the fear of their students not liking it as much. The findings indicate that teacher emotions about grammar – such as the tension between passion and apprehension – exert important influence on L3 teachers’ grammar teaching practices and beliefs. Based on this, it is suggested that bridges are needed between grammar teaching in first language (L1) and L3, since the pedagogical content knowledge and the positive teacher emotions about grammar in teachers of GL3 might be powerful assets that colleagues of other language subjects could also benefit from.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
This article describes how a new, discourse-focused course on English for nursing purposes (ENP) was developed from scratch to fill a critical needs gap: competence in what this article calls ‘nurse–patient communicative engagement’. A needs analysis conducted for this study revealed a gap between how experienced nurses and nursing students viewed engagement. This is a key concept that the present study amalgamated from various research sources. The present study newly defines the concept as the strategic communication moves used by experienced nurses to actively elicit patients’ concerns, proactively ensure their full understanding of what is said and done, and continually establish empathy and rapport. Engagement is currently not the focus of ENP courses globally, which instead focus on general language proficiency and rote learning of surface-level features (e.g. medical vocabulary, pronunciation of terms). What nursing students actually need, and ENP courses currently neglect, is training in dialogic communication strategies that promote engagement. A brand-new ENP course was created to scaffold students in acquiring these interactional strategies using custom-written, analytically rich learning materials based on authentic nurse–patient interactions. The new course was piloted and taught in parallel alongside an existing ENP course at the same institution. Through this control versus experimental group design, and using pre-, post-, and delayed post-test instruments, the new course was statistically and qualitatively evaluated. The new course proved successful in producing nursing students who demonstrated significantly improved perceptions and practices of engagement: they felt more positive and confident about engaging with patients, and could frequently and appropriately deploy a wide range of relevant strategies. ENP practitioners worldwide will benefit from examining this new course design, to pivot syllabuses away from piecemeal, surface-level features towards the teaching of the core discourse skill of nurse–patient engagement, a communicative practice that research shows facilitates better health outcomes for patients.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
In response to the growing prevalence of online second language learning and the burgeoning field of international Chinese language education, this study examines the impact of multimodal inputs (MMI) on vocabulary acquisition within online environments among learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL). A teaching intervention was conducted with 90 Mongolian CSL learners, who were grouped into audiovisual, audio, and visual groups. The findings indicate that the audiovisual condition significantly improved vocabulary retention compared to the single-modality conditions in a delayed post-test. Nevertheless, the efficacy of the MMI treatment was observed to vary with learners’ proficiency levels, with beginner-level CSL learners deriving greater benefit from MMI than intermediate-level learners. Furthermore, participants expressed both favorable and critical perspectives regarding the application of MMI in vocabulary instruction. These results highlight the potential of MMI interventions to enhance vocabulary learning in online second-language education, while also underscoring the necessity of considering learners’ target language proficiency and their attitudes when developing MMI-based instructional approaches.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
Exploratory talk is increasingly recognized in formal education for its role in enhancing students’ critical thinking and literacy skills, which are crucial for quality education both within and beyond school contexts. However, research shows that students often lack opportunities for inquiry-based learning and rarely receive explicit guidance on using language for reasoning, particularly in second language (L2) learning environments. Understanding how students engage in this complex function and effectively promoting it in L2 subject contexts remains a challenge. This study introduces an operational framework for the function of ‘explore’, based on L2 learning and socio-cultural theories and Dalton-Puffer’s construct of cognitive discourse functions (CDFs). It provides both quantitative and qualitative insights into how secondary-level content and language integrated learning (CLIL) students (N = 113) from three different types of schools in Spain performed the ‘explore’ function orally, and it examines the role of epistemic modality in this meaning-making process by analysing the following features: (1) modal verbs, (2) modal adverbs and adjectives, (3) epistemic lexical verbs (ELVs), stance-taking forms, (4) discourse markers and the conditional ‘if’. A learner corpus was created for this analysis using Sketch Engine. The findings suggest that the CDF of ‘explore’ involves a combination of epistemic modality markers that serve as reasoning and exploratory discourse indicators. There is, however, a pressing need to raise teachers’ awareness of how language (through CDFs) supports students’ exploratory and deeper learning in L2 content-learning contexts. To this end, the discussion presents pedagogical implications for future research and practice in fostering exploratory reasoning, and where possible, embedding these skills in exploratory talk within CLIL classrooms.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
This study explored the wellbeing of four university-level teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) in China before, during, and after the implementation of a new curriculum. A particular focus was given to their emotion and its impact on their wellbeing. The data was collected over the course of one academic year through three rounds of in-depth interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis. The analysis revealed various factors influencing teacher wellbeing that dynamically fluctuated throughout the reform implementation. Overall, three archetypes of language teacher wellbeing emerged: (1) ambiguous wellbeing, (2) jeopardized wellbeing, and (3) self-actualized wellbeing. Based on the findings, we propose an action-based framework for language teacher wellbeing which highlights its fluctuating nature as teachers balance resources and constraints at both personal and situational levels. Recommendations are offered to stakeholders – including policymakers, educational administrators, teacher educators, and teachers – to better support language teacher wellbeing in the context of curriculum reform.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
Previous research on translanguaging in classrooms for a language other than English (LOTE) has shown that it helps learners compensate for limited language proficiency. Few studies have investigated how translanguaging promotes learners’ conceptual understanding of the target language. This study aims to investigate how a Chinese teacher mediates conceptual understanding of the target language among 15 Spanish major undergraduates in a Chinese university through pedagogical translanguaging. Data were collected from classroom observations, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews. Microgenesis of the discourse reveals that teacher–student mediation through pedagogical translanguaging facilitates students’ conceptual understanding of Spanish linguistic and cultural knowledge, enhances metalinguistic awareness, and promotes self-regulation. Translanguaging space built up in classroom interaction fosters collaborative dialogue, creating inclusive learning environments. This study may illuminate how multilingual teachers leverage diverse linguistic and sociocultural knowledge to assist students in conceptualizing and internalizing target language form and meaning through translanguaging in LOTE education.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
This article reports on a study that explored Japanese university students’ evolving motivational regulation by mapping its changes over one year of their studies in a collaborative project-based learning environment. An autonomy-supportive collaborative intervention was delivered to the 19 participants with varying or no experience of communicative language teaching and study abroad. Our cluster-based analysis of multiple questionnaire responses revealed increased motivation among the participants. Three learners were selected to represent each clustering group based on the unique characteristics of their motivational trajectories over the year, which reflect the mediating impacts of their previous language learning experiences and their learning experience during the pedagogical intervention. The findings indicate that language teachers can enhance learners’ ‘motivational regulation’ by creating a supportive learning environment in the classroom.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
In the field of English language teaching, the deeply entrenched dichotomy between ‘native English-speaking teachers’ (NESTs) and ‘non-native English-speaking teachers’ (NNESTs) has forcibly positioned NNESTs as linguistically and pedagogically inferior to their native counterparts. The prevalence of native-speaker ideologies marginalizes NNESTs in professional settings and impedes their agency enactment in claiming identities as competent educators. Therefore, it is crucial to facilitate English teachers (especially NNESTs) to practice agency to (re)negotiate identities to move beyond native-speaker ideologies. Framed by positioning theory, this study investigates how 12 in-service English teachers worldwide exercised agency to (re)negotiate positions throughout an innovative identity-based intervention. The intervention, implemented in three online sessions across six weeks, instigated participants’ identity reflections based on three themes: theories, pedagogy and power. Each session comprised one online seminar and one self-reflective written task. Drawing on data from the intervention and pre- and post-intervention interviews, our findings yielded three distinct identity negotiation patterns, namely active, tentative and reluctant repositioning. Participants of each pattern presented unique combinations of repositioning acts, including resisting inferior positions, selectively engaging with empowering positions, shifting back to initial positions and maintaining existing positions. Agency and positioning were found to be reciprocally informed. While agency was practised to facilitate repositioning, the agentic positions teachers undertook influenced agency enactment as well. Participants’ choices of different repositioning acts were jointly mediated by their evaluation of native-speaker ideologies’ impact on their existing positions and their power to challenge native-speakerism in their own professional settings. At a theoretical level, this article provides a conceptual framework that illustrates the interconnectedness between the intervention, teacher identity and teacher agency. At a practical level, it demonstrates the effectiveness of implementing identity-based intervention in teacher education to foster NNESTs’ repositioning and agency enactment against the backdrop of native-speakerism.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
This study examines whether learners exposed to specific example sentences through data-driven learning (DDL) can not only identify generalized linguistic patterns but also apply the patterns to other expressions, thereby demonstrating that DDL is a learning method based on a usage-based model. Forty-three Japanese learners of English participated in DDL activities to study the use of six verbs from two verb classes (three from the Throw class and three from the Whisper class) in terms of the dative alternation. Specifically, they studied whether these verbs can be used in the double object (DO) construction or the prepositional dative (PD) construction. The participants underwent pre-, post-, and delayed post-tests, during which they evaluated the grammaticality of sentences containing the studied verbs, as well as unstudied verbs from the same classes and verbs from the control classes (the Send and Mention classes). A cumulative link mixed model (CLMM) was employed to analyse the effects of test timing (pre/post/delayed post), learning (studied/unstudied), and construction (PD/DO) on test scores. The results showed that learners made more correct judgments on the post-test than on the pre-test. This improvement was observed not only for the studied verbs but also for unstudied verbs from the same classes, and even for verbs from the control classes. This indicates that DDL embodies the idea of a usage-based model; that is, learners generalize linguistic patterns through language experience. Furthermore, the learning effects were retained even in the delayed post-test, suggesting that DDL is not merely a tool for referencing word usage but also a learning method that converts input into intake.

Language Teaching Research, Ahead of Print.
This study investigates the relationship between students’ English language proficiency, their reported levels of academic English literacy, prior content knowledge and their attainment of content knowledge in English medium instruction (EMI). The study also examines students’ perceptions of difficulties with academic English literacy at different levels of English language proficiency. Pre-course and post-course content tests were administered to 27 EMI students in an introductory Chemistry course at a university in Tokyo, Japan. The test results were triangulated with data from a quantitative measure of reported academic literacy and follow-up interviews to explore perceptions of ease and difficulties for academic language skills (i.e. reading, listening, speaking and writing). The quantitative findings indicated that students’ proficiency statistically significantly predicted post-test scores. Interviews with students corroborated this finding, illustrating the specific difficulties in academic language literacy faced by students with lower proficiency. However, proficiency alone did not determine success as other factors, such as previous exposure to EMI and prior content knowledge, played significant roles. The study found a non-linear relationship between reported difficulties with academic English literacy and test outcomes, indicating that students who reported fewer academic difficulties were not necessarily more successful in gaining content knowledge than those facing significant challenges in academic language tasks. The findings emphasise that academic support in EMI programs should not solely focus on test outcomes but also address the broader challenges students face with academic English literacy. Implications are discussed regarding language support, EMI curriculum planning and future research directions.